The Republican party is frequently in a contradictory state with immigration, where they speak loudly against it, but then yield in to business demands for immigrant labor.
It's possible Trump is uniquely different there, but he's talked about being sympathetic to farm and hospitality businesses. It's hard to tell. Everything is up to his whims now.
The comment you are replying to quite intentionally said "legal immigration". Republicans love illegal immigration. Why? because it suppresses wages of both documented and undocumented workers.
Undocumented workers can be employed below minimum wage. If they get an attitude and start demanding a fairer wage or better working conditions, their employer just calls in an ICE raid to clear them out and then they start with a fresh batch. They pay a token fine and that's that.
Several sectors are completely dependent on this arrangement, most notably agriculture and food processing (eg chicken farms)
If they actually cared about this, they would seriously punish the employers for employing undocumented workers. they do not. In fact, when that's been tried it's been a disaster (eg [1])
And because the system allows this to happen, it suppresses the wages of documented workers as well. That's the point. The entire system of restricting immigration is designed to increase profits. Nothing more.
What's the alternative? Easy. Document them. We've done this before. When there was a shortage of male workers in WW2 (because a lot of men were in the Army), we had the Bracero program [2] for temporary workers.
Historically, many such workers came to work then went back to (primarily) Mexico. They only ended up staying permanently when it became too hard to cross the border.
As for these latest bans, well we had 3 Muslim bans in Trump 1. The 19 then 39 (and now apparently 75) countries are pretty much jus tprimarily Muslim and "shithole" [3] countries.
All of this stems from the desire to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy but only for white people.
That was obvious ever since they claimed asylum seekers that had followed the legal asylum process were “illegal immigrants” and society and the media just went along with that phrasing despite it being factually incorrect.
Is this sarcasm? Not that Trump's word means anything, but Trump has been against it since his first term. Having cancelled it temporarily in that first term, has said that he'll end H1B if he gets reelected, and that US shouldn't have the H1B program.
It's only since 2025 when Elon was in his good books and told Republicans to not vote for a bill that Trump woke up that day and decided he'd be pro-H1B.
All you had to do was a 10 second google search to find that:
The racial and ethnic makeup of legal immigrants who have obtained Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) status or arrived as new immigrants in the past four years (2022–2025) has been primarily driven by arrivals from Latin America and Asia.
Asian: Approximately 27% to 28% of all immigrants.
Hispanic/Latino (Ethnicity): Roughly 45% of the total immigrant population identify with Hispanic or Latino ethnic origins.
White: About 20% to 21%.
Black/African American: Approximately 9%.
Multi-racial: About 22% identify as having two or more races.
It just amazes me people continue to push these racist narratives that doesn't hold up once you look at the actual data. Its staggering to think we have the unlimited power of the internet and still can't seem to take 10 seconds to confirm or deny something as simple as this? How depressing.
It's such a small country and an even smaller amount are coming to the U.S. that this would have no material impact. Strange to see them there, but not Argentina (in much worse financial situation).
> A U.S. official confirmed the full list of countries will include Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Grenada is here because the US asked to install radars here for their Venezuelan operation("drug boat interception") and Grenada declined. They also raised the The Level 2 advisory for US citizen.
Russia I presume is on the list because of geopolitical tensions.
I am not familiar with every country in that list but in my experience, what looks like an anomaly is Morocco, which produces a fairly large elite compared to the size of the country (worked with lots of highly educated / highly paid (and therefore net tax contributing) moroccan nationals). I have hardly worked with any other nationality in that list in my professional life (Bangladesh and Tunisia maybe).
I think this move could harm US in two ways: It will reduce the immigrant diversity which might make the population skew towards the biggest immigrant population such as from India and Mexico which are not in this list. Second it will remove USA as top destination for talent, which will help stop brain drain from these countries causing their local industry to benefit and thereby reducing the edge of US companies.
My guess is they view India as producing an elite immigration (i.e. net tax paying) in large numbers. It is stunning how many successful tech or non-tech executives are Indian born. I haven't seen the full list but I doubt any country on that list gets close, even as a % of population.
1st gen immigrants from India are almost always well-educated, and oftentimes even entrepreneurial. They are among the lowest-risk (with Chinese) immigrants. That is to say, they typically will not contribute to crime, gangs, or public welfare burden. So it's a pretty big difference between those two countries and all the others on the list.
It’s bound to generate some heated discussion. A lot of people on that discussion asks the same question. There’s a lack of transparency on why some posts get flagged.
A pause in processing of immigration visas affects the tech industry and is relevant to most of the audience who lives in the US.
Because like most political threads, it will largely consist of people with a crayon-and-coloring-book understanding of geopolitics posting low-effort snipes and trading insults while contributing basically zero to productive discussion.
The most disgusting example of this in recent memory was the Scott Adams death thread, where complimentary comments were being aggressively flagged, and toxic vitriol was being upvoted. It made me finally realize how many joyless, seriously broken people lurk here.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is stupid and weakens the U.S. We have benefited so much from the visa program over the history of this country. If the smartest people of Russia and various other countries want to flee and join the U.S., we would be at an advantage.
Loving the downvotes on a valid, reasonable question.
I'm asking for specifics, isn't that what goes into a good comment here?
Or maybe the downvotes are political.
The one that I'm at a complete loss for is Uruguay - it is one of the wealthiest countries per capita in South America as well as the least corrupt and most egalitarian... not exactly a huge source of desperate immigrants. Did their government scold ours too harshly for the recent Venezuela shenanigans or something?
It continues to be clear that the administration opposes legal immigration (except perhaps in narrow cases, like white South Africans).
The Republican party is frequently in a contradictory state with immigration, where they speak loudly against it, but then yield in to business demands for immigrant labor.
It's possible Trump is uniquely different there, but he's talked about being sympathetic to farm and hospitality businesses. It's hard to tell. Everything is up to his whims now.
That's not contradictory at all.
The comment you are replying to quite intentionally said "legal immigration". Republicans love illegal immigration. Why? because it suppresses wages of both documented and undocumented workers.
Undocumented workers can be employed below minimum wage. If they get an attitude and start demanding a fairer wage or better working conditions, their employer just calls in an ICE raid to clear them out and then they start with a fresh batch. They pay a token fine and that's that.
Several sectors are completely dependent on this arrangement, most notably agriculture and food processing (eg chicken farms)
If they actually cared about this, they would seriously punish the employers for employing undocumented workers. they do not. In fact, when that's been tried it's been a disaster (eg [1])
And because the system allows this to happen, it suppresses the wages of documented workers as well. That's the point. The entire system of restricting immigration is designed to increase profits. Nothing more.
What's the alternative? Easy. Document them. We've done this before. When there was a shortage of male workers in WW2 (because a lot of men were in the Army), we had the Bracero program [2] for temporary workers.
Historically, many such workers came to work then went back to (primarily) Mexico. They only ended up staying permanently when it became too hard to cross the border.
As for these latest bans, well we had 3 Muslim bans in Trump 1. The 19 then 39 (and now apparently 75) countries are pretty much jus tprimarily Muslim and "shithole" [3] countries.
All of this stems from the desire to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy but only for white people.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...
[2]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program
[3]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-...
1 reply →
That was obvious ever since they claimed asylum seekers that had followed the legal asylum process were “illegal immigrants” and society and the media just went along with that phrasing despite it being factually incorrect.
[dead]
That definitely isn't true. Trump has repeatedly been effusive about how important H1B labor is.
How so? In September he added a requirement that any future H1B visas from people abroad will require an unprecedented $100,000 payment.
1 reply →
Is this sarcasm? Not that Trump's word means anything, but Trump has been against it since his first term. Having cancelled it temporarily in that first term, has said that he'll end H1B if he gets reelected, and that US shouldn't have the H1B program.
It's only since 2025 when Elon was in his good books and told Republicans to not vote for a bill that Trump woke up that day and decided he'd be pro-H1B.
All you had to do was a 10 second google search to find that:
The racial and ethnic makeup of legal immigrants who have obtained Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) status or arrived as new immigrants in the past four years (2022–2025) has been primarily driven by arrivals from Latin America and Asia.
Asian: Approximately 27% to 28% of all immigrants.
Hispanic/Latino (Ethnicity): Roughly 45% of the total immigrant population identify with Hispanic or Latino ethnic origins.
White: About 20% to 21%.
Black/African American: Approximately 9%.
Multi-racial: About 22% identify as having two or more races.
It just amazes me people continue to push these racist narratives that doesn't hold up once you look at the actual data. Its staggering to think we have the unlimited power of the internet and still can't seem to take 10 seconds to confirm or deny something as simple as this? How depressing.
Uruguay is on the list. I remember when Uruguayans didn't even need a visa to visit the US.
It's such a small country and an even smaller amount are coming to the U.S. that this would have no material impact. Strange to see them there, but not Argentina (in much worse financial situation).
This is about immigrant visas. Visits are non-immigrant visas.
Well then technically the US wasn't processing their visa's back then either.
An interesting way to make make lots of friends in many countries around the world all at the same time.
There is a German saying:
"Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert lebt es sich ganz ungeniert"
translates to: “Once your reputation is ruined, you can live completely uninhibited.”
Perhaps that was their reasoning when starting two world wars?
Does anyone have the list?
NBC has posted the full list here: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/us-sto...
> A U.S. official confirmed the full list of countries will include Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Grenada is here because the US asked to install radars here for their Venezuelan operation("drug boat interception") and Grenada declined. They also raised the The Level 2 advisory for US citizen.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan? At least they aren’t playing favorites.
Russia I presume is on the list because of geopolitical tensions.
I am not familiar with every country in that list but in my experience, what looks like an anomaly is Morocco, which produces a fairly large elite compared to the size of the country (worked with lots of highly educated / highly paid (and therefore net tax contributing) moroccan nationals). I have hardly worked with any other nationality in that list in my professional life (Bangladesh and Tunisia maybe).
I think this move could harm US in two ways: It will reduce the immigrant diversity which might make the population skew towards the biggest immigrant population such as from India and Mexico which are not in this list. Second it will remove USA as top destination for talent, which will help stop brain drain from these countries causing their local industry to benefit and thereby reducing the edge of US companies.
Why Bhutan is here? It's a peaceful small place.
It has Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh too - some of them makes sense.
But overall this list feels too much.
What did Jordan, Azerbaijan, Macedonia or Uruguay do?
15 replies →
> Afghanistan Iraq
Comparing to US immigration support following the Vietnam war this is shameful.
> Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan
They forgor Tajikistan. Or may be it was just too hard to spell.
1 reply →
> Saint Kitts and Nevis
How many immigrants from an island with less than 50k inhabitants are there?
Also, Cuba surprises me, doesn't the USA usually love to make a big deal about people fleeing big bad evil communists?
3 replies →
Turkmenistan made it through? lol
They just want foreigners to be Indians and the remaining Europeans that will actually want to go to the US.
1 reply →
I'm glad India is not yet included
My guess is they view India as producing an elite immigration (i.e. net tax paying) in large numbers. It is stunning how many successful tech or non-tech executives are Indian born. I haven't seen the full list but I doubt any country on that list gets close, even as a % of population.
1st gen immigrants from India are almost always well-educated, and oftentimes even entrepreneurial. They are among the lowest-risk (with Chinese) immigrants. That is to say, they typically will not contribute to crime, gangs, or public welfare burden. So it's a pretty big difference between those two countries and all the others on the list.
Looking at the list, it appears to be wheather the country or its population is pro-israel or not
Well yeah Trump's big tech friends need cheap H-1B labor.
I don't think tech companies need H-1Bs anymore. From my experience they just set up a subsidiary in India and move all their dev teams there.
3 replies →
I wish it was.
[dead]
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618809
Huh, actually checked first few pages before posting. I wonder why the thread got flagged.
While I didn't flag it, I closed that article without reading after the fourth popup. Thank you for submitting a better source.
It’s bound to generate some heated discussion. A lot of people on that discussion asks the same question. There’s a lack of transparency on why some posts get flagged.
A pause in processing of immigration visas affects the tech industry and is relevant to most of the audience who lives in the US.
3 replies →
Because like most political threads, it will largely consist of people with a crayon-and-coloring-book understanding of geopolitics posting low-effort snipes and trading insults while contributing basically zero to productive discussion.
The most disgusting example of this in recent memory was the Scott Adams death thread, where complimentary comments were being aggressively flagged, and toxic vitriol was being upvoted. It made me finally realize how many joyless, seriously broken people lurk here.
1 reply →
>I wonder why the thread got flagged.
It is off-topic.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is stupid and weakens the U.S. We have benefited so much from the visa program over the history of this country. If the smartest people of Russia and various other countries want to flee and join the U.S., we would be at an advantage.
[flagged]
Genuinely curious: what exactly did we see before?
And what will the luck be needed for?
A very vague comment.
Loving the downvotes on a valid, reasonable question. I'm asking for specifics, isn't that what goes into a good comment here? Or maybe the downvotes are political.
2 replies →
I think you're getting downvotes because, particularly in the AI era, this is very easy to look up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924
2 replies →
It looks like we’re trying to beat Japan, China, South Korea, Italy and Germany in who can age and shrink their population the fastest.
We used to be great shape in regards to the age depopulation bomb.
The presence of Brazil and Thailand on this list stumped me.
The one that I'm at a complete loss for is Uruguay - it is one of the wealthiest countries per capita in South America as well as the least corrupt and most egalitarian... not exactly a huge source of desperate immigrants. Did their government scold ours too harshly for the recent Venezuela shenanigans or something?
Yeah, Uruguay is also surprising.
Well given that the US DHS is posting on social media that it intends to get rid of all 100 million non-white Americans. What exactly did you expect?
what post are you referring to?
1 reply →