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Comment by ljsprague | Hacker News Reader

China is really missing out!

There are over a million legal immigrants in China, plus an unknown but sizable number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and Myanmar. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.

They still have enough unskilled labor they can pull from the country side. They pack up the village and ship them (relocate the people) to a city in need of workers.

why is this downvoted?

They increasingly don't (much of rural China is depopulating rapidly, with only the old folks left) and "pack up the village and ship them to a city" is not a thing, unless it's being demolished for a dam etc.

Lol a million immigrants, that's the net inflows the U.K is getting a year with a 60 something million population.

Wrong. There has never in the history of the UK been a year in which net migration has reached 1 million.

Really? "Estimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 171,000 in 2025. This figure is lower than net migration levels during the 2010s and represents a sharp decline compared to the year ending March 2023, when net migration peaked at a historical high of 944,000 (Figure 2)."

So we're gonna treat 944000 as less than a million I guess? If we also count illegals, as we should since they exist and keep arriving, that year was probably around a million. Even if we don't count them - it's very close to a million.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...

So to sum up : 2023 alone had (almost) the entire Chinese immigrant population come into the UK.

TLDR: the original statement was false, and not justified even with cherry-picked data.

LOL. OK it was 944000 , I was off by 56000 people. You're right, the comparison to China was totally acceptable /s

They indeed will be in about 20 years when the impending population collapse hits

The villagers are treated as immigrants with preferential treatment for city-born folks.

Not really. China is essentially a microcosm of capitalism playing out entirely internally.

E.g. to move to the capital permanently from outside you're basically under the same scrutiny as an immigrant on a greencard.

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