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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Not just immigration, seems like travel in general is becoming difficult too.

It's a real shame that just when we have the tech and infrastructure to allow people to travel anywhere in the world within a day, for a single person to be able to explore the entirety of this awesome planet for the first time in human history,

that the worst among us have to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.

Travel should be codified as a human right.

If someone can support themselves and doesn't harm anybody, what ethical justification does anybody have for denying a person from living where they want?

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People aren't simply interchangeable units of economic output, and when they live together for long periods of time they develop unique and distinct cultures that are dear to them. Letting the entirety of the world into your country without stops is cultural suicide. If you put any a value in preserving culture you will find it ethical to put some limit on immigration. Assimilation is possible but there is a limit to the rate and amount of foreigners a place can absorb before changing significantly.

'Cultures' have never been units of 'insiders' isolated from 'outsiders'. Cultural change is inevitable and there is no reason assume 'changing significantly' is inherently bad. That's what history _is_.

We're not talking about being completely isolated. We're talking about no limits on migration and permanent settlement. Of course cultures change and aren't static. But these no borders people are just as foolish as the no immigration people imo

> Letting the entirety of the world into your country without stops is cultural suicide.

The natives of the Americas, Australia, and the many nations previously colonized by European countries, know that better than any descendants of the colonizers.

Did they get to have any say?

Yes that is a great example. You certainly don't want what happened to them happening to you.

Yeah that's a great example of hypocrisy

No one actually thinks this is hypocrisy. No one is giving up their houses to Native Americans. They do an land acknowledgement and call it even. Even the most liberal among us don't feel it's necessary to sacrifice any meaningful amount of their own comfort to right some past wrongs.

The hypocrisy is:

Taking the lands of native peoples → outright massacring them in most cases → treating the original natives as second-class citizens with restricted rights → starting the worst wars in human history → preventing other people from traveling and immigrating under the excuse of "pReSeRvInG cUlTuRe" or jobs

Land acknowledgement where the most ancient natives get the most marginal and inhospitable land. Plenty of people think it's hypocrisy and are willing to collectively sacrifice to right the many, many wrongs.

No I mean land acknowledgement as in proclaiming "I'd like to acknowledge we're on the land of the..." before a meeting. No one's trying to give up any of their own land or property to anyone. It's always someone else's land somewhere else.

There's no real Us culture to preserve.

The US is too large to have one monolithic culture but it certainly contains many subcultures on the regional level. I won't dispute they're on the decline though.

>There's no real Us culture to preserve.

Fish Fails to Detect Water

The easiest way to see it is look at Japanese portrayals (outsider perspective). Cowboys, horses, guns, pride in our military and our free speech, fireworks and BBQs.

Just because you look down on the culture doesn't mean there isn't one.

That's one subset of Americans and not representative of all.

NYC and Los Angeles are the biggest cultural exporting centers in the US and have none of that.

LA has a lot of that actually. Simulated and on screen, but that's what they export.

Big cities are indistinguishable from other big cities in other countries. All big cities mostly have the same culture. That's why I liked the Japanese perspective on us. They saw cool things that they liked and included in their fiction that contained us.

If you want to experience American culture I recommend https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello

America doesn't have one culture. It has 500 cultures. But the ones that other cultures notice are the ones I listed. Cities literally stink.

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Please don't post like this on HN. We've asked you multiple times to observe the guidelines. We have to ban accounts that continue to do this after repeated appeals. Please take a moment to read the guidelines again and make the effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Which part of the guidelines do you think I didn't follow?

I'm guessing I didn't explain my self clearly when I mentioned that people use the red neck stereo type to make fun of us? I wrote that in an unclear way?

Well, the first line of the “In Comments” section is “Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.” There's also: "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer”, “Eschew flamebait”, and “Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle”.

It's common for people to not recognize that their commenting seems more escalatory when read by others than it does when it's being formulated in their mind, which is why we need to keep reminding people and asking people to make a conscious effort.

I’m think the weird irony is - and your example may exemplify this - a lot of the culture the right may want to preserve might be improved through immigration.

If you want more religious conservatism and traditional values, Americans are naturally moving away from that. Americans aren’t creating a whole lot of cowboy movies. China is innovating in fireworks.

David brooks has specifically called out this nihilism of the modern right. I think people attributing intention to policies like this are sadly externalizing their own values into an administration that doesn’t have them.

Because I think nobody is unified in this stuff. The people representing the culture you purport to imply a desire to preserve I don’t think agree with you, and certainly not with each other.

This is like Cracker Barrel all over again where most of the liberals I know loved Cracker Barrel and all the conservatives complaining about it almost to a one never went!

The sad truth is there is some sense things might be better if you were right.

> to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.

a very postnational view, humanist in a way, lipsius or erasmus would recognize it.

that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.

not for the masses. the nation is still a cradle to protect and nurture the commonwealth, and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.

> that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.

So because not everyone can afford to travel freely we shouldn't let anyone do that?

There's no reason why we should worship borders, or the state.

> and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.

"Borders" as they are treated today began barely 200 years ago, and only started being enforced so strictly since WW1 and then even worse after WW2.

For the vast >95% of human history, if you could walk to somewhere and survive there, you could live there.

The real ironic shit is that most of the travel and immigration restrictions of today are instituted by the descendants of people that invaded and occupied the lands of other people :')

> For the vast >95% of human history, if you could walk to somewhere and survive there, you could live there

For 95% of human history we were hunter gatherers living in extremely sparsely populated areas.

When was the last time you heard of humans going somewhere where other humans weren't already there?

How do you think they got there?

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