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Comment by j4coh | Hacker News Reader

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

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America has a pretty generous immigration cap. But we have chosen as a nation that we want diverse immigration. At one time we prioritized western europeans, and we decided that wasn't a great policy. So we switched to one that encourage people from everywhere. This is what American's want, diverse immigration. I don't get how that somehow is bad? I don't get how more populous nations should have greater representation. Again, we had larger groups from certain countries (western europe) and we decided we SPECIFICALLY don't want that, that that isn't fair immigration policy and isn't part of America's diversity. We aren't going back to that.

It's certainly a popular poem, but I don't see any great evidence it has ever reflected American values.

Not even in that only 3% of the US population is Native American, and the rest are therefore descended from or are themselves immigrants?

All the more reason to avoid the fate of the Native Americans.

As time goes on, the rejection of the idea of US-born people being "natives" in the sense that the rest of the world uses the term, simply because we have another term, "Native Americans" (which, as you will notice, is a proper noun), with a different meaning, is getting more and more dishonest. Yes, language is funny. Yes, the origins of nations are tragic if you go back far enough, and future citizens inherit the distributed weight of that guilt (but not the responsibility). But now, we have 300 million living people whose practical reality we would like discuss, and on that topic you are free and encouraged to disagree with anybody.

This is just a tired old emotional argument. It won't phase anyone who sees the results of modern immigration practices.

We get it, you don't like immigrants.

This sneering oversimplification pushes people away from generosity. It's ok to see and have emotions about the very real negative side of immigration. Lumping all those people in with the theoretical "just racist with no other rationale" crowd is harmful.

> generosity

we tried being nice, reaching across the aisle, etc. and that got us Orange Man 2.0

No it didn't. Putting up a candidate that talked about the stars and the moonlight instead of real problems Americans have got you Orange Man 2.0. To think, that they played the same game they did with Hillary and thought they could get away with it should really get you angry with party leadership.

I don't see how this is a counterpoint to my opinion. You can cultivate the generosity of natives to be open to immigration to whatever degree you think is just (e.g. by declining to use mockery/hate as your default position toward anybody who thinks there is any problem with the state of immigration), and you can do that regardless of your generosity level toward a political party that on average is more conservative or more hateful on immigration than the other. But that seems obvious, so I'm not sure what you're saying.

"This sneering oversimplification pushes people away from generosity. "

If you don't like "sneering oversimplification" you're really not gonna like it when you find out what smug "I'm the adult in the room" rhetoric does to both how you're perceived by interlocutors and the limitations on your own ability to work out the logic of these situations.

It’s not an argument, it’s a value.

It's an argument based on a value. The parent's position is ostensibly that the value does not currently survive contact with concrete reality in the US today.

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