Comment by abalashov

Yes and one step further: it is attention, ultimately to extract wealth.

Trump is a distractor and can make a whole country forget about <insert recent insanity>. Passing a judge is a minor detail here.

Of course it is stupid to talent-leak your country but he just needs you to forget about $LATEST_SCANDAL. That's the value for him. Trump doesn't care about the future of US.

And distracting does not take skill. It only takes a mind poisoned to the core. He will throw anything in his chaos machine to extract wealth. And US has an endless supply of those juicy valuables and values that you can sacrifice and shed.

Let's see what next week has in store!

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I think big companies still want H1B visas but mostly as indentured servitude.

These hypotheticals tend to accidentally reveal a disturbing worldview in the way they treat immigration as a natural phenomenon rather than people with agency of their own. It's dehumanizing.

For example, where does that 99,999,999th person sleep on the night they arrive in this country? What is their immediate plan? How and why did they come here? Your hypothetical has them almost emerging from the ether as an inherent problem rather than a person making an active decision to move to somewhere they think they will have a better life. If we stop providing them a better life, they'll stop coming. But the primary path to doing that is making life worse for everyone already here and none of us should want that.

You lost me in the first sentence, with the premise that immigrants are “overburdening” our social services. Most immigrants work. Most immigrants come here specifically to work. They pay taxes. Immigrants who commit social security fraud have taxes deducted from their income that they will never collect in the form of social services. Most of the immigrants receiving public assistance (like, for example, asylum seekers) are doing so because our government doesn’t allow them to work, even if they want to. The solution is to let immigrants work.

Let's say the government can't care for 100M people because of lack of doctors. Now they could train one over 10 years, or you could have one of the smartest doctors in the world come be 100M+1. Would you take that?

Now expand that across socio-economic spectrum (not enough plumbers, teachers, AI experts, researchers etc). That is what legal immigration is meant for.

That’s like saying the free pizza parties are draining the company’s resources and so we need to cut them.

The pizza parties ARE indeed draining the company, but it’s so minor and ultimately spending your big brain on cutting pizza parties is diverting attention from your real problems that led to this point.

I don’t support illegal immigration but it has little to do with our current major problems. It’s just a political tool to distract the voter.

One reason is population growth. Our current system is based on the assumption of an ever growing labor force to fund things like social security, medicare, fund our massive debt, and evrything else we want the government to spend on. In their current form, these systems will break down in the face of population decline. Since existing Americans are having fewer kids and trending downward, immigration is the only way to sustain the model.

This doesn't neccisarily.mean the is the best, or even desireable, way to structure society, but I also think the political system is dysfunctional to the point major change is currently impossible

I didnt down vote you by the way. Just throwing out a counter point to consider

Immigration is a net positive for social services, housing, childcare, healthcare, etc. over the long term. This country was built by immigrants.

There can be negative effects with large inflows locally, but that's a policy failure that can be addressed.

I have a habit of upvoting attempts at civilized argument, so I upvote once again.

For the "people who understand supply/demand", why use "want a limit" language? What you actually mean is "want a lower limit, from Y to X".

It's flat-out amazing to me that you blame immigrants for the problems of the American medical system -- which are entirely political in cause and financial in nature.

>Clearly not for curious discourse.

This isn't "curious discourse", whatyou're doing is JAQing off (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions)

immigrants don't need to be 'taken care off' because legal immigrants in the US are net social contributors (in fact particularly large ones because the US government didn't subsidize their upbringing and education).

Five minutes on Google would have told you this, that is why "folks I'm just asking questions" gets downvoted, everyone can see through these pseudo gullible provocations

You can't complain immigrants are flooding your boarder while your government is actively working on destabilizing the world. Such arguments are extremely malicious and hence why everyone is downvoting you.

You want a hermitical state, it has to go both ways. You lock yourself in, but also stop fucking around with military and non-military interventions on every contanent on earth.

>it was already downvote bombed in less than 10 minutes with no counter argument

Your submissions to HN evince a pattern that suggests engagement with you would likely fall on deaf ears.

The only people over burdening the system are billionaires demanding corporate welfare while denying the same welfare to civilians.

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Depends on your definition of "immigrants".

Sure, you might think of it as "people with citizenship of another nation."

But I suspect it's more along the lines of "people who don't look like me."

White Afrikaaners are welcome (we'll even invent persecution and call them refugees), but folk from elsewhere (ie actual refugees), um, less welcome.

The trope about "culture assimilation" also comes up. It's OK for Irish and Italian immigrants to keep their culture, adding to the melting pot, but Mexicans and Africans less so

And sure, lots of people are friendly to "the immigrant they know" while at the same time being very against "immigration". One need look no further than the last few elections to see this in action.

As a rather conservative foreigner in the US I find this to be a very presumptive statement. We've made good friends, conservatives and liberals alike - we're people, that's what matters not the policitcal orientation. No conservative I know "hates immigrants." Consider what the policy intends to do rather than blanket-blaming it on hate.

Immigration is not a human right. Countries have a right to restrict legal immigration too.

Thinking that immigration should be slow enough that they can be thoroughly assimilated before they change American culture isn’t “hating immigrants.”

Many of the people doing this are themselves children of immigrants. They recognize that individual immigrants can be fine but the large-scale flow of immigrants can create undesirable changes.[1] Don’t assume people are irrational just because they don’t agree with you.

[1] Trump narrowly won the naturalized citizen vote. Saying “you wouldn’t want America to become more like the place you left” is a compelling message to many immigrants.

Non-European origin immigrants, presumably? Like are they against Irish people coming over in small numbers? Just wondering if you’re actually blanket saying they hate immigrants, I hadn’t heard about that.

>> It's also a bit sad how every generation of immigrants turn around and pull the ladder up behind them.

This is a real head scratcher. Some of the biggest Trump supporters I interact with at work are people of color, from countries the adminstration has labelled "shitholes" - they would never be allowed to visit - let alone immigrate - today. I guess once you get yours everyone else can go to hell.

They called Miller out as one aspect, not the totality of the problem.

There will be plenty of blame to go around when the trials start.

>> put into a literal jail on their return to the USA.

You'd be lucky today if that literal jail was IN the USA.

If you end up in “jail” for leaving the country on a green card then clearly you made a mistake.

The process is very straightforward - without advanced parole or a valid visa you can’t come back in.

Or if you’ve violated immigration or criminal law you run the risk of being detained.

But that’s how the system is supposed to work.

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No, I'm aware of the difference. I just wanted to write this down as 'being told you cannot do something' is not something the typical American likes. Yet, when going through immigration, it's common...

A “non-immigrant” is everything under 8 USC 1101(a)(15): https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1...

Includes H and J. The letters used to refer to those visas comes from the subsections under 1101(a)(15)

It specifically lists H1B as non-immigrant visa on that page, so if you are here working at Google you must leave the country.

If you read the actual policy (it’s on the ISCIS website), it specifically says dual-intent visa are appropriate for AOS in the US.

This is a pretty broad swath of immigrants - H visa (worker and family), L1 (corporate transfer and family) and K1/3 (spouses of US citizen or green card holder).

What this limits are the truly temporary visitors - tourists, students, etc

My understanding is that the dual-intent visa categories have change-of-status rules written into law.

The law doesn't describe reality, though. The so-called "non-immigrant" visas are really not that. "Non-immigrant" has a specific legal meaning, and like many legal terms, they don't match up with what you might consider everyday usage of the term.

And even if they were truly non-immigrant, who cares? If someone comes to the US, does good, useful work, and stays out of trouble, I want them to be given the opportunity to stay permanently. You may not, perhaps, but, well... I don't care.

The law is ever changing and is not always a reflection of what's right, moral, ethical, etc.

You have plenty of historical examples of this, most prominently slavery being legal.

It's ok to defend a thing, but just because the law says so is very rarely a good argument.

it's a specific claim, they want to set up the process to be so onerous that immigrants self-deport

It's shorthand for 'emotional argument'

That's not true. If I'm in Japan on a work visa, for example, I don't need to leave the country to apply for permanent residency. And Japan is not a country famously welcoming of immigration.

You’re going to need to strongly source this one, sounds completely made up.

>a subset of people that don't want immigrants at all.

Does anyone have data on what this percentage is? Seems like it could be 55%:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i...

That’s a strawman. There’s wide gulfs between “I want very permissive immigration à la Canada” to “I want the US immigration system as it was under previous administrations” to “I want no immigrants”. For example, I personally want the standards for H1-Bs to be a lot higher, but would willingly grant substantially more immigrant visas to top academics and workers under EB1, EB2 and EB3 visas.

That's the only conclusion I can see.

We’re going for round 3 of jingoist isolationist Americans not understanding how the world or their own culture and government works.

Wonder if we’ll get a third world war that we stay out of until halfway through and then pile on at the end.

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This is what is broken. The current system is archaic and circuitous. It also performs a legal fiction around non-immigrant visas functionally being a path to permanent immigration.

We should increase the number of immigrant visas and make it straightforward what the process is to get a green card like what one would see in other countries like Canada and Australia.

Meanwhile, non immigrant visas should remain non immigrant and very restricted criteria for changing status (eg. marriage) without reapplying abroad.

That's interesting. European countries do have immigrant visas, and I think Canada does too. (As in, a visa that's issued for the sole purpose of letting you immigrate.)

>> excluding a few obvious exceptions like marriage to an American.

this is a good example, because let's say someone is here on a student visa or temp work visa, falls in love and gets married. without the ability to adjust their immigration status they now have to leave the country - probably for years - to apply and hopefully get a greencard. Good luck making that marraige work.

The US has three classes of immigrant visa. See the bottom of the state department visa resources page.

https://www.state.gov/visas/

Spousal one? I got it outside the US

Thankfully, malevolence, bad faith, and crime are unsustainable as governmental motivations.

Unfortunately, they do stir the populace in a cadence long enough that prior examples are are only fragments of memory.

More unfortunately, however, is that the time it takes to heal from such governments is similar to said cadence.

Why are you looking at the law from the viewpoint of the foreign worker? Obviously what they want is a quick and easy path to citizenship. But they don’t get a vote.

The question is what was the intention of the H1B program when the law was enacted by duly elected legislators? It was never sold to the public as a path to permanent residency. It certainly wasn’t sold to the public as a system where each H1B granted would lead to citizenship, followed by bringing several family members with them through uncapped family reunification visas.

Which is also the only way that makes sense... Permanent residency but you have to be... Outside the country? lol

The logic of it is that if your visa renewal is rejected they don’t have to catch you and deport you. You already deported yourself.

Having to go abroad when a visa/PR has already been granted is totally pointless. Green cards are mailed to your home in the US right now.