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 know what, I made a mistake in engaging. The way you moved the goal posts from open immigration to the obligation to provide social services to immigrants above and beyond any services provided to citizens and they way you're combining the concepts of immigrants and refugees tells me it isn't worth having this conversation with you.
If you live in a Red State, it is highly like that my Blue State money pays for your health care, highways, narcan, and a myriad of other transfers.
Like, I feel for you and your situation, but I just don't think it's sustainable for Blue States to keep being patsies by letting the Red States control what happens with Blue State money.
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.
It would have to be an extremely fast influx to cause real problems along those lines. Social services are able to handle a growing case load with growing budget pretty well.
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?
>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.
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
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
>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
Literally nobody brought up skin color in this entire discussion but you and you're using it in bad faith to call other racists. The typical way of liberals and democrat arguments is always rejecting logic and statistics if they make immigration look bad, and focusing on identity politics and skin color to deflect your arguments as racist. Look in the mirror, the racist might be right there if skin color is the first thing you reach for in a discussion.
>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.
And tell me, what happened to the native American Indians when you "courageous, smartest and hardest working" immigrants(my ancestors) moved to America? Where are the descendant of the native Indians today and how many are they and what's their socio-economic situation at the moment in society relative to the immigrants that displaced them? Or look at what happened to Palestinians after they opened their doors to Jewish refugees from Europe since 1945. How are the descendents of those Palestinians faring today? Not so good, huh, barely trying to survive not being genocided by the guests they welcomed in 80 years ago. Every mass migration event in the world has led to violence and demographic displacement of the local population. If those invading your land in high numbers are "smart and hard working" it makes no difference to you if you're getting demographically displaced.
>We reject that resource today at our own peril.
As we should. Why would I want to happen to me what happened to native american Indians or to Palestinians when they accepted foreign invaders(now called migrants)? Just think about it for 3 seconds, why would anyone voluntarily want to bring in their own demise? Except this time around, I'm pretty sure once you're demographically and democratically displaced, you won't get your own minority rights, reservations and casinos by your invaders, because they'll see your suffering as just retribution for the conquest and past sins your ancestors have done over the natives back then. The overton window has already shifted to the point where democrats call and win election based on racist policies of taxing white people more. It'll be like what's happening to the descendents of European immigrants in South Africa and Zimbabwe today. Not pretty.
>Do we want to be the UK? Inward-focused ignorant navel gazing and xenophobia are how we get there
Except UK has had more migration per capita than the US especially since 2020, and their situation has only gotten worse. If you accept more migration then you're guaranteed to end be like the UK.
Why is it that when Americans travel abroad and say how amazing, clean it was and how safe they felt in X country, that country somehow has very low migration rates and draconical laws on visa entry and is hard on crime? Weird how they can't connect the dots on this one.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Alternate take: Consider strategically avoiding exporting your anti-immigration views for visibility here in the US. That way an intelligent administration can take hold that doesn't cause further havoc in the Middle East and accelerate the rate of emigration from there. Deal?
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.
[flagged]
You know what, I made a mistake in engaging. The way you moved the goal posts from open immigration to the obligation to provide social services to immigrants above and beyond any services provided to citizens and they way you're combining the concepts of immigrants and refugees tells me it isn't worth having this conversation with you.
1 reply →
If you live in a Red State, it is highly like that my Blue State money pays for your health care, highways, narcan, and a myriad of other transfers.
Like, I feel for you and your situation, but I just don't think it's sustainable for Blue States to keep being patsies by letting the Red States control what happens with Blue State money.
1 reply →
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.
It would have to be an extremely fast influx to cause real problems along those lines. Social services are able to handle a growing case load with growing budget pretty well.
5 replies →
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?
What?
Population growth can happen with or without immigration.
Also, what? Are you describing a healthy economy?
>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.
So ask for it. Seems like your issue isn't immigration, it is abuse. The recent changes don't do much to fix that, imo.
1 reply →
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 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
>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
Literally nobody brought up skin color in this entire discussion but you and you're using it in bad faith to call other racists. The typical way of liberals and democrat arguments is always rejecting logic and statistics if they make immigration look bad, and focusing on identity politics and skin color to deflect your arguments as racist. Look in the mirror, the racist might be right there if skin color is the first thing you reach for in a discussion.
>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.
And tell me, what happened to the native American Indians when you "courageous, smartest and hardest working" immigrants(my ancestors) moved to America? Where are the descendant of the native Indians today and how many are they and what's their socio-economic situation at the moment in society relative to the immigrants that displaced them? Or look at what happened to Palestinians after they opened their doors to Jewish refugees from Europe since 1945. How are the descendents of those Palestinians faring today? Not so good, huh, barely trying to survive not being genocided by the guests they welcomed in 80 years ago. Every mass migration event in the world has led to violence and demographic displacement of the local population. If those invading your land in high numbers are "smart and hard working" it makes no difference to you if you're getting demographically displaced.
>We reject that resource today at our own peril.
As we should. Why would I want to happen to me what happened to native american Indians or to Palestinians when they accepted foreign invaders(now called migrants)? Just think about it for 3 seconds, why would anyone voluntarily want to bring in their own demise? Except this time around, I'm pretty sure once you're demographically and democratically displaced, you won't get your own minority rights, reservations and casinos by your invaders, because they'll see your suffering as just retribution for the conquest and past sins your ancestors have done over the natives back then. The overton window has already shifted to the point where democrats call and win election based on racist policies of taxing white people more. It'll be like what's happening to the descendents of European immigrants in South Africa and Zimbabwe today. Not pretty.
>Do we want to be the UK? Inward-focused ignorant navel gazing and xenophobia are how we get there
Except UK has had more migration per capita than the US especially since 2020, and their situation has only gotten worse. If you accept more migration then you're guaranteed to end be like the UK.
Why is it that when Americans travel abroad and say how amazing, clean it was and how safe they felt in X country, that country somehow has very low migration rates and draconical laws on visa entry and is hard on crime? Weird how they can't connect the dots on this one.
2 replies →
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.
you are just BS'ing!! native people lived here before that - they had their own version towns.
1 reply →
What? You make a distinction between settlers and immigrants?
Is "invaders" on that list to?
1 reply →
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
[dead]
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.
Alternate take: Consider strategically avoiding exporting your anti-immigration views for visibility here in the US. That way an intelligent administration can take hold that doesn't cause further havoc in the Middle East and accelerate the rate of emigration from there. Deal?
1 reply →
>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.
[flagged]
@dang, @tomhow, how about application of HN rules here please?