Comment by Auracle
3 months ago
I think you'd be surprised at how quickly that sentiment has moved from the far-right to close to the center. People are (rightly, in my opinion) pretty upset at their governments for letting mass migration happen with pretty much only downsides for their actual citizens. People are all about the idea of helping the downtrodden when it's just an ideal, but when they realize it's having negative consequences for them that can easily change.
From a US perspective, just up until a decade ago, it was a sentiment that left-center perspective that people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had.
I was caught quite off-guard by this new "open borders" perspective. It doesn't seem sustainable at all.
Who supports "open borders" and what do they support exactly?
Radiolab (the podcast) did a good series on border policy that was pretty informative.
IIRC, the US-Mexico border was never open, but it was quite porous. People would come to the US, work for a season to make some money, then go home.
Then once border security started to be tightened, leaving was too risky so people would stay leading to a huge increase in the number of undocumented people living in the US.
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Strict borders have only existed for ~100 years, and many were drawn without much regard for the people living there, often constructed with intention of religious segregation, and to maintain europe's global superiority
They run counter to the notion of sovereignty and local agency which we value greatly in the US
The irrationality of strict country borders and heavy migration controls will emerge as a heavy global challenge due to economic and climate migration and aging populations
I don't think we have a good answer for what replaces them, but I don't believe there's enough evidence to state that hasty decisions made after WWI and WWII should forever govern global human freedoms - and we need a better approach than war to renegotiate some of this
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> Who supports "open borders"
It's a very prevalent idea among US immigration activists and left-leaning people.
> what do they support exactly
Generally speaking, that people can move anywhere, if they want to. This article/interview/book covers it in more depth:
https://www.nyclu.org/podcast/the-case-for-open-borders
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It’s shorthand for the policies of the Biden administration, who oversaw an unprecedented level of immigration.
Biden. His policies led to a huge increase in illegal immigration.
Look at the huge jump due to his policies: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20240127_EPC...
The same was not true for Obama, who was actually much better than Bush.
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The current Mayor of New York City and three candidates that just won congressional primaries in the city belong to a political party called Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They will be joining two more DSA members in congress. This is the DSA's platform on immigration:
> Allow workers to freely migrate between countries to seek employment without restrictive immigration controls. Demilitarize the border, end all immigrant detention and deportations, immediate amnesty for all immigrants regardless of current immigration status, and provide access to jobs, labor rights, and social services to all immigrants.
https://platform.dsausa.org/foreign-policy/
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That may be, but everyone is afraid to openly criticize it because they're afraid of being accused as racists.
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> It’s not, it’s only the far-left’s desire
Bernie Sanders (since you're presumably talking about the US) doesn't even support open immigration or H-1Bs, let alone open borders.
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The far left as represented by Joe Biden’s administration.
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nobody wakes up in syria and thinks "drowning in the mediterranean sounds like a fun way to fulfill the far-left's desire." people leave because the alternative is worse, and the alternative being worse is often something the west had a hand in. quick tour of the "desire" pipeline: iraq 2003, invaded over weapons that didn't exist, army disbanded, vacuum becomes ISIS. syria, proxy-funded civil war, 6+ million refugees, the actual engine of the 2015 europe wave. libya 2011, NATO topples gaddafi with no plan for after, failed state and migration corridor. afghanistan, twenty year occupation then an abrupt exit. the migration is downstream of the bombing. you don't get to set the kitchen on fire and then file a complaint about people leaving the building
and that's before the boring stuff that drives migration everywhere and always, wage gaps, no economy, dead farmland, family already abroad, the same reasons europeans showed up in the americas by the tens of millions without anyone filing it under "desire." you can have a real argument about capacity and integration, how many people a system absorbs and how fast, thats legitimate. but "it's the far-left's desire" mistakes the symptom for the cause, the people making that trip have their own reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's domestic politics
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From the Wikipedia article:
> Markus Allard initiated heavy debate in 2025 by claiming that Sweden is "the land for/belongs to the Swedes"
> In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes.
I don't think it's particularly hard to figure out what these are dog whistles for, and equating my vehement disagreement with it as being in favor of "open borders" is absurd.
It doesn't sound much of a dog whistle? More pretty plain spoken. I think Sweden had one of the lowest crime and high trust societies and then admitted a lot of Somali refugees and now has gang warfare and much rape from the guests. Not sure it's that ridiculous to suggest they go home?
I am confused. Are you using multiple HN accounts or something? I was not reply to the saghm account and your saghm account isn't even present up the thread.
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I think, all pretty recently (atleast in the 'States), there's been much news and noise about the abuse and fraud of these systems designed to help the downtrodden.
Now whether that's all true, has always been true, is propaganda...whatever, but it's easy for me to understand why sentiment has been changing as the spotlight is focused more and more on the abuse of the systems as opposed to the benefits.
I also think there's some 'hierarchy of needs' going on here, where as the economy shifts and more and more Americans are struggling to afford housing, groceries, and other necessities, it's easy to feel like you should be putting yourself first over strangers. Combine that with the prior point, and you have a great recipe to build resentment. Selfish, maybe, but I can understand how you get there.
This is NOT to say 'There is no xenophobia' or anything...racism in general is alive and well in the USA... but I have pretty sound-minded people around me starting to echo this mindset, and this is my best understanding of what's been brewing.
For what it's worth, the most effective propaganda is that which reinforces latent biases.
Humans en masse are selfish, self-serving, and tribal, so it's incredibly easy to believe that there is massive abuse of social services like SNAP/EBT, those delivering services are incompetent, and that we should investment more in fraud reduction.
However, the reality is that the US spends $3.75 for each $1 of fraud discovered. And, "fraud" includes clerical errors made by the government, so the actual ROI of enforcement is even lower.
So much of the propaganda -- "immigrants steal benefits paid for by hardworking US taxpayers, so we should ramp up enforcement spending to make more room for [white] citizens" is designed to simply reinforce our biases because it's just so darned believable to a cynical and tribal people.
In reality, spending more on benefits enforcement just loses taxpayers more money while cutting more US citizens off from benefits they both need and are eligible for. It results in the opposite of its stated goal and this is well known to any policymaker.
So if saving taxpayer money, and punishing those guilty of fraud, isn't the actual objective of all this toxic propaganda, you have to ask yourself what is.
every $$ spent on this "abuse" is a $$ not spent on tax evasion while giving an impression of "finally someone is doing something" and the $$ that could be made in plugging corporate tax evasion by gar outrun the $$ saved on the no income side.
in Germany we talk 350Mio€ vs 10Bio€ y/y
the us numbers will have a similar ratio
Comparing the US and Sweden, it's also useful to know that the proportion of refugees accepted by these two countries is wildly different. Sweden has historically taken in many refugees (including draft dodgers from the US). In 2015 (an outlier) they accepted rouhgly 1 refugee (163k) for every 60 people (~9.4m) in the country. At its peak in 2024, the US admitted 100k refugees, significantly fewer than the Swedish peak. The impact of refugees is much more visible (also in budgetary allocations) in Sweden than the US because of this difference.
Why are you just comparing refugee numbers? That's incredibly disingenuous. A very large portion of the US's population is here illegally, and it would be significantly larger if we didn't have birthright citizenship.
They're effectively the same thing.
Migration in my part of Europe (Holland) has largely been workers for jobs the Dutch won't do. These people are abused as a sort of semi-serf labour mainly in the farming sector.
Some groups are a big net benefit to our (looking at the income the group benefits / social support costs) and others slight net negative. But once you take the economy into account it's positive.
It has been shown repeatedly in multiple studies (you might have heard a very prominent one from Denmark) that Non-European/Non-Western migrants are a net loss for the economy during their lifetime and also their children are a drag on the economy. Meaning the money spent by the government to support them is never made back (from the working) during their whole lifetime.
So no, most migrant groups are not a big benefit. Especially considering that this is only taking the economy into account. When you take into account the societal disruption and anti-values that they bring with them, then its clear how negative they have been for Europe.
> largely been workers for jobs the Dutch won't do.
The Dutch were happy to do those jobs 50 years ago.
After every single "jobs the natives won't do", there's an unspoken "for the dogshit pay we offer."
No they weren't, 50 years ago is when they were working very hard to get people in from Turkey/North Africa to do those jobs because they wanted to pay peanuts and the natives had options.
These are all hyper exploitative industries based on capital exploiting the poor. Which is something we both agree on.
You'd have to stop importing the things you're not paying people enough to produce, otherwise your own products will be more expensive than the next nation over that has no qualms about poor pay for agriculture or whatever.
It all sounds great until the last 40+ years goes away, with the apples year round and bananas, etc.
Going back to just what you can produce in your country is gunna be a rude awakening for billions.
People wouldn’t be willing to pay those prices for food, so they’d just end up importing it all.
You could force people to accept the low wages by removing all welfare but that has its own problems.
I don't see neo feudalism as a positive.
Immigrants are a timeless scapegoat for the problems faced by the working class.
At least from a US perspective, the problem is that the downsides are the deliberate policy goals of the political class. Immigration was but one tool used to achieve them, and now the immigrants themselves serve as a convenient visceral scapegoat for releasing the grassroots political pressure. We finally built enough political capital to do something about the economic vise most Americans find themselves in, only for it to be squandered on performative vice signalling.
There’s expected to be 1 billion climate refugees by 2050. What will be this factions answer to that? Bullets?
What is a climate refugee?
A refugee who is leaving their home country due to direct or indirect impacts of climate change. Think a devastating flood or something.
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Yes. Isn't that how most factions answer that? Even most of the ones that are nominally left.
How can you be sure the opinion moved to the center and not that the center moved to the right?
Migration is all a distraction anyway. Brown people existing doesn't hurt you. Whenever you think they drive up rents or whatever, that has nothing to do with the brown people, that has everything to do with the system that sets rents.
"Brown people existing doesn't hurt you"
Yes, existing doesn't hurt. But when you import mass amounts of people who don't talk your countries language, have no intention of learning, and have no intention of getting a job, and on top of it are intensely religious supporting a religion which is antithetical to your values, then it DOES hurt.
Western Europe has simply allowed too many Muslim immigrants in than they could ever successfully have integrated. Now Europe is full of ghettos of Muslim immigrants who don't get jobs, don't learn the languages, and sap resources which the countries cannot afford.
Note: this isn't about being racist or not, it's just common sense. There is a limit of how many immigrants a country can take, financially and culturally.
So is the religion the biggest problem or just a symptom?
I'd agree immigration must have limits and don't recall any prominent voices calling for unlimited migration or even limitless compassion.
Being a union, one can hope the load of migrants fleeing wars and violence would be spread among all the states, in proportion to their ability. Economic migration is a more complex matter since everyone benefits from it up to some threshold. Where it crosses into an undeniable problem is subjective. If it negatively affects me personally then it's bad, especially if I can overlook all the benefits I accrued (like lower prices of commodities and services).
Yes, increasing demand for housing and increasing supply of labor definitely does nothing for both salaries and housing prices
Perhaps those problems have other causes.
This may shock you, but not all numbers greater than zero are equal. Something might cause a price to go up by some amount, but something else might make it go up by an even larger amount, so stopping that first thing might not stop it from still going up higher than people want.
What happens to supply of housing and demand for labor, and why?
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Do you resent it when babies are born?
> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.
Why did you feel the need to say "Brown people" instead of migrants? Are you trying to play the racist card? Poles are white and when they migrated en mass to Britain they were also making locals very unhappy.
Ironically most of the polish I know who came to Britain returned home to Poland for better prospects.
Adjusting for purchasing power parity, GDP per capita in Poland isn't far behind the UK.
We all know they are not going to expel Canadians.
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> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.
BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764
> How can you be sure the opinion moved to the center and not that the center moved to the right?
I'm pretty sure he meant that what used to be a far-right view is now considered mainstream. Which is true, since even the EU Parliament has now begun passing laws vs migrants, and governments all across Western Europe are now taking steps against migrants.
> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.
Correct, and I'm one of them. Unfortunately some abhorrent elements of our culture, traditions and values hurt erstwhile peaceful societies.
Supply and demand economic denialism is dangerously widespread.
What is supply and demand economic denialism?
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> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.
In Sweden, brown people are heavily overrepresented in violent crime, so many people are getting hurt.
Obligatory disclaimer: the problem is not caused by skin color, but by a complex mess of poverty, lack of opportunity, societal attitudes within and against immigrant groups, etc. But voters hearing about a steady drum beat of robberies, rapes, drive by shootings (yes, in Sweden!) don't really care.
Culture's a thing too. If you admit a bunch of Somali warlords they may keep behaving like Somali warlords irrespective of the other factors you mention.
Perhaps voters aren't being offered the tools to solve the root problems?
Scapegoating entire skin colors for systemic failures doesn't seem like it's going to make things better for anyone.
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That's how populism works and people act if they don't understand that manipulation.
Considering the history of labor unions and their support for the banning of Asian citizenship in the US, I think the right frame is that migration support / opposition has something to do with other things but not entirely. There are only a few ways to come to the US and the employment-based approach is probably the most widely used by unconnected foreigners seeking to live in the US and that pathway is intended to be abolished by Senator Bernie Sanders with no replacement planned. I think it's hard to describe that senator as particularly right-wing.
Likewise, it was a labour union in Georgia that lobbied to get Koreans deported from the US. It should be unsurprising that those who hold to the Lump of Labor economic school should oppose immigration and that's quite popular among the left-wing.
they can exist @ home
Where's home?
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Religious flamewar is not allowed on HN so please don't post like this here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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„Letting mass migration happen „ is such a fallacy in and if itself.
Sentiment hasn't moved from far-right to the center. If it feels like that to you, it sounds like your perspective changed because you moved from the center to the far-right.
It does appear that the Overton Window has shifted far to the right on immigration, such that far-right views are mainstream enough to be highly visible, and found in representatives of formerly or otherwise centrist parties. I consider this shift deplorable, but it's clear that it has happened.
I think it's phrasing and the phrase "damn parasites" that makes it far-right.
The idea of changing immigration policies is not unique to any political party. However the quote isn't that, it's trying to stir up an angry us/them reaction at a large group based on national/racial lines. Also "damn parasites" is somewhat dehumanizing (whether you apply it to billionaires or immigrants).
You mean the Overton window or whatever has drifted right.
Nationalism is a right wing concept.
We were sold one thing and got another.
What were you sold and what did you get?
To be fair, it already mostly exists.
Its 4chan politically incorrect. https://boards.4chan.org/pol/
And yeah, its as terrible as you can possibly imagine. And then even more so.
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No. That sentiment didn't "move toward the center".
What happened is that the far-right -- and, lets not use euphemisms like "the far right" here, we're talking about fascists and literal Nazis (ethno-fascism is Nazism) -- have successfully taken control of much of our mass media. They've also more or less captured the government of one of the world's super powers. Those two things put together have allowed them to make their views appear mainstream.
This is exactly what happened during the 1920s and 1930s prior to World War II. And similarly, you were finding Nazi views expressed openly and proudly and being given a veneer of respectability. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...)
But they are no less extreme now than they were then. They are still fascist and Nazi views. And they still ought to be abhorrent to anyone who considers themselves a decent human being.
It's beyond incredible that anyone thinks that the far right has taken control of the mass media. It's clearly the left that has control of most of the media, which makes sense. People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left.
Have you looked at media ownership recently?
The days of a scrappy newspaper or local market newscast are over. Reframe your statement from "People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left" to "People who own media firms tend to be on the right. People who set journalistic standards for their outlet tend to be on the right."
Which specific mass media are controlled by the left?
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Another point of the Rwandan genocide that's important to remember, is the party who eventually committed the genocide spent months talking about how the other side was about to use extreme violence and they were really the victim. This allowed them to preemptively use violence "in self defense."
Highly recommend the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast on it - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-lions-led-by-donkeys-podc...
You're getting downvotes, but Rwanda has become a textbook study of how racist stresses were amplified to create the conditions for a genocide.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135902