Comment by cloche
19 hours ago
Unfortunately, I think this is the point. They want to push the needle so that even legal immigration is restricted or difficult (unless you happen to pay them directly)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/us/politics/trump-legal-i...
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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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Do you happen to remember where this stat came from? I have not heard about it and would be interested in learning more about it
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No, this only makes it so that H1B and others are more at the mercy of their employers.
Maybe you should look into where statistics that are "going around" are sourced from. This seems to be something an anti-immigration lobby cooked to in 2014, which was an artifact of their analysis; they considered workers aged 16-65, and the effect disappeared if you considered workers of all ages.
Trump resurrected it in 2024 to claim that all job growth under Biden had gone to immigrants. It wasn't true then either.
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This is going to be followed up with - DHS creates an “extraordinary” carve out for large tech companies and anyone who pays into Trump’s pockets.
And mid size companies hire foreign workers in foreign countries and accelerate offshoring.
People then talk about how government should restrict offshoring and punish companies while the Orange Man manufactures his phone and caps in China.
Surely a win for the people.
Why don't they just say what they mean, and ban immigration completely? Are they trying to trick most immigrants into leaving voluntarily so they can deny re-entry?
I think big companies still want H1B visas but mostly as indentured servitude.
H1B is transferable. How is it remotely considered "indentured servitude"?
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>> so that even legal immigration is restricted or difficult
like it was simple and easy before that. Now it becomes borderline impossible
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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.
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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.
> with the premise that immigrants are “overburdening” our social services. Most immigrants work.
I just want to point to a flaw in your reasoning.The point is not that immigrants are some special kind of human beings that require more assistance. It is just that immigration can unlike natural population growth, result in arbitrary population growth in a short amount of time.
From that view point, it makes sense that immigrants can overburden the social services, because the latter does not get a chance to accommodate the increased population properly, causing additional suffering to existing population.
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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.
>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?
But that is not what usually happens, right? What usually happens is that some hospital employs a doctor educated from some other country where standard of education is less, instead of someone who is educated from native institutions, because they accept to work for 10x less salary. In this case both the US Society as well as the US educated doctor losses, and the US Hospital and the migrant gains.
Feel free to expand this across socio-economic spectrum..
But if the justification for immigration is prior immigration, is there a stopping point here? Like, after you import a bunch of doctors, is it going to turn out that now you need a bunch of fast food workers, back and forth?
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>Let's say the government can't care for 100M people because of lack of doctors.
Then the government is proven to be severely incompetent and shouldn't be trusted with more migration because it will guaranteed fumble that too. Barring mass migration, populations don't naturally just explode overnight for you to suddenly end up with 100 million people and no doctors.
Governments have all the tools and data at their disposal to see population trends, piramid, emigration, immigration, job statistics, housing, etc. all this data you can use and plot out to determine how many doctors you'll need in the future as the population follows the trajectory and plan training and recruitment of doctors ahead of time so that when population reaches 100 million or 500 million there will be an proportional number of doctors.
So then why didn't the government do this preemptively when they had all the info and levers at their disposal? Could it be because they simply don't give a shit and they only care about winning the next election and not what happens in 20+ years when the population reaches 100 million and there's no doctors? Because they won't be in charge then when the shit hits the fan so they don't care to be preemptive for something that's not a pressing issue now. So then given this, why would you trust these same people with enabling mass migration on your behalf? They clearly don't care about the long term future planning and second order effects of their actions.
> or you could have one of the smartest doctors in the world come be 100M+1. Would you take that?
In which case do 1 million of doctors and only doctors and nothing else but doctors show up at your borders because if that were the case I guarantee you everyone would take them in no questions asked.
That's the classic bait and switch. Merkel also told Germans they're getting "doctors and engineers" in 2015 and the only thing that increases is sexual assaults rates, crime and welfare spending to the point where "doctors and engineers" became a meme phrase for migrant crime in the news.
>That is what legal immigration is meant for.
In theory yes, but just like Germany, in practice the system has always been abused to dupe voters to accept anything other than doctors so that corporations can get cheap labor and landlords more tenants. The overton window has gotten so bad on this topic that if you complain about migrant crime, they'll maliciously ask you back "but what about doctors, you don't want them either?". No, we want doctors, We just want the doors shut to people who aren't doctors, it's really that simple.
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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.
The British who came to this land weren’t “immigrants.” They were settlers. They came to this land, and created a country based on British law, British civic institutions, British political philosophy, and British economics. The Germans and Scandinavians came here for the most part also developed towns and cities that weren’t there before. Immigrants are the people who then moved into those places.
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I notice isn't quite often that the people complaining about immigration are less than the most shining examples of American ingenuity and hustle. They are, very nearly to the one, small, terrified people who seem to think that their position in the social heirarchy is threatened by the relative concentration of melanin in the area (or they are pretending to hold that opinion to manipulate those people to their own ends)
America needs the vigor and drive that immigration brings. Our countrymen have always been immigrants and we were greatest when we stole the most courageous, the smartest, the hardest working from everywhere in the world. We reject that resource today at our own peril.
Do we want to be the UK? Inward-focused ignorant navel gazing and xenophobia are how we get there
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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
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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.
>while your government is actively working on destabilizing the world
I live in Europe, small landlocked country. My government isn't destabilizing anyone but still has some of the highest illegal migration rates per capita in OECD.
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>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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@dang, @tomhow, how about application of HN rules here please?
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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.
My favourite one is second amendment rights are inviolable… unless blacks are owning the guns.
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So what? No one is forcing you to come to a country you deem hostile to foreigners.
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.
I have a family split along classic ideological lines between the northeast and southeast of the US. If you are unfamiliar with conservative's hatred toward immigration, I suggest you travel more.
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> Consider what the policy intends to do rather than blanket-blaming it on hate
It looks like the policy intends to prevent immigration in every way possible, and (along with other policies that have come about recently), kick out as many people as possible; even those that are immigrating here legally (or have already done so).
So, other than a hate for immigrants/immigration, I don't see another possible explanation.
This may not be the intent of some conservative voters, partly because some are plausibly immigration friendly, partly because many movement conservatives have more of a opinion-vibe than a policy position on immigration (among other things).
But conservative voters that don’t want much immigration at all (especially from some places/backgrounds) absolutely exist, and more to the point so does leadership that’s determining policy with that goal in mind.
Perhaps you and your circle reflect the more egalitarian policy-driven view. Commendable if so. But it’s not commendable to deny that conservatism has a xenophobic streak a mile wide right now.
GP seemed to be commenting on the Trump administration, not necessarily individuals of conservative persuasion. The Trump administration diverges materially from traditional conservative doctrine in many ways.
Do you believe the immigrants in Ohio are eating the pet dogs? Because Trump sure does.
> No conservative I know "hates immigrants." Consider what the policy intends to do rather than blanket-blaming it on hate.
If you look at the rhetoric from the Trump people over the years, they absolutely and clearly do hate immigrants, or are doing their best to seem that way. As an example, consider the following quote^[1] from Trump just a few years ago:
> They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country [...] That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.
It's trivial to find more like that. Weird white supremacist-adjacent rhetoric. Equating immigrants with animals. Etc.
American conservatives may not hate immigrants, but they sure love a guy who fervently expresses his hatred and disdain for immigrants every chance he gets. They've voted him into our highest office twice, and immigration was a central pillar of his campaign both times. I fully understand that many people who voted for him did so for reasons besides immigration, but at this point if they aren't willing to disavow him after the catastrophic first year-and-change of his second term then I am done giving them the benefit of the doubt, because there must be some reason they still support him, and at this point it sure isn't his performance on inflation, general affordability, etc.
In fact, looking at the Silver Bulletin charts^[2] as of right now, immigration is the only macro issue they track where his approval isn't in free-fall.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im... [2] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil... (paywalled i think, unfortunately)
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Interesting that nobody on the conservative side hates immigrants but continue to vote on politicians with platforms built upon the hatred of immigrants. It’s almost as if they’re lying.
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I’m tired of people acting so naive past the point of zip-tying entire apartment buildings and building concentration camps. White supremacist manners and politeness are disgusting.
Every conservative I know centers their politics around hating and demonizing immigrants. I blame Youtube and Elon.
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Just FTR conservatives aren't the only ones on the Right
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/left-vs-ri...
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Immigration is not a human right. Countries have a right to restrict legal immigration too.
"Rights" is not the point. You're correct that a country doesn't have to welcome you.
However, the US has been a prosperous country because it welcomes ambitious, hard-working, and skilled people from around the world. They immigrate, build inside the US and for the US, and the US economy grows. This is how the past several decades have worked, and restricting legal immigration would basically destroy this country, its economy, and everything that makes it a great place to live.
I'm a citizen of the US, and I 100% want more smart and hard-working people from around the world to come here and set up shop.
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You also have a right to become homeless, doesn't suddenly mean you're prospering.
On top of this, do you think legal migrants are equal to your fellow country men?
Why else the need for this non sequitur?
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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.
> immigration should be slow enough that they can be thoroughly assimilated before they change American culture
I support your idea. Would you agree that all immigrants that arrived in America after, let's say, 1493, have to leave America and apply for citizenship?
If you don't agree, can you propose another immigration year after which you'd have to leave America again? Would you agree on 1783?
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How are they supposed to assimilate if they have to leave the country to apply?
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> ...They recognize that individual immigrants can be fine but the large-scale flow of immigrants can create undesirable changes
You should also consider the other side of the equation, which is that immigration is the only thing that's keeping the US workforce and total population growing.
The size of the workforce and overall population has real economic, fiscal and quality of life impacts that every American feels on a daily basis and there's a very strong argument to be made that if your interest is in maintaining US wealth and "strength" globally, you don't want to become Japan, South Korea, Italy or Germany.
This is not to say that immigration policy should be made thoughtlessly or recklessly, but I rarely see the staunchest immigration opponents mentioning the stark demographic reality that faces the country.
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I'm not sure why this is being downvoted.
> Saying “you wouldn’t want America to become more like the place you left” is a compelling message to many immigrants.
There is a very very large Indian community that echoes this sentiment (which you can see in very large expat FB groups) and wants to close the doors. They are extremely vocal and supportive of closing immigration, because their children now have to compete with the continuous influx.
Its just humans being human. Everyone wants to look after their own interests and there are lots of special interest groups, each with their own interests.
What a bunch of misleading and gross noise.
Nobody above said people who disagree with them are irrational.
Nobody said immigration should happen faster than anyone can assimilate.
They said preventing people from applying for green cards while on an existing visa will make it much much harder to immigrate legally.
If you think immigrants need more time to assimilate so they don't change your culture but you still think immigration is good then it seems like you'd be against this change. On the other hand if you want to limit immigration to just the wealthy this sounds like exactly the matching policy.
Also, Trump winning the naturalized citizen vote doesn't mean naturalized citizens all think the same way. Even if they all did think the US was perfect and their country of origin was garbage that STILL doesn't mean they think other people from their country are bad, obviously. Being at risk from your government or thinking your government needs to change doesn't imply you think other citizens from your culture are bad.
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I cannot understand why people downvote otherwise civilized posts they disagree with, so I'll upvote.
That said, you are impressively wrong. If someone doesn't agree with me because they choose to believe obviously false or made-up data, that is being irrational.
Is it rational to suppress large-scale studies of vaccination? If someone says "I am against vaccination because there are no large-scale studies", is that rational?
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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.
Does this rule make an exception for European immigrants? No, so the obvious answer to your question is yes they blanket hate all immigrants
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