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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

That's like saying families is an obsolete concept and anyone should be able to come into your family and get all the benefits and rights and privileges as your born children get (including all the love and attention you give them, the twice a year dentist visit, breakfast, etc).

Also rights aren't fundamental in nature, they only exist because groups of people come together, produce/work, and that work provides the benefits you call "rights".

Others just consume those rights.

And given that resources are limited, and that highly advanced societies require highly advanced skills, there is no "logic" in flooding countries with seekers of benefits who are mostly not going to add any value to that society for 3 generations while costing the resources of 10. They will simply consume.

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Actually there is something wrong with the concept of families - it's unfair that some children do not get the same level of love and attention (and dentist visits) you provide for your children. However, families are not obsolete because there's no obvious solution to the problem of unfairness between families, and given human nature perhaps there will never be a solution.

But outside the family there is a solution: Just treat everyone equally. There's no biological reason why I should care about the passport of a man I have never met, any more than I should care about his race or tribe or religion.

Yes, mass immigration would mean that you would be worse off and the immigrants better off (although spreading the immigration period over say 50 years might limit your costs in this equation). But isn't that the right thing to do? Do those people deserve to live in absolute poverty? If not, doesn't that mean you have an obligation to help?

Nationality is not yet an obsolete concept, but society is slowly moving in that direction. I think Charles Darwin said it best:

"As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races."

"There's no biological reason why I should care about the passport of a man I have never met, any more than I should care about his race or tribe or religion."

Actually you should care, for a lot of reasons. Your presumption of not caring comes from taking for granted a lot of things. One first thing that you absolutely must care is security. The world around you and your loved ones is relatively safe thanks to multitude of operating services that make sure that the individuals roaming free are not that crazy, not that malevolent, not that contagious, and in short will not have that much of a negative impact on society at large (which includes you). Achieving that is no easy task, especially when you also want such things as freedom and openness to the rest of the world. Of course, there are also a lot of other important considerations that require individual identification, and I'm sure you'll manage to understand many of them on your own.

> That's like saying families is an obsolete

That's like saying a tennis ball and a planet are the same because they're both round. Scale, you're missing the scale of it.

> That's like saying a tennis ball and a planet are the same because they're both round.

What is this random analogy and what does it have to do with mine?

> Scale, you're missing the scale of it.

The number of tennis balls that would fit in the volume of this planet has 25 digits in it.

So no, it's not even close to the scale of anything. And what does being round have to do with it?

I can't even figure out what your argument is.

You're saying families are like nations, in that $arbitraryPerson can't just "come into your family/nation and get all the benefits and rights and privileges as your born children/citizens get". They're saying that the difference in scale makes the comparison invalid; a nation is, say, 8 orders of magnitude larger than a family, and, similarly, the earth is 25 orders of magnitude larger than a tennis ball. For the same reason that comparing the earth and tennis balls doesn't work because of scale, comparing a nation and families doesn't work because of scale.

If a family of 10 is increased by 1 member each year, that is an increase of 10%.

You can apply a 10% increase in population each year, due to benefit seeking immigration, to a country.

There is no "scale" issue here.

And even if there was, the reasoning that followed can stand on its own (because the analogy was directed on the OP's analogy, and not on the reasoning provided).

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