Hacker News Reader

Comment by like_any_other | Hacker News Reader

> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act

View on HN

I think you're conflating naturalization/citizenship with immigration.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (and subsequent) acts said you had to be white and have lived in the US for X years already to become a citizen. [1]

However, per your cited article a law was passed in 1882 to decrease Chinese immigration (who famously immigrated and helped build our railroads). [2] The Chinese immigrants couldn't become citizens but there was nothing (at the time) stopping them from moving and living and working in the US. [3]

Anecdotally and more recently: my Mexican grandmother, who married my World War 2 veteran grandfather in Mexico, legally immigrated just fine in the 1950s.

But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_Chinese_immigrati...

[4] https://www.history.com/articles/u-s-immigration-before-1965...

> But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself.

You don't think it had anything to do with the Naturalization Act of 1790 that limited citizenship to whites, or the fact that even in 1965, congressmen felt the need to lie to the public and promise that law would not change US demographics? It was just because it was "expensive", that people from Europe immigrated, but not from South America?

Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.

I remember learning about that from Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, back in the day.

It’s not even a US-specific thing. Many countries recruit foreigners to their militaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_militaries_that_recrui...

I've heard of some people on the lam who wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, a military that gives a no-questions-asked grant of citizenship at the end.

That's not how it works, and I have firsthand experience, and hasn't been for at least three decades. The very first thing that happens when you show up in Fontenay-sous-bois is that they run Interpol checks and other checks in your country of residence or anything notable in your passport.

Gone are the days of accepting any criminal openly.

They do however, if you either complete your contract, or are injured, deem you eligible for French citizenship "by spilled blood".

former squid here, can confirm. filipinos were very common until the USN pulled out of the bases in the Philippines in the early 90s.

they couldn’t get clearances easily if at all so a lot of filipinos worked in the galley (kitchens) which sometimes resulted in unexpected menu items. if it had been lumpia and chicken adobo that would have been great but usually it was stuff like spaghetti sauce with liver

i miss lumpia with banana ketchup so much

And in the same era in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_head_tax

You forgot to mention that those people weren't considered "white" at the time.

Why is this so important to mention here?

Correcting jeffbee's misrepresentation of history is important for the same reason they felt the need to misrepresent it in the first place.

That’s not an answer. Their comment didn’t mention whiteness at all. You believe that the whiteness of these immigrants is so important that leaving it out constitutes misrepresentation. Why is it so important? Come on, you obviously think it’s a key part of the story, so spit it out.

> Their comment didn’t mention whiteness at all.

Yes, that was the misrepresentation.

Why are you dodging the question of why that even matters? Are you too cowardly to explain your beliefs?

I'll summarize the conversation up to this point to you: The story is about a Chinese national working as a supervisor in CBP.

geetee asked why is CBP hiring foreign nationals.

jeffbee answered that it's because the US is a "nation of immigrants that for centuries recognized the value of recruiting foreign people".

I corrected him that those "centuries long" attitudes only applied to whites, and excluded the Chinese national subject of the article. This directly debunks his assertion that American values until recently meant his acceptance.

My beliefs are only relevant in so far as it is against my beliefs to lie. Why is that so strange to you? You seem to believe debunking lies requires one to have some fringe beliefs. What does that say about what you think are mainstream beliefs? What does it say about yours? I've only referred to widely-known facts of US history, that I don't believe you're ignorant of. Why did you not only not correct the lie, but attacked the person that did? The only conclusion I can make is that you are so at odds with truth, that you see correcting obvious lies as an assault on your worldview.

I corrected the actual misconception in another comment: CBP is not hiring noncitizens.

Given that, I don’t know what to do with the rest of this. Knowing about the racial makeup of past immigrants is apparently super important for a bad answer to a question based on faulty assumptions.

And I guess you dropped in that little parenthetical about politicians promising that law wouldn’t change white-only immigration just as a fun little reminder about how people in the 1960s were super racist.

> I corrected the actual misconception in another comment: CBP is not hiring noncitizens.

If you want to imply that what I corrected wasn't a misconception, why don't you say so directly? Is it because doing so would make it too obvious you're trying to deflect from the truth?

Your statement is far too broad to be correct in any case. Thousands of Chinese and other non-white people immigrated long before 1965. Ironically, some of the earliest Chinese people employed by the federal government were employed by Customs, decades before 1965.

Yes, my broad statement about US immigration policy is incorrect because of a few exceptions. It's impossible to talk about trends and averages because there's always a counter-example somewhere that, by your logic, disproves the whole thing. This gas is not hot - look at these ten molecules, they're moving slow! I guess China is open and welcoming too, because they have thousands (1.4 million!) of foreigners living there?

(0.1% of China's total population, but why let statistics get in the way of anecdotal reasoning?)

Are you really incapable of thinking statistically, even this little bit, or are you just playing dumb because it lets you avoid engaging honestly with the question a little bit longer?

You’re the one who can’t fathom that a general answer to a very broad question must be a lie (not merely incomplete, not merely wrong, but a lie) because you think the answer to a broad, general question must include “although our immigration policy was racist as heck until the 1960s so this specific guy would have had a hard time before then” at the end. I’m not the one incapable of engaging honestly here.

Yes, saying it was part of US historical culture to accept people like this guy, when the culture explicitly rejected them, is a lie. Nothing you said so far disproved this.

But I was more polite, and merely said he "forgot to mention" that aspect. That's all it took to draw your objections. I'll leave you to your word games now.

Edit: Fine, you get one more reply.

> The question was “foreign nationals,” not “people like this guy.”

But the topic was this guy.

> And it’s a specific choice to consider race as part of “like this guy,” not a law of nature.

Yes, a specific choice that the US made, from its founding up until 1965. But you are more comfortable talking in vague abstractions divorced from real world implementations, talking about words without thinking what those words refer to, so I get why you're confused. It's just a way of thinking I find repellent, and refuse to humor. As I said, enjoy your word games.

The question was “foreign nationals,” not “people like this guy.” And it’s a specific choice to consider race as part of “like this guy,” not a law of nature.

>Why is this so important to mention here?

Race baiting bullshit allows people to poo all over the discussion and avoid having to confront the actual reality of what kinds of people we make good immigrants and citizens and why, because the answers to those questions are gonna cast some shade domestically. Any correlation to skin tone is mostly coincidental or just a figment of how the cards fell historically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com