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Comment by kreetx | Hacker News Reader

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That's the verbiage racists use to try to make it sound like it's not racism.

Spoiler: it's racism.

Do you think if the immigrants didn't change the situation for the worse, he'd be making the same arguments? I doubt it.

-- cultural non-fit, rather than racist

Incredible

Imagine there is a latin dance club, most want to dance rumba. But a pair who happens to be of other race wants to dance tango. Would sending them to another dance club be racist?

If some behavior associates with race, it doesn't mean that it is caused by race. There are plenty of African or Muslim origin people who assimilate just fine. It's just that a larger proportion than natives, some "other" groups commit more crime or live off of welfare. Race associates with less merit, yes, but doesn't cause it. Cause is merit, not race, hence not racism.

Imagine you're making a pizza, but you're out of pepperoni. Your mother-in-law is allergic to bacon. Now imagine I'm leaving your house and riding my bike into the sunset.

Like I said, if an attribute is statistically associated with another, then one doesn't cause the other. Proportionally larger part of the immigrants produce less value to society and come to consume away what the natives produced, then basis for reducing immigration or "remigration" is merit, not race.

If you are unable to point errors in this line of thought, then making fun of it will unfortunately make your stance look even weaker.

If you believe and promote racist shit like this you produce negative value to society

You'll need to point out where I'm wrong to make any progress here.

I guess you haven't felt the consequences yourself yet.

-- Proportionally larger part of the immigrants produce less value to society and come to consume away what the natives produced

This is absolute nonsense in every way, in addition to being racist and xenophobic. You aren't special because you won the lottery of what line you were born inside of. Get over yourself.

Do you think migrants from, say, Mexico to the US or Morocco to Spain, are skilled workers?

Also, unfortunately the lottery is real: while there are productive people who become wealthy mostly due to their own effort, there are many more who are just born into a well off country and benefit from the history before. But the question is, should a country that is well off somehow let everyone in to enjoy these benefits because it is "fair"? I guess your answer is yes, mine is no. I'd say, if you drew the less good lottery ticket then it's up to you to climb the ladder, rather than get into a rich country and start using its social services.

They absolutely are skilled workers, more skilled than you for sure. And they contribute a great deal to the country while not getting the benefits of being citizens, they pay way more taxes than the limited services they use.

And there is no ladder to climb, it is nearly impossible to migrate legally and gain citizenship. One of the many big lies of xenophobic, racist, anti-immigration people is "they should do it the right way, come legally" when for the overwhelming majority of people it simply isn't possible, and the current admin is making it even harder, motivated purely by racism.

Another one of the big lies, one that you are doing here, is wildly overstating the extent to which they "enjoy the benefits". Mexican immigrants are not eligible for most of the services provided to citizens.

Every attempt at quantifying the impact of Mexican immigration to the US is overwhelmingly positive to the country. You have nothing to stand on but racism.

You start with a terrible analogy, and then you make a leap into saying false, racist things about crime. Incredible.

Immigrants commit fewer crimes

Also, Muslim is a religion not a race

I don't think DHH speaks for all immigrants, but specific subgroups, including Muslims, but others as well.

Race and racism are terms you have brought in. (And I guess this is another reason where my arguments aren't actually "racist"?)

"He's not talking about all immigrants, just the brown ones"

Dig up man

None of the discussions on sending migrants out or being stricter on immigration is about color or race in principle. The issues are that legal processes aren't followed for immigration, or that the other cultures bring a disproportionate amount of new forms of crime.

Since enforcing laws and fighting crime is what states are doing anyway, then doing them more on immigrants achieves that goal more. (The situation is of course also unfortunate for any decent immigrants, as it will be more difficult for them to enter.)

But it's you who for some reason turns the merit argument into a race one. They do conflate, yes, perhaps that is why you can't tell the difference?

You keep saying things that are blatantly false. Immigrants commit fewer crimes. There is no legal process that will allow the vast majority of immigrants to migrate legally.

There is absolutely no merit based argument against the immigrants who are here or trying to come here. It's completely about race no matter how hard you try to deny it. No one is buying this nonsense.

Based on his own blog post (https://web.archive.org/web/20250925050154/https://world.hey...) I would argue he does come off as racist.

There are a lot of non-white british people (just like there are non-white americans), and he basically ignores that entire population. He assumes that you are only british if you are white and that london is worse now because there are less whites there. That has nothing to do with meritocracy, and arguable little to do with cultural non-fit.

There's a lot more to unpack in that article aside from just that, but that is the most blatantly obvious one.. And for what it's worth, I don't disagree with DHH on mass immigration. But he seems to have a lot more severe beliefs than just "mass immigration is bad".

> There are a lot of non-white british people (just like there are non-white americans), and he basically ignores that entire population.

There are many people who are mostly or wholly culturally British. I am not white and I live in the north of England and the biggest cultural non-fit is that my speech is obviously southern.

London does not, on the whole, feel very different culturally, from when I grew up there in the 80s. The biggest change in terms of the cultural impact of immigrants has been that of Eastern Europeans: things such as the availability if Polish food.

The issue is likely that readers for whom DHH sounds racist have (1) read the accusative fluff about him, and (2) then read some sentences in the blog post(s). If you read more, watched interviews or asked him directly, you'd get that it's less about race and more about merit. It's just that these attributes correlate (which is not racism).

I strongly disagree. I listened to a few of his interviews (one was the 5 hour long lex interview), and read the entirety of his more inflammatory blog posts. In one of them he specifically says he doesn't like modern London because it's not full of native british people, but what he really means is he doesn't like it because it's not full of white british people. Of course he doesn't say this outright but if you look up the statistics he sites you can see for yourself that he excludes asian, black and mixed british people from the statistic he lists. This is just one specific example.

I do think he also supports merit based immigration, but that doesn't mean he's not racist. He also very openly supports very extreme right wing political figures that promote things like ethnic cleansing. If you look into it more, he is pretty blatantly racist.

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