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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

> declare they simply cannot handle the influx

They cannot handle it with the resources being given. This is true for the red states like Texas and what not, the social services we do have struggle to handle the load. But we're choosing to let these systems struggle. We could solve it if we chose to do so.

In 2020 our population was ~330 million people. Even if 12 million people immigrated to the United States, that's an influx of 3.6%. In reality its probably closer to 4 or so million, so really more like 1.2%. We're supposedly the wealthiest country on the planet with so much opportunity and freedom and yet we can't handle adding far less than 5% of the population as migrants in five years? If that's the case, we're probably the poorest country on the planet, not the wealthiest.

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And that's a population of millions admittedly including many minors and major barriers to thriving, but overall far fewer elderly or disabled people than the general population. Boosting immigration is only an economic drag if you structure the asylum/immigration process to prevent people from working, which we do now seemingly to punish communities that accept immigrants.

Yes, basically this. Americans have to hustle all day in the war against "line go down". Our agency is not allowed to be put to caring for other people but the illusion the 1% alone prop up society.

So sick of Americans empty-analysis and ignorance of externalities their society puts on others; overseas colleagues see it as white Taliban. They don't see people in streets over tariffs screwing up their lives, so they've started to tell their politicians Americans (as in the public) are not reliable actors. They don't realize it, but the American publics own credibility is shot, not just their politicians.

I have taken to cutting off friends and family and shit talking anyone in public that wants to socialize; do the politic work to put me on the hook for their healthcare, otherwise I refuse to bother with their existence. Withdrawing from people's lives is a forcing function for self reflection.

You all keep me off the hook caring you exist. I just have to help make line go up. Anything to do with you all as individuals is not my responsibility. That's the choice of the American people. I'm here to profit, not give a fuck you exist.

That's what my fellow Americans taught me through their feckless political effort. Illusory idea some invisible hand gives a shit based upon the gibberish from history they read by people who were wanking their literacy rather than inventing indoor plumbing.

My government owes everything to the people inside the borders and nothing to the people outside

They are concentrated in major cities not evenly distributed across all of the US.

This does nothing to change the facts of my statement.

And even then, we could choose to do something about that. We could do more to help people settle all across the US and be well supported to succeed. But we don't. So instead, we have people crowd the areas where we turn a blind eye to hiring illegal labor and have the social impacts concentrated there and then refuse to actually do anything to help those social costs.

But these are all things we choose to do. We could choose to do something else.

You make it sound so simple, they don't want to live in a small town where they will stand out; with no social support or services.

How do you decide who goes where? What stops them from moving back to the bigger cities? How to you limit demographic displacement?

The UK is doing this, and the US under Biden was trying at a smaller scale with Haitians in smaller towns. It doesn't work, and isn't so simple.

There's many towns & small cities that have been revitalized by immigrants communities. Lewiston Maine, Charleroi Pennsylvania.

America is really struggling to support & enable a people, to create a social safety net. Opportunity is low. But often when immigrants come in from other places, they will put in enormous energy, that can bring some very sad towns back to life.

> with no social support or services

Once again, we're choosing to not have these social supports or social services. It's a choice. We could do it if we wanted, after all we're allegedly the wealthiest country on the planet but somehow can't seem to afford anything.

> How do you decide who goes where?

I'm not suggesting we force it to be a top-down forced decision. I'm often a pretty free-market and empowering people to make their own decisions kind of guy, when it makes sense. And sure, people will tend to cluster more in large cities, that happens even for non-migrants. But in the end, we're doing practically nothing to encourage people to spread out that social cost (or worse, encouraging for forcing the clustering), and that doing nothing is a choice. And then we're doing very little to support these places experiencing such large social costs, which is once again a decision.

All of this is stuff we could do differently, we just choose the status quo (or now choosing violence!) that doesn't work well for a lot of us. Sure seems to be making some people exceptionally wealthy though.

Huh? Have you driven through Iowa lately? Southern Idaho?

We could’ve done something but we ran out of money, the previous generation built up too much debt and sold off the future so now we ran out of the resources.

Guess what is also true of the US population in general...

> In reality its probably closer to 4 or so million

your calcuation needs to account for ppl coming in on non immigrant visas too.

usa issued 10 million non-immigrant visas in 2024. not counting 5 million tourist visas.

If they were approved visa, they aren't exactly an illegal immigrant, no? That's a different issue entirely.

Also, Trump approved for. Ore H1B Visas this year.

> they aren't exactly an illegal immigrant, no?

parent and gp comments are talking about "immigrants" . where do you see illegal immigrants ?

Up the chain mentions "perceived enemy". ICE is supposedly cracking down on illegal immigration.

Are we instead saying that anyone not born in the US but comes in is an enemy?

but context was set to just 'immigrants' . Why would i go up the chain if the context was reset ?

Are you saying 'immigrants' anywhere in this thread automatically implies 'illegal immigrant' . Thats really confusing to me.

> Are we instead saying that anyone not born in the US but comes in is an enemy?

this is ridiculous twisting of my comment. I was just correcting record about population increase from immigration. population increase doesn't happen just from immigrant visas, ppl on non-immigrant visas stay in the country often for decades.

Then let me clarify, I was intending to talk mostly about illegal immigration and asylum seekers, the kinds of immigrants person I was replying to was probably mostly talking about. These are the immigrants people seem most concerned about, as they typically have a higher rate of relying on social services and welfare at least in the short term. It is these kinds of immigrants which impose the largest initial cost on society to allow in.

But sure, somewhere around 4-5 million illegal/undocumented immigrants, add another 10 million or so non-immigrant visas (which I agree, tend to have people end up staying for lots of other reasons), we're still somewhere around 15 million or so migrants with most of those having some kind of stable job lined up before they arrive. It's still less than 5% of the overall population increase with these migrants, but now a lot of these in this addition are largely economically self-sufficient from the get-go (those with work visas). You're not really changing my point at all.

In the end we're just too poor to deal with a generally pretty minor increase in population over several years while simultaneously seemingly being the wealthiest nation on the planet? How does that make sense?

Also, your claim of:

> usa issued 10 million non-immigrant visas in 2024. not counting 5 million tourist visas

is factually incorrect. The US issued around 11.5 million non-immigrant visas, of which 8.5 million were visitor visas. So not a total of 15 million visas and excluding the tourism its really about 3 million non-immigrant not-tourist visas.

> in 2024, in Fiscal Year 2024, we issued 11.5 million visas, and that’s a world record for us, breaking all previous records. Of these 8.5 million were visitor visas.

https://2021-2025.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-s...

lets look at data for 2023. ( I mistyped 2024 instead of 2023.)

https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...

There were 10,438,327 non immigrant visas. Out of which there were 5,902,426 b1/b2 and 29,286 B1.

looks like i din't count ppl with BCC in visitor visas.

> In the end we're just too poor to deal with a generally pretty minor increase in population over several years while simultaneously seemingly being the wealthiest nation on the planet? How does that make sense?

again, i didn't say this. i was just trying to correct the record. I honestly have no say in "how many is too many" . i have no idea how to even think about that to come up with a framewrok to answer that question

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