Hundreds march in Singapore against website licensing regime

I wasn't clear about what I meant. I'll accept your assertion that it's easy to get a work visa in Japan. It's certainly easy for Japanese expats to work in the USA for subsidiaries of Japanese companies. There are special visas for that.

What I meant by immigration is the whole totality of how an immigrant would become part of Japanese society. My understanding is that's more difficult in Japan than here in the USA.

E.g. this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_Japanese makes the perhaps unsubstantiated claim that "Probably because of the difficulty in gaining citizenship and because of cultural difference, foreign-born Japanese people account for a very small percentage of the population in Japan."

Contrast with USA where, as Butch in Pulp Fiction puts it: "I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit." And, by the time you get to children of immigrants, national origin "don't mean shit" either. Except, doubtlessly, to a small minority of WASPs who trace their ancestry to the Mayflower.

Hardly anyone will emigrate to homogenous Japan if it's really hard to be accepted by the natives. I was interested in whether homogenous Iceland was similar.

Good point. Even by the time Brin entered in 1979, the rules of immigration had changed. Brin got in easily because we had special rules for Jewish families trying to get out of the Soviet Union. More recently (in the 2000's) we did the same thing for certain persecuted people from Africa (a colleague helped sponsor a family of these; sadly I don't remember the exact nationality).

But what happened to the "traditional" method of high tech immigration? I.e. come here for grad school, then stay. Is that all H1B stuff? I know quite a few people who came here for grad school and then stayed to work in high tech. They are now citizens. Their children are native born Americans.

Yes. Kim Jong-il had personal slaves. Plus thousands of North Koreans work to death in concentration camps.

And comparing Singapore to North Korea is just absurd. You might as well just reference the Nazi's and be done with Godwin's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law)

No but they had 2 out of 3 of those things down to them in the last century. Still, it's probably they're own fault they're as screwed up as they are right?

Did North Korea massacre its indigenous population? Has it nuked or firebombed any foreign cities?

"Evil" is a loaded term. The government does things it considers right. I don't like the government of Singapore but I don't think it's "evil".

In the US we have election rigging (almost all states are gerrymandered, both sides try to encourage their supporters to vote and prevent the other side's supporters from voting, and both support an antiquated electoral system that prevents third parties from being viable), peaceful (well, non-violent) organizations have been put on lists of terrorist organizations, we're running a prison in conquered territory in Cuba specifically to avoid legal jurisdiction, we've got a government surveillance system that issues requests to service providers which they cannot report (the digital equivalent of being allowed to breaking in to people's hoses without showing them the warrant). Is this "evil"? I'm sure everyone thinks they were doing the right thing.

Edit: and this from another post I just saw...

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7

An absolutely corrupt elite that made their tiny city state one of the most prosperous and stable countries in south-east Asia. Lee Kuan Yew is probably one of my favourite political figures - studying Asian leaders like him, or China's Deng Xiaoping, can be perception-shattering.

I still think democracy is important, but the order of priorities for a country should go something like stability -> rule of law -> economic prosperity -> democracy. If you mix up the order, you're gonna have a bad time.

As for this case in particular, it sounds more like lobbying by the newspaper industry than any campaign to suppress free speech.

>You must be very naive to think that once a small group achieves a complete control over a country, they will use it for everybody's good.

Yeah you're right. Singapore's dictator totally didn't bring the country from third world to first world, currently ranking top 5 in the world for academic grades, lowest child mortality and GDP per capita PPP, without the help of foreign aid or natural oil resources, in less than 40 years.

Come visit sometime. Those who live here do not seem to think anything is being "destroyed" or even corrupted, and that includes people from America and many other places. We have experienced the alternatives, and Singapore is not worse.

That's precisely why I said that this is no false dichotomy here. False dichotomy is something completely different. False dichotomies are things like "if you're not with us, you're against us", or "The new research shows that one part of the theory of evolution is wrong, therefore creationism is right". There's nothing like this here; his was a simple statement of the form "X is not bad, because Y is even worse". See the difference? False dichotomy means (falsely) asserting that when you disprove the factuality of one alternative, only one other alternative remains and therefore it's automatically true. (Whereas apeeal to worse problems is not about factual truths but about the weights of problems to be solved.)