Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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> That you consider immigrants to be automatically part of an 'underclass' is very telling of the stigmatisation of asylum seekers.

What? Motherfucker I am part of the underclass, it's brutally hard to escape the underclass and unfortunately if you turn up to a country with no connections, no safety net, no money and no applicable skills then: YOU ARE PART OF THE UNDERCLASS.

Why are all the Foodora drivers Arab? do you think Arabs are pre-disposed for food delivery? No, it's because gig-work that barely pays the bills is the only option for many: this is disgusting servitude, barely surviving like this.

> Some of them are doctors and scientists especially from places like Syria.

Doctors from Syria who don't speak Swedish, need to pass a bunch of Swedish certifications to practice and cannot take female patients aren't going to get along well.

It's a valid point and one I would grant you, but it's very true that the observed reality of things is that asylum seekers are the most vulnerable in society.

Pretending they're not doesn't make this not the case.

My ex is an immigrant from a poor country and she does this kind of job, like driving uber. For a middle man who provides the car so it's not very lucrative.

Doesn't mean you're automatically underclass. In her whole family nobody is involved in anything criminal. In terms of wealth I would consider them middle class. Like me, I'm also a middle class immigrant though from a western (richer than here) country with university education. I'm just not very ambitious so I coast in a middle level job by choice.

But they all came here with nothing more than high school diplomas. They just work harder for it than I do. Nights, tough work etc. She worked very hard to get a local passport too. Because that's not easy these days.

The stereotype of immigrants ending up straight in the ghetto is incorrect IMO.

1) An outlier wouldn’t prove any point about average trends.

Its a well understood point, even to the point that it ends up in economic and sociological studies.[0]

2) “Middle class” is not living paycheck to paycheck, I guess “middle” depends on which country you live in, but in Sweden if you don’t earn well or have secured employment (Ie; paid sick days) then people would likely not call you middle class.

In the UK, most people are working class (not middle) which is more defined by high income white collar work. In the US its based more on yearly income than the type of work or how secure it is. So middle class has many definitions and none of them cover gig-workers.

Working hard isn’t the point, i guess you’re arguing the permanency part, while glossing over where I said its very hard to escape the underclass, even though you’re clearly admitting that its very hard.

FWIW it might help to read a definition of what Underclass means, natives are also a major part of the underclass especially in the UK; its not a derogatory term, its a state of being that is hard to escape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Kin...

So, talking about an outlier who works hard, does nothing to talk about how the overwhelming majority are stuck. Unless you’re going to say every asylum seeker is superhuman, and truthfully now- we’re not talking hypotheticals, we have decades of migration information across the UK and Sweden to compare.

Arguing against what actually happens and talking about statistical outliers as the norm is disingenuous at best and immoral at worst.

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026427512...

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