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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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Immigrants account for ~98% of the American population.

100% if you go back a little further. Large hominids aren’t native to this continent.

BTW have you ever thought about what incredible bad asses people had to be to cross the Bering strait during the ice age with Stone Age tech? We could definitely settle space if we had the will. It’d probably be more comfortable, safer, and easier, even in the early days, than that.

100% of the population of everywhere other than parts of Africa if you go back far enough.

But Japan is clearly different from India, right? So how useful is that out-of-Africa factoid for analyzing modern societies?

That is my point.

The comment saying immigrants are 98% of the population of the US is not useful because they are people whose ancestors have been their for many generations.

Defining anyone who has immigrant ancestry as an immigrant is pointless. Sometimes it is useful to talk about, say, second generation immigrants, but not endlessly.

For one thing, after a generation or two the culture of people descended from immigrants diverges from that of their ancestors, even if their ancestry is limited to just one culture.

There is a fundamental difference between settlers, who create a society, and immigrants, who move into a society that already exists. America was established by mostly British settlers. Folks on HN of all places should be able to understand the importance of founders.

It's self-evident that this difference between settlers and immigrants has a huge impact. Australia, Canada, and the United States are very similar to each other in terms of language, law, economics, etc. But the U.S. separated from the parent society, Britain, 250 years ago. Subsequently, those countries underwent completely different immigration patterns. So why are those countries so similar? It's because of the difference between settlers and immigrants.

America was pretty "settled" when Italian immigrants showed up in the 1910s-20s. Or the millions of Germans in the late 1800s. Or the millions of British and Irish a generation before that. Not every white American has ancestors who stepped off the Mayflower. The majority are - by your own definition - immigrants.

I agree that the majority of Americans are immigrants. But you said 98% above. Probably 40% of American are descended from settlers or African slaves, the people who constitute the founding population.

19th century Germans and Scandinavians are difficult to categorize. On one hand, the nation was well established by the time they came. On the other hand, they were the original settlers, creating greenfield cities, in large swaths of the country. Depending on how you count them, a majority of Americans may not have immigrant ancestry. But it’s surely a very large fraction.

> Judging by the numbers, it’s too easy

I don't see how the numbers support that claim.

What percentage of the population would you like to see made up of immigrants? Would you make immigration harder if the immigrant populating was above 1%?

If it got too high, would you start deporting people or forcing native people to have more children?

You want the number to be small enough where the cultural and social impact of immigrants is controlled. We don't want America to become more like India or Bangladesh or places like that, so we need to keep immigration low enough where the native culture overwhelms that of the immigrants.

According to a 2021 Cato survey--which is a pro-immigration outfit--the median response to "how many immigrants should be allowed each year" was 500,000: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/aside_3x/pu.... If we enforced that number long term, we'd probably end up with a foreign-born population under 5%, as we had in 1970. That seems like an appropriate number to foster cultural homogeneity and a high level of social cohesion.

> Clearly immigration to America isn’t hard. Judging by the numbers, it’s too easy.

Just tell me, have you ever gone through it? My guess? You haven't as you would think a little different of how easy it is.

And yes, I have.

I didn't have a U.S. passport until I was in high school, despite living in the U.S. since I was five. Lots of my family has gone through the process; I have a cousin going through it right now.

Are you hoping your cousin doesn't qualify because from what I can tell, you believe there are too many immigrants in the U.S. already?

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