Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

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Europe has way stronger data protection laws than the US. EU has GDPR, strict requirements, large fines. US only has a couple states protecting personal data, with HIPAA for health data, and that's it. We require you to unlock all your devices within 100 miles of a border (inland) so we can look at all your data. Of course our intelligence service also hoovers up the metadata of US citizens in contact with anyone overseas, which is borderline illegal. All our states are now passing "age verification" which is mass surveillance under a different name.

And US absolutely has been xenophobic for years, by official federal policy. I'm really surprised you're not aware of it, but here's a small selection of examples:

- Both our elected and appointed leaders are white nationalists. Our president called all Mexicans murderers and rapists, said African migrants were eating random pets in a rural US town (they weren't, obviously, but it was intended to exacerbate xenophobia)

- Our federal government has a mandate using ICE to try to eject anyone with a Hispanic name from the country (has already deported US citizens based on being hispanic/latino). We even boot people seeing asylum, often exporting them to foreign prisons even if they've never had a criminal record. We have concentration camps now, filled entirely with foreigners, and people who have lived here for decades but were foreigners.

- We stopped accepting new visas from 75 countries. We may even expel you for social media posts we don't like, or for attending a protest that our citizens can attend. We increased travel bans for people from majority Muslim countries. H1-B visas have been rolled back to only the highest paying jobs, and you may need to pay a $15,000 bond. We also now collect and store foreigners' biometric data indefinitely.

- Let's not forget the tariffs on virtually all other nations, to say nothing of "America First" and the new "Greater North America doctrine".

The US accepts immigrants from 200+ countries around the world with the top 5 being Mexico, Cuba, India, Dominican Republic and China. None of that has changed under Trump.

I think you got lost in the rhetoric somewhere.

Tariffs are just the US adjusting to reality which other countries are slow to do. Free trade died all on its own, because the pandemic showed that critical industries were hollowed out by free trade in a way that could be appreciated from a national security perspective. That situation was favoring China too much, so we need to unwind that some.

Tariffs already existed in many countries in practice, so it's not like the US reinvented modern tariffs.

Are you seriously trying to reframe the largest tariff war in 100 years, targeting 180 countries and territories, as a readjustment against China? And in both of Trump's terms he's radically changed immigration more than at any time since the 1960's. Either this is a great troll, or you need help, man.

Free trade isn't only a China issue, no. It's only the most important one partly as a function of China propping up massive state companies while also trying to avoid becoming a consumption led economy.

If you feel like formulating a good argument about immigration, I'll listen, but you haven't provided one.

Putting some numbers into the discussion census.gov [0] is tracking a sharp decline in net immigration due to both, a decrease in immigration and an increase in emmigration, from the start of 2025 to the present. Trending towards a net negative.

Pew [1] suggests that the changes around the start of 2025 were due increased restrictions on asylum applications under the previous admin and EOs by the current one to restrict new immigration. Given the rough numbers [2] of about 40k asylum grants per year in the early 2020s, I doubt the previous admin's actions are playing much of a role here.

Stating that none of it (immigration acceptance) changed under this administration might technically be true - with respect to the number of countries applying, but misses this point.

[0]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2026/...

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

[2]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-seek-asylum-in...

No doubt some changes were made by both Biden and Trump, but the argument being made is that this was fundamentally xenophobia, which is not supported.

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