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Comment by yolo3000 | Hacker News Reader

Numbers are going down, but in my area there are now 4 buildings with asylum seekers. Started with a hotel, then an office building, then some newly built expensive houses that were first up for rent and now rented for asylum seekers, and now another office building. Honoring existing treaties out of principle can also be put on hold when the situation changes.

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From what I can tell, a big part of the problem in Europe is that people seeking asylum are prohibited from making a living (due to widespread belief in the lump of labor fallacy) and so have to be dependent on welfare.

Yes and when a government tries to do something about that (like Spain granting temporary permits so they can work and pay taxes) it angers the right even more.

The issues here are the same as they have been forever in every country; Spanish people simply are not going to do the jobs the immigrants are doing. This is the same in every country I lived in or visited, including the US. In Spain, most my uneducated neighbours feel too high to even work in bars, let alone pick fruit, shovel shit, pick up garbage etc. So who is going to do that besides immigrants who are eager to do it; a few generations later, they will vote right and complain about immigrants and will say they are too good to shovel shit, of course.

>asylum are prohibited from making a living

This is exactly how we got here. We allowed them to work to make temporary asylum permanent migration.

Look, you can either let people make a living and manage their own lives while contributing to society, or you can not let them make a living and ensure they're housed and fed. You can't be angry at A and also be angry at B.

Nice framing. How about C: not letting in a flood of financial refugees with completly different cultural values in the first place or at least send them back at some point instead of giving them free citizenship and all its benefits as justification for them working here or not being able to work?

Just admit then that it's not about jobs, housing or anything else but you just don't want to see brown faces in the street?

PS: Part of the issue with sending them back is that the countries they're from won't take them. They can't live at the airport like Tom Hanks either.

> just don't want to see brown faces in the street?

They could be green for all everyone cares about. The actual relevant distinction with real word implication is criminal statistics and per capita rates. Not to mention everyday real life bad experiences for people living outside of the sheltered silicon valley world.

>countries they're from won't take them

That is just wrong. In many places it literally results in a brain drain. Your position literally hurts already poor countries just because you want to see less white faces in the streets.

> That is just wrong. In many places it literally results in a brain drain. Your position literally hurts already poor countries just because you want to see less white faces in the streets.

Countries are not entitled to keep their citizens by force to prop up their economy. If the person doesn't want to stay, why should they be forced to?

You might want to contemplate the fact that you're literally rehashing the same arguments that Soviets and East Germany used to justify their exit visas. Except you're doing it from the other end of the pipe.

If they are only asylum seekers, it means they are still in the validation process.

Unfortunately the hard-right has also defunded that process for many years, and have thus created this problem themselves. The agencies tasked with figuring out if asylum seekers have a legitimate claim are overwhelmed with all the work. This is purely a self-created problem (intended to gaslight the population in there being a huge 'immigrant problem').

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