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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Nothing like real data. The US has over three times more immigrants than any other country.

I should also note it is my belief --my belief-- that most people in the US, outside of certain groups, are for LEGAL immigration. Don't come here illegally or with a student visa and then cry foul if not welcomed.

EDIT: the reference to student visas is about using them illegally to get in and then stay. It is NOT about not allowing students with proper visas to come in and study.

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What's this about a student visa?

A student visa is a completely legal way of entering the US.

PS. Post the Boston bombings the immigration officials at the port of entry are required to verify valid student status before letting students (F1 visa holders) into the US. This means the chances of people entering the country illegally through a student visa are slim to none.

I am talking about using a student visa to get in and then stay and work permanently and not study. In other words, using the visa fraudulently. If you want to stay and work go through the proper legal process and get a resident visa.

Again, legal immigration.

Overstaying on an F1 visa is quite hard because the school is required to report all changes in academic status through the SEVIS database.

If you want to stay and work go through the proper legal process and get a resident visa.

F1 students are allowed to work 20 hours a week when the school is in session and 40 hours a week during the summer.

It's fairly common to come in on a "Student" visa to study at a community college or take night courses while also holding a full-time job. It's also common to skip the facade entirely - Use visa to gain entry, take job on forged credentials, stay past expiration. The student visa does allow the holder to work, but it is intended to be secondary to the education, and history has shown that it is not.

This is not as easy you make it sound. First, when entering the US, the immigration officials verify whether student status is valid using the SEVIS database. Second, all changes to student status must be reported to the SEVIS database by the school. If the school finds out that a student is doing unauthorized work, or if they find that the student's academic progress is unsatisfactory (likely if they are working full-time) they are required to terminate student status and report this to SEVIS.

The generic issue of using forged credentials to get an unauthorized job is applicable to any visa. And if I wanted to overstay my visa, it would be dumb of me to choose a visa that was as carefully tracked and monitored as as the F1 visa.

I don't think someone who went JHU, and was planning on joining MSR, would be, to not put too fine a point, the kind of person you're alluding to.

> The US has over three times more immigrants than any other country.

Which is completely irrelevant because the US is hundreds of times larger than many countries.

That's why we use percentages.

The claim is that Americans don't want anyone to come here. That is utterly false and it is fully supported by this data. Your point might have been valid if the topic at hand were different.

So...

    10000 Americans love pizza
    15000 Americans hate pizza
    10 Chileans love pizza
    15 Chileans hae pizza
    
    America loves (and hates) pizza 1000 times more than Chile?

Still absolutely irrelevant as it pertains to the issue being discussed.

And, if I chose to play your game, according to the same page approximately 12% of our population are immigrants. And this is very much on par and well above most European countries. And, after eliminating the top layer on that list, all of which are corner cases (i.e. Vatican City) the US and a number of European countries are in the top ten countries in terms of the percentage of immigrants as related to total country population.

So, at this point, I have no clue what your problem might be with this other than to imagine that you are just looking for a way to claim that Americans hate immigrants, which is simply not true any way you care to look at it.

> Nothing like real data. The US has over three times more immigrants than any other country.

That doesn't take into account the population of the US. Relative to other countries, the US does have lots of foreign-born population, but is far from being the one with more immigrants.

People who make this kind of argument are often the same who say "Sweden is much more homogenous; you can't compare apples to oranges like that" whenever some success story about welfare, healthcare, democracy, or something else is used to contrast against the U.S., despite the fact that that very same page shows that Sweden has the same number of immigrants as a percentage of the population that the U.S. does.

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