Yuck. It's like the perfect marriage of taking any remaining humanity out of law enforcement and add tons of bottomless greed to it. It's so very Peter Thiel-ish.
I'd love to say I wish them well, but I hope this company goes out of business due to a public outrage. But they'll always find someone to sell to, like authoritarian governments, and make money hand-over-fist.
From your words I understand you don’t see compatible border patrol or border control with “humanity” and nothing said will change your mind.
Are you aware of any country without any border control laws or laws to regulate the movements of people? I am only aware of countries who cannot enforce their own laws, and for sure I am for sure not speaking about international agreements between countries which is a total different topic.
I said it takes the humanity out if it. I am not, nor have I ever been against, having a border patrol. You’re putting words in my internet mouth.
It’s how you approach the idea of border patrol. I don’t know the ratios but border enforcement probably splits their time between smugglers of things and smugglers of people (or just Individuals crossing).
This fully AI based border-patrol system could work well if you see the border patrol problem as a "bringing shit in that we never want, under any circumstance" scenario, so for drugs this could work well. (although it'll just be yet another cat and mouse game, with the AI taking even longer to learn)
But the other side of the coin is the people side. It's more complicated. With people, it isn't just "we never want, under any circumstances" – there are many questions to be asked. We want to apprehend the actual smugglers for trafficking people, even if we want to deport the actual migrants, we want to properly file them, make sure they aren't malnourished, and send them back safely. Is an AI going to do all that? No. That's the problem with this solution.
I'm sorry that this doesn't fit into a binary view of "he must hate this totally AI border control, so he must be for open borders!"
Binary view? Hate? what are you speaking about? I am just pointing to you the fact that you are mixing current politics with a principle of law and order which derived from any civilization. The conclusions you extract from it are all yours.
You should listen Palmer's interview in the podcast someone suggested in this entry. There is no humanity in the security arc or control of any airport, or in the form of any bureau and, even if there is a lot of margin for improvement, and there are methods effective than others, I do not believe that by denying these "control elements" their role and purpose will just fade away as if the civilization never needed them in the first place.
As soon as you recognize we need to have these controls in place, why not make them more effective? The humanity towards infractors of a bureaucratic process is regulated in a separate term, and it should not be left to a physical exam to the ones who can skip a control. And regarding humanity, these methods do not imply the judgement of a human person on individuals, it just will multiply the effectiveness.
As said I did not want to get into the current political discussions on the topic, just to remark that these things exist because they are necessary and negating them is negating the reality of the world.
I say it's Thielish because it's an extremely audience-focused business without much competition because potential competitors are ideologically opposed to entering the market. Something else like this which comes to mind is gene editing or designer babies as a service, but this would have the opposite level of support from the current government regime.
You can't post like this here regardless of how strongly you disagree with someone or dislike them. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and using HN as intended? They include Be kind. That includes being kind even when others are not being kind.
This is indeed a really great podcast. I'm sympathetic to his points that 1) the US is falling behind and 2) that in a strong democracy policy plays a big role in shaping the technology.
Is the US regarded as a "strong democracy"? Surely some can argue just how strong, especially with the effective 2-party system.
It gets repeated a lot, the US being the greatest democracy and all, but that doesn't make it true per se.
Yeah, between the entrenched 2-party system, Citizen's United, gerrymandering, voter suppression (voter-ID laws, the war-on-drugs combined with felons not being eligible to vote, etc.), the politization of the supreme court and the complete dysfunction of Congress, I'd classify the US as a 'failing' democracy. Not 'failed' mind, you but well on its way. I'd put it about 2-3 democratic dysfunctions behind Turkey and 4-6 behind Russia.
The submitted title ("Palmer Luckey's new startup, a virtual US/Mexico wall, valued $1B by A16Z") broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." We've reverted it to the original now.
Submitters: Rewriting titles has a massive effect on discussion, so please don't do that unless the original title is misleading or linkbait.
Those are massively subjective concepts, especially in the modern political climate. Have you considered adding examples or further discussing this point in the guidelines?
There are zillions of case studies in the moderation comments we've posted over the years. I wouldn't add much to the guidelines because if we make them too long, they won't get read.
Many things about moderation are massively subjective. We do our best to be fair, and in most cases the guidelines provide good guidance.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone using the internet for long to identify what's flamebait.
If you need examples just look at the political sections of Twitter and Reddit where all sense of civility and intellectual debate has been abandoned. Or look at the headlines of clickbait news sites like Buzzfeed and Vice which target that demographic and do the opposite. There's no shortage of examples kicking around.
It should be for a lot of people. But, for more than enough people, it’s not. And, even if it is obvious, the drama it promotes even among the knowledgable is a big negative I’d prefer to avoid on HN.
Well dang is an expert in it by now and I 100% trust him to make the right choices. Not everyone has to 'get' it and if there was any serious problems they'd bubble up.
While that would be nice, I don't feel like in this scenario it would have mattered at all. The actual title of the article is pretty clearly neither misleading nor a linkbait.
Anduril is one of the few startups today I believe is solving a core problem in the United States' institutions - Defense industry dysfunction. It costs American taxpayers billions of dollars on weapons that under-perform at best and endanger American lives at worst.
Palmer correctly identifies some of the incentive issues with current defense contracts. Rather than working on contracts pre-defined by the DoD, which puts the US Treasury on the line for all cost over-runs and entangles project planning in Pentagon political intrigue, Anduril R&Ds technologies on their own dime, to their own specs, before trying to make a sale. High-risk, but one way to do it right today. He explains his vision more in this interview: https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1087803794266550272
Anduril has a nice model. It's not unique to Anduril, but it is nice. Most R&D places with eventual infusion / sale to acquisition partners start with IRaD funding and move on to small scale demos and sales.
I can't comment on the major acquisitions like fighter jets and aircraft carriers, but this feels natural and familiar when it comes to these advanced, small-scale, systems-level engineering projects.
> a core problem in the United States' institutions - Defense industry dysfunction.
You missed a word.
But to answer your specific suggestion for No. 1: No, I don't think Super PACs are near the Top 10 issues facing the United States' institutions. They might be in the Top 100.
There’s a lot of conflicting incentives here, and PACs are definitely part of the problem. Luckey is, in my view, helping with just one of those issues (stagnation of innovation in the defense industry). Unfortunately I don’t see how he avoids employing, you guessed it, PACs to break the mold.
“I felt like there were not nearly enough high-tech companies working on defense problems in a way that was more similar to the Silicon Valley model of innovation rather than a traditional defense contract.” (Luckey)
Is this true (not enough companies applying "SV innovation model" to "defense problems")?
A bit of a tangent, but how is the US/Mexico border a "defense" issue? The Mexican military is not planning an invasion. I am unaware of any Latin American terrorist groups threatening the USA.
I am not trying to be pedantic here, but words are important. If the US/Mexico border is a defense issue, then it should be entirely militarized?
Andruil would be most accurately described as a surveillance company, would it not?
Honestly, it's just a subtle misunderstanding due to how Anduril's product path blurs the lines between the products they sell now, and the structure of their company & goals long-term.
Long-term, Anduril wants to be a defense co. that bids for and wins contracts with the Department of Defense and challenges the monopolies of Lockheed Martin et al. To do this, they had to find an MVP that let them develop technology & make money in a way that could be leveraged toward that goal in the future.
Border security works well for this, because a lot of the software & hardware they will build here is dual-use for defense and border security. Furthermore, selling technology to the border patrol is probably the closest sales problem in the world to selling to the U.S. military - Same regulatory framework, sales cycle, Congressional lobbying landscape, even product review. It's a stepping stone to selling full-blown defense tech, hence the mish-mash of terms.
Yeah, surveillance is definitely the more accurate description, buy borders are always a defense issue. In this case the US has a vested interest in knowing who is coming into the country and making sure they are processed through official channels and catch incidents where that isn't happening. The idea that migrants and caravans are somehow massively harboring terrorists may be a bit of hysteria, but that doesn't mean there aren't still national security issues at stake on the border.
It's long, so here's the relevant part quoted at length:
>
There’s an anthropologist friend of mine, a guy called Steve LeBlanc–he runs the Peabody Museum in Harvard–who wrote a book once called “Constant Battles” about pre-civilized human beings and how they actually lived. Not the fantasy version, where they lived in, you know, the Garden of Eden and wore flowers in their hair, but the real ancient world where food shortages, including ones that you could die from, were a regular occasion. And his rule of thumb is “people always raid before they starve.”
“Raid the neighbours.”
Now, it doesn’t automatically/inevitably follow that large civilized society will do the same as small hunter-gatherer bands, but it’s the same people, you know. So the military think that there’s going to be a lot of work for them. I mean I can’t discern, and I don’t see how you would separate their motives into the ‘good ones’–they just want to be ready to deal with trouble–and the ‘bad ones’–they’re looking for a justification for their existing budget and the present justifications are getting a bit thread-worn so we need some new ones…I can be quite cynical about this on occasion; but I have taken my pills today.
But they’re right. That–I mean, you talk to the US military for example, their, I’d say, obsession in the planning. I mean, not your average grunt or his, you know, the “2nd platoon officer” but in the thinking parts of the military: the obsession with Mexico. Because there’s a 2,000 mile/3,000 kilometers (I’m in Canada) 3,000 kilometer border between Mexico and the United States. There are a hundred million people in Mexico, another 50 million south of them in Central America; the farms there are going to dry up and blow away.
There’s already a well established pattern: when you’re in deep trouble and you can’t feed your family, head north. There is an existing arrangement on the US border which might be described as “catch some, let some go.” I mean it’s–it’s not really fortified. It looks pretty impressive in the cities where people can see it, but if you drive 10, 15 kilometres out of town east or west along the border, you’re down to three strands of barbed wire and a dirt patrol track with a vehicle down it every 4 hours. It is actually meant to allow lots of people to get through because cheap illegal labor is what keeps American agro-business profitable, and the reason that it’s cheap is because the workers are illegal and they can’t bargain. So there is a reason for all this–though not one we can speak of in front of the children. This provides a safety valve for Mexicans, the Mexican state. It provides cheap labor for American farmers and, you know, the flow is maybe half a million a year, a million a year, and half of them go home again after the harvest. We can deal with that–there’s 300 million people in the United States; drop in the bucket. But try 5 million a year, because things have fallen apart and there’s no food in Mexico.
What do you do at 5 million a year? Well, the US Army’s convinced that the Congress will tell them to close that border–really close it–and they can do that! It’s absolute nonsense–though you’ll hear it often enough in the States, they go: “Ooh, I dunno…2,000 miles of border; we could never shut that–”
Bullshit.
Iron Curtain! You remember the Iron Curtain?
But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you’re willing to kill people.
Admitting and training 5M new American people per year could be precisely the workforce solution the US needs in order to solve the looming long term care crisis we will have on our hands when the baby boomers transition from elderly to frail.
What if the first stop across the border wasn't a detention center but rather a LTC training facility?
Yes there is the language problem, but how many jobs in LTC require fluency?
Yes there is the fact that some places where the LTC crisis is hitting hard like New England and the rust belt are far away from the border, but perhaps families are desperate/poor enough to relocate? Aren't some retiring near the border for cost reasons (tax) already?
>>>A bit of a tangent, but how is the US/Mexico border a "defense" issue?
Border security is THE most basic, fundamental responsibility of national defense. The US has just spent so frickin' long with benign powers on its land borders, and so focused on global expeditionary operations, that its border security efforts have atrophied. That said, national defense is now an over-arching term that includes a mix of law enforcement and military responsibilities and tasks. Note that securing our airspace "borders" largely falls onto Combat Air Patrols conducted by the various state Air National Guards, typically flying F-16s or F-15s.
>>>I am unaware of any Latin American terrorist groups threatening the USA.
Maybe not Latin American ones, but Al Qaeda just called for renewed attacks on the US in the wake of the 9/11 anniversary.[1] We KNOW that illegal aliens are crossing into the US traveling from as far as west/central Africa. [2] West Africa already has an Islamic terrorism problem.[3] From a risk assessment/risk management perspective, it is wise to allocate resources to reduce the chance of AQ or ISIS agents sneaking across our southern border, which leaks like a sieve.
>>>If the US/Mexico border is a defense issue, then it should be entirely militarized?
I think most major countries handle it as a national-level law enforcement responsibility, but sometimes there are still significant military forces involved.
As a point of comparison, China uses Army forces for border security, in addition to other agencies.[4] Russia's primary border force is a law-enforcement organization.[5]
It's not corruption, it's basic resource allocation. Why would we want to dedicate equal amounts of manpower to both borders, when only one of them accounts for the overwhelming majority of unlawful crossings?
It's not a defense issue, it's a law enforcement issue. Which is why law enforcement agencies (ICE, CBP) are the ones enforcing laws against illegal entry. The military is generally only mobilized at the border when large groups are poised to cross the border in numbers large enough that ICE and CBP don't have the manpower to stop it.
Because there is significantly less illegal immigration coming from those borders. Responsible resource allocation involves employing your assets where they will net the greatest utility.
Let's say 1 Anduril Widget would stop 10 border crossings/year on the southern border, but only 1/yr on the Canadian border. If I have 100 widgets, allocating them all to the southern border is the objectively superior employment of my assets. Only if my marginal utility per widget drops to preventing <1 crossing per year in the SOUTH should I even CONSIDER shifting resources to the northern border.
Why does DoD care about illegal immigration? Mexico is not about to invade. This is useless to their mission.
If they are going to build it and hand it of to border patrol, then Congress should fund it with the border patrols budget. Which they won’t, because this is as useless as a physical wall. So funding it with the money taxpayers allocated for the DoD is the definition of corruption.
Those people are quite well accounted for, right (IIRC they take your photos and fingerprints when you cross the border, presumably also for visa application). Completely different from an illegal "new-immigrant" that crosses the border unnoticed.
No it’s not, the most basic responsibility of national defense is stopping invading armies.
Or maybe it’s dealing with the other nuclear powers.
Stopping people coming over the border to be residents is probably not in the top 10 of national defense priorities.
Honestly, as a matter of policy I don’t think it’s even something we are trying to do since immigration is so good for GDP, and nothing else really matters as much as growing GDP.
You would stop invading armies everywhere, at the border, inside the border, in their homeland and the lands of their allies, in the borders of your own allies, anywhere.
Do you imagine border patrol plays a key strategic role in war? What would be an example
of that from history?
>>>You would stop invading armies everywhere, at the border, inside the border, in their homeland and the lands of their allies, in the borders of your own allies, anywhere.
"Defend everywhere" makes for a very poor Commander's Intent or Mission Statement. If you are defending "inside the border"...you've already failed at stopping your adversary AT the border. It also violates almost half of the Principles of War (mass, objective, economy of force, simplicity). Reference Appendix B of [6].
>>>Do you imagine border patrol plays a key strategic role in war? What would be an example of that from history?
From[1]:
"Pakistani patrols began patrolling in territory controlled by India in January 1965, which was followed by attacks by both countries on each other's posts on 8 April 1965.[44][45] Initially involving border police from both nations, the disputed area soon witnessed intermittent skirmishes between the countries' armed forces."
Re: [2][3]These Soviet-Japanese border conflicts would have 2nd and 3rd order effects on military doctrine, development, and strategic focus (the Japanese stopped poking the Bear and focused on China). The Soviets gained some confidence in their operational doctrine and gained confidence fighting the Japanese (who they last fought against, and lost to, in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War).
Reference [4] describes how the Soviets managed border security during their Afghanistan war.
Reference [5] has a short section on "Border Security in Contemporary Counterinsurgency" to summarize border control issues from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. It particularly points out the significant political ramifications of cross-border insurgents and counter-insurgency operations.
As a Mexican I can only agree, and would love the US to have a hard solution to this problem which a wall could certainly help. People think migrants are the US's problem but no, sadly the real question is how can we make migrants thrive in their original places and why this is not the approach to take?
I completely agree that one approach to illegal immigration is understanding why illegal immigrants are coming to the US in the first place.
In my analysis the US "War on drugs" is a major reason. Illegal goods in high demand mean smuggling and black markets with lots of profits. These markets cause criminal cartels. The cartels corrupt government and law enforcement. Corruption and cartel activity lead to high crime areas and low economic opportunity. High crime and lack of opportunity leads to people wanting to leave.
The US also ended guest worker programs that made it easy for seasonal workers to work in the US and live in Mexico. Many people wanted to do this, so they could live in their homeland with their family, friends, and culture but also seasonally work in the US where they could earn more. By ending seasonal worker programs, the people who wanted to work in the US needed to do so illegally, and, in order to minimize the risk and hassle of repeat illegal border crossings, they made a single illegal crossing and lived and worked in the US with their families.
If I were President, I'd end the drug war and decriminalize virtually all drugs. I'd also reinstate guest worker programs and make it very easy to get temporary legal access to the country. I'd invest in technology and infrastructure at the US Mexico border so we could move people through, both ways, as fast as possible. I'd also be involved with Central and South American allies and work with them to mitigate problems that may be the root of illegal immigration.
I agree that the war on drugs is one component. However even before it (19th century Mexico) my country had structural issues leading to crime, inequality and corruption.
MS-13 was literally founded in the US, in Los Angeles. Their rise to prominence (from small street gang to transnational one) was under the control of a man named Ernesto Deras, who had been trained by US Army Green Berets in Panama while serving in the Salvadorean Special Forces, and then left El Salvador and moved to the US to escape the brutal civil war in El Salvador- a civil war the US did have some involvement in. But MS-13 (and their rivals the 18th Calle) started in the US and then emigrated back to El Salvador.
Nobody* deserves to be the subject of violence but at some point Americans need to take responsibility for creating (and continuing to create) the environment in which cartels can flourish.
When almost half the country can't even be bothered voting, much less stand up against crimes against humanity like forcibly and intentionally separating children from their parents (sometimes permanently) and locking them in cages, then frankly I think you lose the right to complain about the circumstances you find yourself in.
In other words, you can't take a shit on the kitchen counter and then complain about the smell.
Well, whether you agree with it or not, part of the justification is that if anybody can cross easily, terrorist groups will, too. IIRC, the 9/11 hijackers didn’t fly into the US since we were looking for them, they flew into Canada and crossed the border (although Canada’s not Mexico, of course…)
This is correct. There were attempts to cross over from Canada, like the Millennium plot, but they were stopped despite a notoriously porous border [0].
That might be because it’s way bigger than the wall we would need on the southern border or because more people cross from the south than from the north or because they actually are using border security as an excuse to keep out Mexicans - but keeping terrorists out is (one of) the justifications for classifying border security as a national security and therefore military issue.
> You don't hear a lot about the big wall we need across the Canadian border.
We don't have many people crossing the border illegally, at the canadian border.
Of course we are going to prioritize the location in which the vast majority of people who enter the border illegally, are using. Which is the southern border, in this case.
- Military or gov't produce exact specifications for something
- Contractors bid to create that something
- The end product ends up being the result of macro-management and even sometimes micro-management from the very top, which would be the equivalent of SV tech startups being instructed on what to build by Oracle and Microsoft
But since the military and gov't are open to working with independent parties when said parties come to them with an offer, Anduril and similar companies have more freedom to develop tech as they see fit and then go and sell it to the military/gov't, and judging by this article, with considerable success.
While what you write is true in a way, but saying "military or gov't produce exact specifications for something" may be interpreted by some people involved in software development in the wrong way. I've worked on a couple DoD related projects long ago and they don't put out specifications as much as requirements. If anything, the requirements are annoying vague. They will ask for something like "a light truck that can carry at least 1 ton while overcoming vertical obstacles 1 meter high and climb 50% grades". Or "software to track and manage electrical usage of a base at the building and circuit level. It should includeoff-site historical data storage, an interface for reporting and the ability to transfer data with existing reporting systems." Obviously the real RFPs have a long, long set of requirements, often conflicting :-).
Each vendor is responsible with coming up with their own approach to the stated problem, their own designs and all the rest. And while there is certainly far too much micro-management -- and a healthy does of mismanagement -- a naive read of the rules makes it clear that most of the bureaucratic rules were created with good intentions. That is, they were created to fix "bugs" in the procurement system, to reduce corruption, to try to reduce errors, etc. Sadly, as you implied, the mass of contract bidding rules is now literally inches thick when printed out (I know because I printed out one set of them from the GSA) and probably create more problems than it solves. Ah well, such is life.
They sort of started out solving an internal problem and then took that domain knowledge to build their platform. Their success early on relied on being able to put together a really good presentation. I would hardly look at their tech as being extremely cutting edge though, they're simply a package solution with a decent enough outcome with minimal competition in what SV would consider an "unsexy" industry.
Getting a foot in the door with Govt. Contracting is probably the hardest and most expensive part. Most won't go through the hoops and it creates fewer competitors or alternatives (as OP alludes to).
This is basically true but there are startups working on defense contracts (usually as subcontractors) ... Silicon Valley adds some cachet to the whole thing. The whole pitch is that traditional defense and government contractors are bloated, bid low, ramp up costs and deliver a subpar product (see the DMV as the referenced example #1) .. and that true innovation using off the shelf components can deliver results and value etc... It's messaging to catch the ear of politicians and/or decision makers as a way in and it's probably true in some cases. You do see big examples of cost overruns and failure to deliver.
In my experience in a corner of this field, I can say that's less true than you think (there are many more partners), but competition is still not quite strong enough.
> Although Luckey left Oculus in 2017 amid controversy over his political contributions, he has maintained some links to Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB), which bought Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, sits on Facebook’s board alongside Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund previously invested in Anduril. Andreessen Horowitz also invested in Oculus, which makes virtual reality headsets.
This sentence is really stretching for "maintained links to Facebook".
This is probably how the wall should be built for the most part. It allows wildlife to freely roam but then uses AI to identify specific threats. This will probably save a lot of lives too. Then Trump can have his wall and we can all laugh that it is invisible but it will hopefully be effective for border security and environmentally friendly.
well good to know that the wildlife is going to have more privileges than the people. Truly a humanitarian technology company. We sure do live in interesting times.
It's hearing things like this that make me regret having supported Luckey on his Kickstarter. I had followed him for a few years on the MTBS3D forum when he was experimenting with various HMD prototypes (usually modding the heck out of the Forte VFX-1). He just seemed like a kid with a dream, and the will and ability to make it happen - and potentially revive VR for "Round 2".
I suppose he did do that, and while I didn't like the "sell-out" to FB and Zuck - I couldn't blame him, either. Then it seemed like things went downhill from there.
I don't have any problem with someone being a republican or a conservative, but I can't and couldn't understand why someone would support a person like our current POTUS. To me, it would be similar to continue to voice support for Manson while saying "well, it isn't like he killed anybody himself, so it's ok" - umm, no - it's not ok.
...and now this.
I sometimes wonder if we humans will ever get over this artificial border fetish we have. I don't have problems with property rights, to a certain level, but I'm not sure it has really worked well at the large scale level. All it has seemed to do is create some level of tension at best, and outright violence at worst. I am not certain that we as a species can continue on this path for much longer, not without some very terrible things occuring.
So - while I would prefer a "monitored solution" to border control over physical imposing measures, my real preference would be for us to all work toward eliminating these national-level borders completely. Instead, it seems like we're going the opposite direction, even online, and erecting virtual barriers to separate us from each other, instead of working to understand each other and work together on solving our world problems.
>So - while I would prefer a "monitored solution" to border control over physical imposing measures, my real preference would be for us to all work toward eliminating these national-level borders completely.
You sound like someone with the ability to live anywhere, who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." Lots of Americans (and people in other countries) don't have this flexibility. They are directly and inescapably effected by the de facto U.S. open border policy for low-skilled workers. For example:
I have family in New England who ran an all-organic dairy farm. They had to shut down a few years ago, in part because they couldn't compete with the farms who paid undocumented workers under the table. At the same time, their rural community has been decimated by the opioid crisis. Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico [0].
We've seen what happens when other countries adopt wholesale open borders policies. In Germany, the 2015 migrant crisis nearly brought the far-right "Alternativ für Deutschland" into power. That crisis only abated once the Balkan states took it upon themselves to secure the E.U.'s southern border.
Finally, I also think it's likely that any compromise to solve the border crises will involve additional border security measure. We've come close enough before to know what such a bill might look like - remember when George W. Bush strongly supported the DREAM Act, amnesty, and a path to citizenship? [1]. Why not develop the necessary technology now?
If we want to stop undocumented workers from fueling a race to the bottom in unskilled labor markets, we should make more than a token effort to go after the business owners who employ them, and impose meaningful punishments to deter others. This is just another example of the gross hypocrisy of the GOP: it's well documented at this point that businesses owned by their top man make a habit of employing undocumented workers.
We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand. What we're doing now is theater.
I agree. We should have a guest worker program if they job exists. Have an app that monitors compliance, pays taxes etc... It's the businesses that want the unlawful immigrants precisely because they can pay them so little and have no worker protections. And we see that ICE raids basically shutdown processing plants and farms when they clear out a whole community.
>This is just another example of the gross hypocrisy of the GOP
I’m not a member of the GOP. Extremely far from it.
>We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand.
Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment.
> I’m not a member of the GOP. Extremely far from it.
I didn't mean to imply you were or were not a member of the GOP. I included the observation about their hypocrisy simply because they are the largest group making the most noise about border security while clearly not actually giving a shit about Americans' jobs being "taken" by undocumented laborers.
> Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment.
If hiring them gets you thrown in prison, they will suddenly have a much harder time getting hired, and after some time employment will cease to be a reason to cross the border illegally. We don't have to fuck around with "virtual border technology" to accomplish this; all we have to do is recognize that (relatively) wealthy business owners are not above the law, but in America we have an astonishingly hard time with this. It's like the Brock Turner judge's mindset is baked into half the population from birth.
What you're talking about is basically a surveillance based internal border. It can work that way for people if you have massive levels of internal surveillance (otherwise how do you think the government can catch employers of illegals with any efficiency), but it doesn't do much for goods or people who cross the border without wanting to get a job, like gang members, dealers etc.
> What you're talking about is basically a surveillance based internal border. It can work that way for people if you have massive levels of internal surveillance (otherwise how do you think the government can catch employers of illegals with any efficiency)
What you're talking about is called law enforcement and it has existed in this country for a long time. Until you clarify your point (what are "massive levels of internal surveillance"?) and justify it (why isn't the current investigative toolbox enough?), this is nothing but FUD, and ridiculous FUD at that.
> it doesn't do much for goods or people who cross the border without wanting to get a job, like gang members, dealers etc.
To the extent that this is actually a real problem, why do you think these people are crossing the border? Are they just coming up here because they feel like it, or are they responding to some kind of demand?
The current setup of law enforcement doesn't scale to millions of lawbreakers who aren't being reported by any victims of crime.
Are they just coming up here because they feel like it, or are they responding to some kind of demand?
That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market demand to get more for less. The issues with immigration aren't on the employer's side.
> The current setup of law enforcement doesn't scale to millions of lawbreakers who aren't being reported by any victims of crime.
It scales to far more than the handful we go after now (seriously, it's a handful, look it up) and guess what: business owners don't want to lose what they have, and they don't want to go to prison.
It's called a "deterrent", and it's the reason e.g. bars and restaurants don't sell liquor to kids despite the fact that the overwhelmingly vast majority of kid-looking people who would try to buy it if these laws weren't enforced are not actually undercover cops. (it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, but I'm sure you understand)
> That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market demand to get more for less. The issues with immigration aren't on the employer's side.
I think you're confused. Are you talking about undocumented workers, or "gang members and dealers"? I addressed the former in the comment you originally replied to; the bit of my last comment that you quoted refers to the latter, and my question stands. Why (do you think) "gang members and dealers" are coming to America?
LE could do more today true, but if there were no borders at all how would they not be overwhelmed? They don't even have the law successfully enforced at the moment, let alone in a world where nothing stops people moving at all. And what stops illegals just being self employed?
Why (do you think) "gang members and dealers" are coming to America?
Ah sorry. I interpreted "they" as "all people crossing a border".
My point is raids on employers only catch cases where people are working for legitimate employers. If that's all you rely on, you can't try to filter out people who have alternative illegal income streams before they enter the country and become much harder to find and deal with.
I would be interested in a system whereby an internal border is so effective no external border is needed. But it's not clear to me it'd actually be better: there'd have to be constant checking of identity documents all the time, hugely ramped up law enforcement, and without a border it's unclear deportation would mean anything at all. People could just turn around and come right back in. It'd be sort of like trying to solve theft by just spending lots of money on police but not having door locks anywhere. There's a fundamental mismatch of costs.
> Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico
"Unsecured" is being asked to do an awful lot of work in that sentence. Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints. If you want to reduce the drug trade, better techniques for catching smugglers at the checkpoints will help, and reducing demand -- which is being driven by customers in the United States -- will help even more. "Build the wall!" will not.
I'm sorry about your dairy-farming family in New England, but if we go by statistics rather than anecdotes, there's been a lot of studies on the modern industrial farming economy which conclude that trying to chase out all the undocumented immigrants is attacking the wrong side of the problem. If farmers weren't hiring them, they wouldn't come here to work. Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers. They feel they have to pay the farm hands that low because the prices they can charge are largely set by their huge agribusiness customers. Going after the infamously exploited undocumented workers at the end of this whole chain isn't going to solve the problem.
In any case, there aren't actually many people in power in the US who are calling for "wholesale open border policies," the person you're responding to notwithstanding. The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings. They are coming here to legally apply for asylum.
If the world is serious about solving "the migrant crisis," then perhaps we should stop trying to desperately fight against people being displaced and driven out of their homelands and start trying to address the issues that are displacing them and driving them out.
>Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers.
If cheap labor was unavailable, would American farms shut down? I don’t think so. I think they’d raise wages until Americans were willing to work for them, and pass the price along to consumers. I think the status quo (undocumented laborers working for low wages in terrible conditions with no healthcare, all to subsidize $0.50 oranges at Safeway) is a humanitarian tragedy equivalent to the worst Nike sweatshops.
>the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings.
Right. Anduril’s work would not affect these people, so why all these comments calling them literally evil?
If cheap labor was unavailable, would American farms shut down?
If you increase cost it's going to have an effect. Some farms will shut down, some will automate, some will "move" (by way of imports) to other countries where the working conditions are worse.
> Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but how do you know the specific means by which fentanyl is getting into the US?
> The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings.
I'm also curious about this, how you know the actual motivations behind people's concerns about the border?
Fully agree with your final point though, fixing the problem at the source should at least be seriously attempted, and I don't see any sign of that happening.
The amount of downvoting on legitimate questions is starting to get a bit out of hand around here. If people can't answer a mild challenge to their claim, should they be making it in the first place?
I didn't downvote you (you can't, AFAICT, downvote a reply to your own message). Having said that: I did start to compose a reply to you last night, but decided against it for two reasons:
1. The process by which drugs are generally smuggled into the US from Mexico has been covered by a multitude of news sources for decades. The vast majority are smuggled through border checkpoints; a small minority are smuggled around border walls using tunnels, speedboats, aircraft, etc. It's hard to believe that you've had no exposure to any of this news in the past yourself if you're concerned about border security at all, but even if you hadn't, you could literally have looked this up by typing "HOW ARE DRUGS SMUGGLED INTO THE US" into the search engine of your choice.
2. The more I thought about "how do you know people's motivations for border concerns" question the more I was at a loss to answer it. I didn't say anything about people's motivations; I pointed out that to the extent there is a real migrant crisis on the US-Mexico border, it is a crisis caused by refugees seeking legal asylum, a problem which is entirely orthogonal to any problems that could be solved by a border all, real or virtual. The belief that the United States is treating those refugees inhumanely is also entirely orthogonal to any beliefs about border security, immigration quotas, etc. The "Trump era fight" that I refer to is the fight over the ethics not only of treating refugees this way, but over the honesty -- or, bluntly, lack thereof -- in the way the Trump administration and its supporters have been framing the debate in a way that conflates a refugee crisis with illegal immigration.
> At the same time, their rural community has been decimated by the opioid crisis. Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico [0].
Pretend you are a border control officer and your sole objective is to stop illegal drugs from entering our borders. What situation would you rather have:
a) Thousands of peaceful people jumping the border in pickup trucks intermixed with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members.
or
b) Thousands of peaceful people lining up at a border checkpoint or consulate, with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members jumping the border in pickup trucks.
You should try legalizing more immigration. It gives us more control over the process and more selectivity and enforcement capability, not less.
> We've seen what happens when other countries adopt wholesale open borders policies. [..AfD]
You make it sound like there was an actual negative impacts. I haven't seen much "horrible" data on that front. It certainly gives ammo to fearmongers, but how does this make it a less good goal to strive for?
You mean besides the mass sexual violence in Cologne, the Berlin Christmas market attack, or the fact that migrants in Germany are disproportionately more likely to commit violent crimes [0][1][2]?
What really gets me is headlines like “German far-right capitalizes on migrant crimes,” as if those politicians were happy the crimes had been committed or consented to the policy decisions that led to them occurring.
This needs to be repeated often. If you want to stop illegal immigration, arrest those who employ illegals. A few business owners spending the night in jail, being charged with felonies, and facing huge legal fees and fines will have a large chilling effect. If there are no under the table tax free jobs to be had, the flow of migrants will diminish quite a bit.
Here's a thought: make those who employ illegals liable for back taxes and back wages at US minimum wage. That will hurt.
Or is that already the case? If it is the law is not being enforced at all.
Your low-effort comment on a throwaway account is detracting from this discussion. I absolutely support harsh punishments for those who employ undocumented laborers illegally (why would I not?). That issue has zero bearing on whether Anduril’s work is “evil.”
All I’m saying is that it’s appalling to see all of these “solutions” almost completely ignore the root problem and instead become obsessed with “border security”. Our borders are secure, immigration is not a threat to your life, the problem is almost purely economic and I think that is the more fruitful discussion
I meant no particular offense to you, I see this sentiment regularly in online forums and repeated throughout comments here, your comment was just the one I happened to reply to.
My wife and I have both been hit by illegal immigrants. One of them driving drunk and drinking in the car while he hit me, and had no insurance or license, and had a prior DUI that he missed court for. The other (one that hit my wife’s car) simply didn’t have insurance, but wasn’t drinking.
My wife’s car had to be repaired heavily (over $5,000), which was paid for by our insurance, and the $500 adoptable was paid for by us. When my car was hit in the back, both of us were in the car, both of us had serious concussions because this accident was much worse. This is the one where the guy was driving with a beer in his hand, and he tried to leave the scene of the accident but one of his engine’s Peripherals was hanging out Of his hood and he couldn’t get his car to start.
The fact that the people in question were immigrants (one from Honduras, the other I’m not sure) Is not the problem. The problem is that they are here illegally and in a sanctuary county, which means that the law-enforcement is in a Weird position where they cannot really do anything about petty crimes like driving under the influence, because it’s an expensive process of dealing with the county. So, in both cases, these people are still roaming around probably hitting other people, meanwhile both of us have had to pay to fix our own vehicles and had at least medium level injuries (concussion symptoms last for a lot longer than I realized, and we were both Having serious issues a month later).
So, while immigrants don’t necessarily Harm people, illegal immigration certainly does.
That’s awful. I’m sorry that happened to you. But I’m not sure I understand your argument. If one or both of these drivers were legally in the US, what would law enforcement do differently? From my reading of your situation, it sounds like you had the misfortune of twice encountering under-insured drivers, and had to deal with the consequences. How did you make the (il)logical jump from that to, “Illegal immigration harms people?” It sounds like a causal logical fallacy to me, but I’d appreciate being corrected if you think I’m wrong.
Some general problems your situation unintentionally alludes to (not perhaps in your state, but common in the south) are criminalizing the issuance of drivers licenses to undocumented people (which literally prevents them from obtaining insurance), and the fact that these people are working in the shadows and thus being underpaid (and thus not being able to pay for insurance).
The problem of under-insured drivers (estimated about 13% of all drivers) is real. Many folks have proposed ways to quantify and address the problem (e.g., [1]).
Thanks for the reply. Both were illegal immigrants; one had a license and wasn’t DUI. The answer to why I think this is caused by the illegal status is that, pertaining to when the Honduran immigrant (the DUI one) hit me, I went out of town with my wife during the period of time when he was supposed to go to court and obviously go to jail because he had done the same thing 11 months before and actually left the scene in that case, so he was already wanted, and so I thought “surely he will go to jail for many months...” when we got back to town I called the prosecuting attorney to ask her what happen with his sentencing/verdict/etc., and she told me that he didn’t show up to court. So I asked her “so are you going to go arrest him?“, And she informed me that they don’t handle cases like this by going to the house to arrest him. I was confused thinking ‘oh so this is going to be like an outstanding warrant and he will get arrested when he gets pulled over at some point’. I was frustrated but I thought ‘well it’s only in evitable that he will go to jail eventually’. But then I realized, ‘wait a minute, if he was already arrested for the same thing 11 months before and they didn’t even keep him in jail longer than 12 hours in the drunk tank, why would they ever put him in jail...’. That’s when I started asking more questions and found out (from the PA’s secretary) that the reason they couldn’t arrest him is because if they were to try him for contempt of court they would end up having to deport him, and this is when I found out we were living in a sanctuary county.
So the reason he was drinking and driving isn’t because he’s an illegal immigrant or because he was from Honduras. It’s because there is no rule of law when you are letting people break your laws to get into the country to begin with. And if there is no law there is no accountability. If I didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble myself, I might be out drinking rum runners on the highway 24 hours a day.
We all like to think of ourselves as virtuous, but, without accountability to the rest of society, we are just wild animals on this rock floating through space.
Risk is relative. What’s your standard for being secure? The homicide rate in the US is 4.9/100k people, which is lower than the global average. Is your standard for security measured by this metric? If so, you should feel quite good; the rate in Fairfax county is 1.9/100k people. Or is it that you’re allowing the emotion aroused by the splashy headlines you linked to color your judgement?
In response, I'll ask you this: how do you feel about the private ownership of assault-style rifles?
Risk is relative. What’s your standard for being secure? The rifle homicide rate in the US is 0.18/100k people [0], which includes hunting and "traditional" rifles in addition to assault-style weapons. Is your standard for security measured by this metric? If so, you should feel quite good. Or is it that you’re allowing the emotion aroused by splashy headlines to color your judgement?
To answer you directly: I wouldn't make my home more dangerous if I can avoid it, barring some counterbalancing upside. The counterargument that, "it's still way better than living in a favela!" doesn't work for me.
Economically, mass low-skill migration has significant downsides for low-skill American workers. The "upside" is an increase in the total economic pie for U.S. citizens, but only because capitalists can exploit migrant workers even harder, and non-citizen workers' shares of the pie don't count.
Wrong. I’m not bothered by privately owned assault rifles because of the homicide rate. And, this time, you went to a straw man logical fallacy. I said Fairfax was better than the rest of the US, and not a favela. So, I’ll go back to my original question: what’s your standard for feeling secure?
>Wrong. I’m not bothered by privately owned assault rifles because of the homicide rate.
Sure, and neither am I bothered by your statistics.
My standard is feeling safe when I walk late at night. I don’t feel safe when gang members dig shallow graves in the park up the road, or tag buildings in my neighborhood with gang signs, or recruit in increasing numbers from local high schools. I don’t feel safe when the police chief describes gang murders as “out of control.” [0]
Nor am I comforted when Internet strangers patronize me, and deny the validity of my own thoughts and experiences. I don’t have anything left to say to you within the HN community guidelines.
> who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere."
As first generation American this is dangerously misguided and follows the debunked lump of labor fallacy. It reminds me of the "rootless cosmopolitan" slur.
>It reminds me of the "rootless cosmopolitan" slur
You have no idea how offensive and ridiculous that statement is to me.
It’s the reality that if you earn more than a certain amount of money, and posses an advanced degree plus a certain amount of capital, your relocation options are vastly greater than someone with fewer credentials, less capital, and a smaller salary.
Radical idea: why not giving a legal path to whoever wants to enter instead? Illegal work would become much less frequent and convenient and business owners would be forced to pay a fair wage to these now documented immigrants or get sued. Then you would not have any more unfair competition.
> You sound like someone with the ability to live anywhere, who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere."
And you sound like someone with the same privilege speaking from a place of paternalism. Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor.
> I have family in New England who ran an all-organic dairy farm. They had to shut down a few years ago, in part because they couldn't compete with the farms who paid undocumented workers under the table.
Others have already debunked your trafficking claim, but your anecdote about an all-organic dairy farm is particularly laughable. 'Dey took ar jerbs' has been debunked for decades now.[1]
My mom grew up on a dairy farm in New England (I'm visiting my Grandma there in a month), and I can tell you that there's plenty of reasons that most of them are closing/consolidating, and undocumented labor isn't even top-5.
> In Germany, the 2015 migrant crisis nearly brought the far-right "Alternativ für Deutschland" into power. That crisis only abated once the Balkan states took it upon themselves to secure the E.U.'s southern border.
Wait, the migrants and open borders are to blame for xenophobia?
You do well to point out that Bush supported the DREAM act and take about as wrong a lesson from that as you possibly could. The lesson is not 'give the xenophobes a compromise to get slightly-more-sane immigration policies', it's that the rise in ultra-right wing nationalism/xenophobia around the world in the last decade should be the real thing keeping people up at night, not some imagined migrant 'invasion'.
Your article leaves out a lot, and you present a false consensus. Here are some counterpoints:
"Illegal immigration to the United States in recent decades has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate
number of whom are black men."
This would seem to contradict your statement that, "Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor."
"Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year."
"But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year."
tl;dr Low-skilled citizens are still hurt, and the "bigger economic pie" from illegal immigration turns out to mainly be due to wealth concentration and bad statistics.
Btw, since you are so pro open national borders. I am a Mexican based in Mexico City, I know a lot of people who would like to live in the US, would you be interested in sponsoring them, maybe hosting them at your place? That way they wouldn't have to risk their lives trying to just get to the US border Feel free to reach out.
I applaud your honesty in expressing a desire for open borders. I think culture would benefit from more open and honest discussions on this topic as all the double speak makes it frustrating and boring to discuss, normally.
I’m not really very interested in borders one way or the other but national borders certainly aren’t “artificial.” There are certainly some artificial aspects (lines of longtitude, etc) but borders are also created by geography and culture and saying that culture is artificial is odd to me. There are distinct peoples with different values. We also have lots in common as humans, but the border of France and Germany, for example, is very real and those countries have different cultures.
I think the EU is a good example of improved relations between countries but it’s certainly fine and not some sort of mental disorder to think that Switzerland and Italy are different and it’s fine that they are different.
If nations want to have distinct boundaries and populations then there should be an avenue to respect human rights and not resort to racism and undue nationalism. It’s also a good time to point out that immigration has been essential for major countries and is a very powerful positive force.
You're mistaken about borders being some kind of fact of human nature, and you're mistaken about different countries having some kind of fundamental "different cultures".
Nation states are an invention of the last few hundred years. Before that, kingdoms had borders between the lands they controlled militarily, and while they would certainly stop an invading army, they didn't have the administrative capacity or desire to stop small scale migration of individuals.
Historically, the culture and language of people living on the Baltic in what is now Germany would certainly differ greatly from the language and culture of people living on the Mediterranean in what is now France. But there was not some magic dividing line between those 2 points, between "the French" and "the Germans". People living around what is now the border of France and Germany would have had a very similar culture and spoken a very similar language.
In the last few hundred years, with the help of such technologies as the telegraph, the railroad, and the radio, nation-building rulers enforced speaking of the Parisian dialect in what is now France, and the Bavarian dialect in what is now Germany. They also created a lot of propaganda and myths about their "national culture" and invented far-fetched stories about the greatness of their national ancestors. In Germany's case, this went way too far and had disastrous results. The French national myths were much more benign, mostly centering around arrogance about cheese.
I think the EU is a good example of how the border as 'a thing that prevents people from moving about' has been eliminated (via the Schengen Agreement) while it still maintains them when it comes to nation states, voting and so on. I think that's exactly the right way to do it - I think people should be able to move about, but it's also important to let people vote on a small enough scale that it is meaningful, and within a small enough group to share a culture and world-view.
Borders being primarily geography and culture is a very western perspective on things - in Africa for example a huge proportion of borders were arbitrarily drawn by colonisers. And even in Europe and other western regions, certain borders are the way they are more for political reasons than because of true distinctiveness.
Also, different regions within countries tend to be able to maintain their distinctiveness rather well despite a lack of internal borders, and in parts of Asia and Africa were borders were recently enforced by external intervention, culture continues to exist across them and despite them, so it feels like cultural differences and borders are not as closely correlated on a global scale as one may at first think.
> the border of France and Germany, for example, is very real and those countries have different cultures.
You'd be hard-pressed to identify a more artificial border in Europe than that one (maybe the former Yugoslavia). Curious if you've ever been to Alsace-Lorraine, and if so why you think the culture there is distinctly French versus their German neighbors.
I have but only as a tourist. I called out that border because Alsace and Lorraine have gone back and forth quite a few times. I don’t think that’s a “natural” border but I think being exchanged by war and treaty is a pretty purposeful expression of local and national desires. So it’s not random. That wasn’t kind of what I was trying to express.
Some borders are arbitrary (Kenya and Tanzania) and some are based on rivers or natural borders (France and Spain, Nepal and India).
But curiously the people are different in Alsace than Germany. And also different from Alsace and France. Some differences are the result of French laws and culture, some differences are the result of local custom, some differences are the result of historical German laws and culture. This doesn’t mean that people here are alien or have no commonalities. I think that people have much more in common than they have different.
Incidentally, the EU also provides examples of where the borders are completely arbitrary. Consider the border at Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau:
> The town is the site of a complicated borderline between Belgium and Netherlands, with numerous small exclaves of Belgium, of which some contain counter-exclaves of the Netherlands.
> Some houses in the town of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau are divided between the two countries. At one time, according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border, this simply meant that the customers had to move to a table on the Belgian side.
Culture isn't artificial, but lines in the sand create hard disconnects where culture is much more fluid. I'm a Seattlite, and I can tell you I feel more cultural similarity to British Columbians than I do to Texans. And people from Miami have a lot more cultural similarity to Cubans and Veneuzuelans than they do Alabamans. And Guatamalans have a ton of cultural similarity to Hondurans and Salvadorans, but northern Mexico might as well be Thailand to them. Cultures didn't define our borders, Manifest Destiny did...and cultures transcended those borders.
We have a 250 year precedent as an immigrant nation. We have always been at least somewhat tolerant of massive waves of migration, whether they were Germans, Italians, Irish, British, Chinese, etc. We have already lost any claim that our borders are lines in the sand for our socioethnic culture.
The only aspect of "American" culture that seems to be represented by our borders is a love of capitalism. And considering the fact that you can't really have capitalism with restricted trade and restricted movement of labor, it seems to me that Trump is more of a cultural invader than Salvadorans are.
> We have always been at least somewhat tolerant of massive waves of migration, whether they were Germans, Italians, Irish, British, Chinese
The US wasn't tolerant. I don't even know where to begin.
A single comment cannot convey how anti-immigrant the US was.
Nativism took hold of the US when the Irish and Germans arrived (mainly due to religious reasons & also fear of cheaper labour) Given that Italians were majority Catholics, they'd have the same intolerance shown. The Chinese were also hounded.
Laws were passed to discriminate against all those groups.
The only people who possibly got off lightly were the British (due to same religion & culture)
Yes, I'm well aware of the racist sentiments and actions of the past in the US. The simple fact of the matter is that we still let them in the country.
But that attitude resulted in much less allowed into the country than desired to enter.
I think it’s weird that the US seems to always have a struggle where there’s lots of racism but still makes some progress. For example, I figured that the current vitriol against immigration meant the US was some sort of racist hellhole limiting immigration but this article [0]states the census estimates 13.7% of the US wasn’t born in the US. And this Pew [1] article shows this as near the historic highs of 14.8% at the end of the 19th century. I think this is pretty cool and refreshing. So despite lots of heated statements, the US is improving in the number and quality of people immigrating.
I agree with everything you said except this:
> borders are also created by geography and culture
It seems to me that borders exist because certain people could wield power, and gain benefits from controlling land.
When we were hunter gatherers, the idea of "territory" makes more sense, because different clans were taking things from the land (including the ability to traverse it without getting into conflicts).
Also, there weren't enough people to fill the entire Earth, and no one had a house filled with every model of Playstation, so being Nomadic wasn't a huge burden compared to staying in one place.
Later, when we had organized militaries, and food came from working the ground for months, Kings could benefit by stealing land and serfs from other Kings that had rightfully stolen them from some other King, and so on.
I don't think too many land-grab wars started with the thinking, "You know what the French need? Culture. And boy, are we gonna give it to 'em".
And also this:
> the border of France and Germany, for example, is very real and those countries have different cultures
I hear that near the border, the Germans are even allowed to make wine, and the French are allowed to make bier! ;)
> I hear that near the border, the Germans are even allowed to make wine, and the French are allowed to make bier! ;)
Of course. My point was not that cultures create entirely different species with absolutely no commonalities. I think people have much more in common than different. But there are differences and customizations that are real and not arbitrary. Although I think they might have been triggered and evolved from arbitrary factors (ie weather in one region is kind of arbitrary because it exists whether people are there or not).
So while Germans may make wine and French make bier (these are both done far away from the borders as well btw) that doesn’t make Germany and France the same. It just means they have lots in common.
What I struggle with is how to think about what the right relationship is between different groups that have many things in common but aren’t the same, and don’t necessarily need to be the same.
The "birth lottery" is a metaphysical construct. There is no such lottery, in which souls are assigned at random to bodies. Each human being is a rooted thing with a multigenerational history which is (in the typical case) deliberately created. Some stochastic variability is at work in this process, but it is by no means random.
Every nation must have the right to choose the people it wishes to assimilate and those it doesn't. I should not be allowed to go kicking in doors and demanding acceptance. This is the fundamental basis of sovereignty.
The only exception is that a nation must accept those born to its own members, as stateless persons create a potential burden to others.
Try to think in terms of individuals, not nations. As for your sovereignty - it ends outside of your condo - you can't restrict someone from Oklahoma to move to SF.
But in the physical reality that we live in, individuals don't exist "on their own", they don't exist as completely separate entities. They have a lot of personal thoughts and experiences, but they also have a lot of traits that are predetermined by their culture, family, education, nation, society values of their immediate surrounding etc. It is just not honest to only treat people as individuals when there are obviously parts of them which are decided by the nation. So that's why people think in nations.
There is no such thing as a sovereign individual. Unless you refer to the Libertarian cranks hassling cops on YouTube.
In practice, nations can restrict people from moving if they choose to. Perhaps mine won't, but China certainly will.
The reason, by the way, that Oklahoma and California can't restrict migration between them is that US states are not sovereign. The original colonies ceded essential parts of their sovereignty to form a national federal government. This is US history 101.
>>> As for your sovereignty - it ends outside of your condo
Why do you have sovereignty over your condo? Why can't I express my right to sleep on your couch, regardless of your consent? If you can express access control rights over a particular piece of territory or property that you consider your own, then why can't a collective group of people also express access control rights over their common, government-managed and administered property/territory?
To eliminate the birth lottery. Remember, we are talking about the reasons - restricting the movement of someone only because he/she was born in the "wrong" coordinates on the map (and in the "wrong" time) is simply inhuman.
I'm slightly confused regarding your position, are you seeking open borders, or solely the elimination of birthright citizenship?
I think there's enough responses in the thread regarding open borders that I won't belabor that point again. To the question of birthright citizenship, I'd probably be ok with eliminating it if we replaced it with service-based citizenship a la Starship Troopers (to include volunteering in the Peace Corps, volunteer firefighting, and maybe law enforcement). But it leads to the question of: if people (including native-born ones) don't meet the citizenship requirements, do they become stateless persons? Do we deport them? To where?
There are many angles/perspectives. Lets consider two categories for whom it is declared that we need them or they are allowed to enter: high-skilled workforce and refugees. We all know (here at HN) about the huge bureaucracy and obstacles when it comes to work permits. As for the refugees - everyone declares that they are allowed to enter, but in order to qualify for such status they need to be [almost] drown in the sea or [almost] killed at the border.
So....all of the problems you've mentioned, and they ARE legitimate issues....can be resolved via means other than eliminating birthright citizenship, or adopting open borders. So can we agree to attempt implementing other measures and policies first before jumping to a drastic and likely highly-disruptive policy shift?
>>>but in order to qualify for such status they need to be [almost] drown in the sea or [almost] killed at the border.
There's not much we can do about natural geography. I'm not sure what alternative course of action is suggested in the case of, say, Cuban or Haitian refugees attempting access by boat. Secondly, no one is "almost killing" refugees that show up at designated legal points of entry to the country. Finally, anyone other than Mexican citizens attempting to seek asylum/refugee status by crossing the US-Mexico border is probably in error (I wouldn't go so far as to say "not acting in good faith").
Consider this from: [1]
"Once refugees or asylum seekers have found a safe place and protection of a state or territory outside their territory of origin they are discouraged from leaving again and seeking protection in another country."
In other words, Hondurans/Guatamalans/etc... should not be transiting Mexico to seek refugee status in the US to begin with.[2]
> Every nation must have the right to choose the people it wishes to assimilate and those it doesn't. I should not be allowed to go kicking in doors and demanding acceptance. This is the fundamental basis of sovereignty.
I don't necessarily disagree with this notion, but it has its limits. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, Sodomy laws, and voting restrictions on females have all been reflections of sovereignty...and they were all fucking terrible decisions. And they were eventually overthrown not by a peaceful process of deliberative change, but through massive grassroots dissent that was absolutely illegal in every respect.
If our sovereign decision is to decide that we don't want rapists and terrorists in our country, I don't have a problem with that. But if terrorist or rapist becomes conflated with brown people, restricting all of their entry regardless of their individual merits, that's gonna be a big fucking no from me dawg. I will gladly and willingly help subvert those laws, because they are unjust laws motivated by pure racism. They deserve to be subverted.
I am only claiming that you are an organism that was created by sexual reproduction, and that your current state of being is a result of genetics and environment. Surely this does not require evidence.
We don't seem to get wrapped up in questions of why a particular tree is "that" tree and not some other tree. It seems to me, as an atheist, that once you start carving out a special metaphysical nature for humans you're dabbling in the religious.
What requires evidence is this spiritual "you" that was "assigned" to this planet. If we admit that, whether the mechanism is a spiritual hand or a spiritual lottery machine is purely a theological question.
This isn't some mere abstract debate - the meme you're expressing is a radical egalitarian (Protestant) system of ethics being smuggled in under a secular guise.
I too am vigorously in favor of communities right to expel people. Being born to American or Saudi citizens shouldn’t give any special rights if you the community decides they’d be better off without you.
Less sarcastically we have no evidence that democracy, unrestricted immigration and welfare states are compatible. I’ll happily bite the bullet and see massive restrictions on immigrants’ and even their children’s rights to access the state’s largess as the potential welfare gains are enormous. But that’s probably among the least important and disruptive changes of open borders. The EU, Canada or the US could easily attract immigrants in similar numbers to their total current inhabitants. You think their politics could cope with that well? California can’t even force the amalgamation of the Bay Area into a single city or copy working models of dealing with the homeless. The US can’t copy international rail infrastructure. The EU can’t get it together enough to pay Erdogan his bribe to not let the Syrians into Greece and the rest of the EU. Canada barely has an internal market in goods and services. Politics doesn’t work very well as is. How will it work with a sudden huge increase in non-native non-citizen population?
This chips away at the advantages those winners have particularly when they don't have much else going for them (see the many low education, low income people being vocal opponents of any kind of immigration into their country). Which is why a lot of those people see someone changing country as a big threat. It's any group's right to choose who they want to let in and they will use this to make sure that either the newcomers pull them forward too, or they don't get to move at all around that group.
> borders are also created by geography and culture
If this was true we should have the right to enter any country we want as long as we align with its culture.
> distinct peoples with different values
Can you provide a list of values that make you suitable for your country?
One could wonder: would it be ethically acceptable to run value exams on citizens and non-citizens to decide who can enter / stay / gets expelled? Would the exam be reliable?
> If this was true we should have the right to enter any country we want as long as we align with its culture.
It seems most people would be ok with that, yes. The question is of course of the practicality of determining someone's culture to a great extent, when there would be incentives for them to lie on the applications, interviews about their culture - if that would be the deciding factor (in some countries it is) for getting into the country or not.
> Can you provide a list of values that make you suitable for your country?
You have probably a favorite style(s) of music and other styles that you don't like. Can you really provide a list of traits of that music taste exhauistively and exactly? Probably not, and it's not because it's random. There are definitive differences in those styles, and yet it can be very hard to pinpoint them. And now we are talking about one individual, and you are asking a question about something much more complex, like a nation. Not being able to list the values exactly in all cases does not mean that there are no values or that they are meaningless or have no effect on people.
> would it be ethically acceptable to run value exams on citizens and non-citizens to decide who can enter
Some countries do that already. It might not always be in the form of simple written exam, but there are people who determine your cultural values and make a decision on whether you can stay or not depending on them.
This strikes me as one of those things where the polled results vary drastically depending on how the question is asked.
The border situation (between whatever countries) is affected by globalization and communication, including the creation of the internet. When people realize how much better they can have it elsewhere (which is much easier to realize than it used to be), it creates more demand to move. But this results in a spike of demand that will normalize over time.
And this is because other effects of globalization have already started to normalize the differences between countries. For instance, it's not as cheap to offshore as it used to be, and that trend will continue. Human rights are increasing in other countries at a faster rate than they used to, just from the greater visibility of the rights people enjoy in other countries.
If we're all lucky, most of the normalization will be that other less advanced countries will improve, rather than other countries degrading - like hopefully we can all "grow" enough fast enough that it'll lift those boats, rather than sink the boats in the more societally/technologically advanced countries.
And that fear that "them getting ahead" might mean that "we will fall behind" is basically what drives the demand to "protect" our borders, even while generally people are in favor of everyone having a better life.
So I think it's totally possible for a majority of the country to be in favor of more open borders over time, while also being against entirely opening all our borders tomorrow.
> This strikes me as one of those things where the polled results vary drastically depending on how the question is asked.
I've seen a few different polls on the subject. From what I understand open borders has always been a minority position (even among immigrants).
> And that fear that "them getting ahead" might mean that "we will fall behind" is basically what drives the demand to "protect" our borders, even while generally people are in favor of everyone having a better life.
I think it's deeper than that. I've tried to address some of the reasons why in other comments on this thread.
Oh, clearly they are in the minority but I was responding to a claim that indicates they are negligible it non-existent.
I would argue that many people oppose open borders in practice but not in theory. There are good practical reasons why open borders are a bad fit for many situations. That does not mean that those situations can't be changed to make that no longer true.
> Oh, clearly they are in the minority but I was responding to a claim that indicates they are negligible it non-existent.
That's fair. I didn't necessarily read it that way, but I think we're more or less on the same page.
> I would argue that many people oppose open borders in practice but not in theory.
I'm not sure that we will see a practical set of circumstances where people would actually be OK with open borders. People have always had some reflex against migration (for cultural reasons, as well as perhaps an instinct fear of disease) and mass migration has historically almost always led to violence.
On top of that, most developed countries have an established welfare state. Any sort of communal system needs a way to ensure that the contributions to the pooled resources is greater than the demand on those resources. If you don't have immigration control then you get a "tragedy of the commons".
> On top of that, most developed countries have an established welfare state. Any sort of communal system needs a way to ensure that the contributions to the pooled resources is greater than the demand on those resources. If you don't have immigration control then you get a "tragedy of the commons".
This one of the practical reasons I alluded to and is part of my reasons for opposing certain types of welfare systems (and thus something I wish more attention was paid to in the creation of policy proposals.)
Many services (e.g. education, infrastructure, policing and more) pay off so well in the long term that paying these costs for immigrants is in our own interest as they increase the long term value of those immigrants. (I think the US would be greatly served by doing something like what Germany does, offering free higher education to foreigners who qualify to attend their public universities.)
If other public services are actually being abused they can be limited to citizens of the US (and of countries with which the US has reciprocity agreements with.)
Immigration fears make a strong argument in favor of a citizenship dividend. I think subsidizing your workers and making them more competive vs. immigrants is far better for our country than the dehumanizing policing (not just at the borders) required to effectively enforce immigration laws.
Personally, I view this as a negative since I think immigration has been unabashedly good in the long term for our country throughout it's history. Immigration controls may offer some sort term benefits, but it seems hypocritical to ask for those benefits for ourselves (at the cost of future generations) while reaping the advantages of historical immigration.
>I had followed him for a few years on the MTBS3D forum when he was experimenting with various HMD prototypes (usually modding the heck out of the Forte VFX-1). He just seemed like a kid with a dream, and the will and ability to make it happen - and potentially revive VR for "Round 2".
He already worked in the military before the Kickstarter, I've seen posts on MTBS about his experimental VR stuff at Lockheed. He was 17 or 18 back then, most likely got the miltitary connection from a familiy member or somebody close.
If you're young like he was your political views are mostly shaped by the people who surround you. From interviews it's known that he was homeschooled and didn't have many friends, so most likely no punk rockers, hip hoppers, skaters or other street dudes who could influence his views in other directions.
Eliminating borders is a recipe for disaster. You can't expect your country to remain the same if you let millions or dozens of millions of people freely coming in from different cultures and backgrounds. Immigration is all about "how much is still OK to let in (trade-off between risks and benefits)", and once you say "whoever wants to enter", it's hard to take this kind of opinion seriously.
Countries should not remain the same. Stealing all this land from California to Texas from Mexico was absolutely not about leaving the country the same. Expelling the Latinos from there was certainly not about conservation of the then current state of affairs, it was a social adventure.
Moreover the US actually had more or less open borders for a long time, calling into some kind of date at which its society should be preserved at is a little bit arbitrary.
You think you expelled the Latinos and stole the land? That's simplistic perspective. If you go read the real Mexican history books (serious scholars and historians) you will realize that many people in those state were pro-leaving Mexico. Why? Well, Mexican 19th century history is defined by the conflict between Federalism and Centralism where everything was to be controlled from Mexico City. You can guess how people living on the outskirts of Mexico took to taxations and impositions of politicians from the center of the country. Sure, the US swooped on this, but you can bet the people in those territories were not particularly bothered, au contraire. Also you have to factor in that Mexicans have not felt particularly united as a nation until after our Revolutionary War in the 1900's
He didn’t make an economic argument, he made a social and political one about changes to culture. I support open borders for the same reason I support free trade but the idea that it would be anything but massively disruptive to most existing political settlements is a joke. The US fifty years after open borders would have a lot in common with before but the Roman Empire had a lot in common with the Republic too.
No way a welfare state, democracy and open borders go together. Open borders isn’t going to be costless for existing residents.
Borders are an authoritarian tool of control, so allusions to empire and talking about a democratic society with a safety net being unable to handle open borders is bizarre to say the least.
The entire point of the argument is that in aggregate the benefits outweigh the costs, not that it's costless.
> The entire point of the argument is that in aggregate the benefits outweigh the costs, not that it's costless.
True, if you don’t have the concept of community. If you do you value fellow members differently than non-members. From a net human welfare perspective the conquest and settlement of the Americas was pretty great. More people, richer people, healthier people, more educated people. Not so great for the people and peoples who were there before 1492 though.
> If you do you value fellow members differently than non-members.
This is where xenophobia comes from, nevermind the fact that however slice it (unless counting military action/colnialism as immigration, like you do) 'community members' are more likely to commit acts of violence on other community members than non-members.
> From a net human welfare perspective the conquest and settlement of the Americas was pretty great. More people, richer people, healthier people, more educated people. Not so great for the people and peoples who were there before 1492 though.
This is a rich example to use given what you're arguing for. Colonizers weren't immigrants, they were colonizers. Blaming the original inhabitants' border control (in a world where borders were very different than the ones we have today) for colonialism, and conflating modern-day migration with colonization, is disgusting.
If free trade ends up being bad for a country, it's much easier to change that compared to deporting some insane amount of people. Especially when the migrant home country can't even be determined.
Having a constant flow of immigrants is fine, however I think it's important to monitor how it affects the vitals of the country and not crash its welfare system etc.
- erosion of social trust due to conflicting cultures
- erosion of other social capital if immigrant culture has a higher time preference than native culture
- identity politics (people vote along ethnic rather than ideological lines)
Now, there are certainly benefits to immigration as well, but they must be put in balance.
I agree that trade and immigration have many parallels, but there is still a difference between an economic transaction at arms-distance vs. inviting someone into your home.
>>>Trying to associate immigration with disease is some vile rhetoric.
Cross-border population movements are a potential vector for disease transmission. Just look at the Google Scholar results from some similar searches, especially [1] and [2]. Casting objective physical science concerns as some sort of subjective expression of xenophobia is unhelpful to mitigating or solving real problems.
Yet no serious commentator advocates shutting down tourism out of concern for spread of disease, and it's long been found that the key to preventing infection outbreaks is to have a well-functioning medical system.
Probably because tourists move through very easily monitored access points. Not sure about the US, but most major airports in Asia have body-heat sensors to flag anyone who might be suffering from an infection-related fever. Similar controls should exist at all immigration points to the US. Implementing processes and technical systems to mitigate risk first requires acknowledging that the risk exists, and isn't just "vile rhetoric". Then we can reap the benefits of legal immigration while avoiding the negatives.
I've never knowingly been tested by any body heat sensor at an airport or other border crossing, and I've travelled plenty in Asia, USA, Europe, and in/out of my home country of Australia.
It’s hard to imagine how much use it would be; an active fever is only one indicator of whether someone is carrying an infectious illness, so such a test will lead to many false positives and negatives.
I'm fine with a sober discussion about the economic and moral pros/cons of immigration, and about fair and humane means of controlling immigration.
But this line of argument seems like a red herring.
>>>I've never knowingly been tested by any body heat sensor at an airport or other border crossing, and I've travelled plenty in Asia, USA, Europe, and in/out of my home country of Australia.
I guess they are easy to miss, they just look like camcorders on tripods, usually, but the checkpoints themselves and their purpose are usually clearly marked.
Both those links refer to specific infection outbreaks, that health authorities feared (rightly or wrongly) may escalate into global pandemics. Both were contained due mostly to medical systems implementing standard procedures for controlling outbreaks. Checking some people at some border crossings may have helped somewhat, but it was only one part of a much broader response.
The point stands; no recent, serious infectious outbreak can be blamed on immigration - authorised or not - any more than any can be blamed on tourism.
It's just not a serious part of the discussion, and it is likely invoked as an attempt to cast certain classes of foreigners as unclean and trigger susceptible people's disgust response.
>>>Checking some people at some border crossings may have helped somewhat, but it was only one part of a much broader response.
To clarify, the body-heat scans aren't "some people at some border crossings", they are literally every human who walks through the gate at most airports, including Incheon, Taipei, Narita, BKK, and Noi Bai (Hanoi). Usually just before the immigration checkpoints.
>>>The point stands; no recent, serious infectious outbreak can be blamed on immigration - authorised or not - any more than any can be blamed on tourism.
Handbook on Migration and Security, pg 320:
"The spread of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic...was facilitated by human mobility."[1]
Or look at the quarantines during the 2009 influenza pandemic[2]. Entire hotels quarantined and cruise ships diverted.
>>>likely invoked as an attempt to cast certain classes of foreigners as unclean and trigger susceptible people's disgust response.
I'm not trying to paint foreigners as "unclean". I AM a "foreigner". I'm an African-American living in Japan. I know exactly what being treated as an unclean underclass is like. I'm nevertheless able to rationally assess that the country's robust immigration controls are likely a major contributing factor to managing the assimilation rate of other cultures in order to maintain national stability.
But instead of responding with well-sourced and rational debate points you've instead lept to implications that I must just be a xenophobe who hates brown people.
Sorry to be slow replying to this, and to imply that I believed you personally were a xenophobe.
That's not what I thought or meant; I was referring more broadly to the motivations of many of the people who make this a primary focus of their anti-immigration argument, not accusing you personally of this.
To summarise my thoughts on this:
- The topic of immigration is one I've wrestled with and debated for well over a decade, since it became a big issue in Australia, and I've generally been the one railing at open-borders advocates, asking in exasperation "how does this work economically?"
- These days I don't get emotionally invested in positions on immigration, as it's an issue that's too big and complex for any strong opinion I might form to make any difference (and I've literally made myself sick by getting too emotionally invested in things in the past so I now take care to avoid doing that about any political issue).
- That said, my position on open-borders policies is that it sounds like a nice idea but the onus is on advocates to articulate a way in which it can work, economically and practically, and I haven't heard anyone do so convincingly.
- My objection to the focus on disease-spread as a risk of immigration it's just not a convincing argument, due to the fact that it's a concern that applies pretty much equally to tourism and authorised immigration [1], and it exposes the proponent to accusations of xenophobia - justifiably in many cases.
In short: I'm on the side of those who are skeptical about uncontrolled immigration; I just want all the arguments in the discussion to be convincing, and to avoid being derailed by arguments over xenophobia, which is inevitable when people cry "disease!" in the context of immigrants.
[1] I understand those prosecuting the argument above are focused on the risk of immigration that doesn't go through any kind of checkpoints where vetting can take place; but there are versions of open-borders systems that can still require passing through checkpoints and undergoing health checks if necessary.
> It's just not a serious part of the discussion, and it is likely invoked as an attempt to cast certain classes of foreigners as unclean and trigger susceptible people's disgust response.
The CDC literally has policies about who can be admitted to the U.S. as an immigrant or refugee based on their health status[1], including whether or not they are carrying a communicable disease (such as TB).
This unsubstantiated inference about other people's intentions is misguided at best, and disingenuous at worst.
So are you arguing that disease isn't a risk, or just that there is never a need to have border control to deal with it?
It is a risk, one that we can and do take into consideration. Anyone seeking to be a permanent resident in the U.S. is required to have certain vaccinations. That requires a certain level of border and immigration control to enforce.
Having a well-functioning medical system is good, but won't help much if your dealing with the spread of disease that isn't easily treatable. Or rather, quarantine is part of a well-functioning medical system. And yes, shutting down travel to/from certain countries experiencing a serious epidemic has been a real consideration in the past.
Look, I'm not saying "shut down the borders". All I'm saying is that completely open borders are impractical and ignores real risks.
> You can't expect your country to remain the same
Why would anyone want or expect their country to remain the same? Especially the US? There are massive problems here, with millions of people hurting every day. The current state of the US is not a nice place for tens of millions+ of its residents.
Stating that you'd expect a country to 'remain the same' is tantamount to stating you want the current horrible problems that presently plague our society to persist - with no action against them. That doesn't make any sense.
Things are awful right now. Thing should _not_ stay the same. Things should improve, and people should work every day to improve them.
> it's hard to take this kind of opinion seriously.
> Stating that you'd expect a country to 'remain the same' is tantamount to stating you want the current horrible problems that presently plague our society to persist - with no action against them. That doesn't make any sense.
This was the entire premise of the current president's platform; going back to before things "changed" and everything was "better"
Nonsense, and you don't believe that either. Otherwise you'd be arguing for hard borders between US states to preserve their unique character. Border politics are drive by racism, pure and simple. You may not be racist, but you should look into the history around the politics of this and the extreme right wingers that back the various anti-immigration front groups.
Are you implying that wanting to have a border is a belief that is "basically racism"? What you are doing is stretching and expanding the word "racism", which doesn't do anyone any good because you are diluting the real phenomenon, you make free speech harder, because suddenly you call many more phenomenon "racist", you alienate a lot of people who would even agree with you otherwise - you are basically corrupting your language.
This is not a good thing for any cause, this is just a tool that is used in a political debate to try to win arguments through linguistical tricks, not through real arguments.
It becomes a bit of a tragedy of the commons. People elect awful governments who promise paradise and country’s economy craters resulting in mass exodus (Venezuela).
Why should Colombians or Chileans (or Americans) shoulder their poor choices of government and civil society?
If some country wants to grow unsustainably and follow unhealthy land use habits and then have problems, why should others shoulder that (outside of unforeseen natural) disasters?
You should not..Nobody will force you.But as a Venezuelan is my duty to mention some reasons to counterbalance your POV:
1- No country is an homogenous group.In the case of Venezuela after Chavez first election the country basically was splitted 50/50 . In Maduro's case the split is easily 90/10 against him.When you refuse to help venezuelans you refuse to help a gigantic group of people who did not choose Maduro at all,either because they never voted for him.or because they were/are minors and unable to vote at all.
2) Funny you mention Chileans and Colombians 2 groups that were received in mass by Venezuela.Chileans fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship and Colombians fleeing from poverty and the historical violence there. To be fair to those countries they have returned the favor in a gesture I hope will never be forgotten. When I see my nieces aged 4 and 1 living happily in Chile there are no words to express the magnitude of the gratitude we will always have with Chile.
3) Venezuela is.not an isolated country. We in South America have an incipient integration model a la UE. This give us Veezuelans the right to settle in certain countries (Ar,Br,Uy,Py) by just complying with basic requisites.If markets are going to be free an open ,the.movement of.person should be too. Many venezuelans also have European citizenship ,being the children and grandchildren of thousands of Italians,Spaniards and Portugueae who made Venezuela their home and helped to form its culture.
4) This should.not count but, stil.Venezuelans have a very high rate.of tertiary education for the region and most of the migrants seek to integrate themselves in the adopted country in the regular job market. The migrant influx ( especially if controlled by checking crimer records) is a net positive for the receiving country.
> If markets are going to be free an open ,the.movement of.person should be too.
Facts.
Thanks for coming on here and helping balance the rampant xenophobia in this thread. Please know that some of us in the USA are aware of how our government has treated and continues to treat the Western hemisphere, and that we're doing the best we can to change it.
Unfortunately, comments like the one you replied to reflect the majority opinion. Or at least the more vocal one.
No problem. I understand that with the model we have right now (nation-states with closed borders) most people do not like to receive migrants for certain valid and not-so-valid reasons. I just wanted to provide the perspective from the migrants point of view.
Maybe I am naive, but I like to think that if we dont destroy ourselves first, in some moment in the future (100-1000 years) the earth will belong to all of us, so a person from Africa could visit Yellowstone, Montreal and Stamford Bridge without giving their dignity away in a visa process. Same for an American going or settling in Beijing , Vladivostok or Brasilia.
By that logic, should we not confine the residents of West Virginia to their home state as its coal-based economy collapses? Or should we allow them to move to other parts of the country to seek jobs so that they can lead happier, more productive lives?
Fortunately, for West Virginia, they joined the union and as such we help each other out since they are under federal regulation and are taxed at the federal level.
If we let New Mexico in, why not? Obviously it would require harmonization in many regards, just as we’d require from Canada. Obviously it would have to go through whatever formal process they have in addition to our own process —which typically involves becoming a territory, etc.
I don’t think I’d want to go beyond North America as then it would gather enough momentum to enable a one world government. I don’t think we need that. Nations should be free to follow self determination. A one world gov would not allow that.
Now, Greenland, being a small pop., would be much easier to incorporate into the Union than a Canada or a Mexico.
No, we should try and fix the area and make it better. Throwing your arms up and saying "fuck it, we're leaving" is understandable on an individual level, but on a societal level the effects are devastating.
The US has been very hands on with South American politics (and not only those), so pretending now like their current state is solely the consequence of their own poor choices is ignorant at best.
The US has had hands in Chile and Panama. They’re doing pretty well. We haven’t touched Argentina or Uruguay or Bolivia. Uruguay is doing well, the other two not so much. The U.K. and France and others had their hands in the US, we’ve done okay. [and let’s not ignore the lengths the USSR went to try and destabilize us as well].
It’s not what someone has done to you, it’s what you do for yourself.
Look at S Korea, Taiwan, etc. they were very much poorer than Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, etc. They had little in way of natural resources, but with grit and determination they overcame despite being occupied and decimated by imperial Japan, they helped themselves. They didn’t have the best governments initially, yet they have done very very well. It’s not about who invaded you or had you as a vassal state, etc., it’s what you do for yourself that really matters. Singapore is another.
Compared to others on the list who have overcome? Taiwan, Singapore, S Korea, Qatr (looking at you VZ), Panama, Chile. At some point they have to realize they need to help themselves and forge a future.
The point countering the parent comment is that the country didn't fall apart. Since it is not an inevitable outcome, the US shouldn't get all the blame. European and Asian countries also suffered heinous acts of subjugation and total war but they do not have an inevitable permanent incapability as a result.
Concerning Pinochet - despite his many abuses, in a pragmatic sense he did improve the country's stability relative to the actions of other South American leaders, and stopped a popular slide into socialism by showing that free markets can also create prosperity. Note that his successors kept most of his economic policies intact due to their efficacy and popularity.
I don't have any problem with someone being a republican or a conservative, but I can't and couldn't understand why someone would support a person like our current POTUS.
88% of Republicans think that Trump has done a good job as president, so if you think supporting Trump is not okay, then you basically do have a problem with someone being a Republican.
Why muddy things? His approval rating isn’t analogous to 40% of our population’s support. It’s the support of individuals who bothered to spend time entertaining the poll. He has a very consistent approval rating with his base but you sound like the PR announcement after one of his rallies with inflated attendance counts.
Polls are usually pretty good at correcting for response rates. Claiming he has a 40% approval rating is hardly the sort of statistic that would be at a rally!
My point is: if it's a natural phenomenon, it obviously isn't artificial. Animals do it, it wasn't invented by humans for some arbitrary reason. Pretending that it was leads to confused thinking.
Is everyone in silicon valley a flaaaaaming, communist level liberal? At least Hacker news is frightening so, and I believe a lot of commenters here live in California and work on the industry. I mean, I live in Brazil and it shocks me to see that the mighty US, the bastion of freedom and capitalism, can harbour such idiotic ideas.
For various reasons, I'm slightly sketched out by pretty much every company I've heard of that is named after something from Lord of the Rings. Even when I don't think they're contributing to a dystopian surveillance state (à la Palantir and this one), you have the other HN front-page story about Mithril Capital being accused of mismanaging investor funds.
Is there some weird self-selection that causes only certain types of people to name their companies that way?
Edit: I was looking for a list of companies named after LOTR and apparently the link that connects all of them is that they're owned or heavily invested in by Peter Thiel.
Well, Gollum did preserve the principal for hundreds of years, before becoming the victim of a thief, through no fault of his own. I'd at least consider investing.
I like that I’ve never heard about the Tolkien estate threatening lawsuits. It’s hard to imagine that there aren’t licensing fees in place but I’d love to read an article about the amount of money it takes to name your company Anduril (or Palantir).
In principle, nothing. In practice, current policy at the southern US border is directly responsible for acts which are unconscionably cruel and inhumane.
Separating children, babies and toddlers from their parents. Keeping children in bed-less, 24/7 lit rooms. Not giving sanitary pads to menstruating girls, etc. The list of atrocities is growing, depressing and unforgivable. Apprehended migrants are treated in ways that most humans would consider too cruel for dogs.
It is because of these policies that enforcing border security is immoral. Because of these policies, any increase in enforcement has a direct, causal, traceable and immediate consequence of increasing human suffering.
"Law and order vs chaos" is a false dichotomy. There can be peaceful lawlessness and cruel law and everything in between.
Anduril, anyone working there, and anyone backing them, will now be directly responsible for an increase in human suffering. I will never pitch A16Z again.
By that logic, doesn't someone also support "unhumane practices" if they do any kind of work or subcontract to US government? If you group everything together, then anyone supporting US is "directly responsible for an increase in human suffering". Does that really look like sound logic to you?
Of course not. I don't think there's anything in my comment that would suggest that.
My comment was explicitly about: inhumane acts done to apprehended migrants and building technology to apprehend more migrants. Those seem very connected.
Does the manufacturer of cars that they provide for the border patrol contribute to the "increase of suffering"? This technology is directly related to apprehending more migrants, in fact those cars are used on the ground to do that exact thing. Some of those cars are used to separate children from families by driving them away. To clarify, my point is if you see such technology as directly related, then cars would also be directly related?
>>>Separating children, babies and toddlers from their parents.
You mean the same thing we do with American citizens who commit crimes? [1]
>>>> Keeping children in bed-less, 24/7 lit rooms. Not giving sanitary pads to menstruating girls, etc. The list of atrocities is growing, depressing and unforgivable. Apprehended migrants are treated in ways that most humans would consider too cruel for dogs.
Additional funding would help, but the same politicians criticizing the conditions also ....voted against additional funding! [2] It's almost like they aren't interested in actually solving problems....
As an aside, the US isn't alone in first-world countries with harsh immigration prisons.[3][4] Pretty much every gaijin I know understands the importance of "staying on the level" with regards to the immigration authorities here because the prisons are terrifying.
>>> Because of these policies, any increase in enforcement has a direct, causal, traceable and immediate consequence of increasing human suffering.
Or you could put personal responsibility on the people who chose to leave their homes at great personal risk, exposing themselves to life-threatening dangers.[5] <---that couple both had steady employment in El Salvador. Do you consider their decision to leave their (meager) economic situation and expose their children to danger immoral?
Have you seen interviews with some of the detained African aliens?[6] There are NGOs feeding these people propaganda about how the US will take care of them, provide for them, and give them money. If anything, those organizations and people are directly responsible for deceiving unfortunate populations and skewing their risk analysis in order to convince them to undertake an objectively-dangerous course of action. Are you going to directly hold them accountable for human suffering, as well?
Big fan of the iron curtain, then? The way borders between North Korea and China/SK are secured too? Protesters being shot to death at the Gaza Strip borders? That's fine?
There have to be reasonable limits to how you secure your border and whether you violate international and local laws to do it. The US border is currently being "secured" by ignoring lots of laws and treaties we agreed to re: asylum seekers and people seem to be OK with that even though the result is dead or horribly ill asylum seekers who have done literally nothing wrong.
Does stealing children from asylum seekers when they apply at ports of entry and then losing them count as safe entrance? Because we've been doing that.
MLK said something along the lines of, there is no problem with just laws (such as those upholding border security), but there is a problem when they’re applied unjustly.
There is nothing wrong, all other things being equal, with enforcing border security. I think this is where your perspective comes from. Nations have sovereignty. Therefore, they can enforce their borders. If all else actually was equal, it would be a sensible argument.
However, this new “virtual border fence” does not exist in a vacuum. The current administration - and the prior administration - has ramped up immigration enforcement efforts, in many cases tearing apart families who have lived in the U.S. for many years, had kids, jobs, etc., causing immense pain. Billions and billions spent to remove hardworking residents from the country and place them back across an imaginary line. Why? Because “law and order”. How will your children sleep, if an illegal immigrant is working night shifts to send money back home to his struggling family? The response (e.g. ICE raids, children in prison camps separated from parents without medical care/showers/hygiene, increased enforcement causing more dangerous crossings resulting in drowning) is clearly disproportional to the crime, even if you see illegal immigration as criminal and unjust. The “virtual fence” exists in context with all of these other realities. Perhaps you can see why myself and the parent commenter aren’t exactly cheery about our nation’s innovative, synergistic solution to border enforcement. All of the unjust measures mentioned above (minus perhaps more ICE raids) will be easier than ever to do. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / with such efficient surveillance measures in ‘t!”
Even if you see the startling conditions/extensive surveillance measures as justified and deserved of people thrust into difficult circumstances beyond their control, the current administration is clearly incompetent and untrustworthy in the task of implementing such a border fence system. Do we really trust the people who separated parents and children without keeping track of which child belongs to which parents will use such a system in a just manner? I seriously doubt it, and therefore I doubt any argument implying that all enforcement measures can be justified because “order”. Breaking the law does not make you subhuman, and no new measure exists in a theoretical vacuum of just intentions.
>Yeah but we're not discussing those other issues. We're specifically discussing using technology to enforce borders.
You can't remove Anduril from the cultural context it was born in. Handwaving away his entire post "because we are not discussing those other issues" is a cheap cop-out. Its akin to saying Facebook shouldn't have an instropective look at the way it collects data because "elections are other unrelated issues."
We agree that sovereign nations should be allowed to enforce its borders. But for what reason should technology like Anduril be funded and exist? It's more likely this technology is used in an Orwellian manner than in whatever noble "enforcing borders" principle you believe in.
I did not say I want illegal immigration to be legal. I agree with nemothekid’s other reply.
As I said earlier, nothing exists in a vacuum. I am arguing that the U.S. government’s immigration enforcement apparatus is consistently unjust. Saying, “Oh but that’s not what we’re talking about” saddens me. That is exactly what we are talking about, only looking ahead at a new way for injustice to occur.
It is absolutely reasonable for you and I to consider who the people are who will be using this privacy-invasive technology. Increasingly, I am disappointed by the tech world’s lack of ethical awareness and foresight for these kinds of issues. The outcome won’t be “border += cool new virtual fence”. It will be “border += virtual fence” plus the bad side effects that come from making immigration enforcement more powerful, as I argued above.
On the other hand, maybe all that ethical stuff is just B.S. and all actions should be taken without thinking of consequences or context. Indeed, the world is a bit like Haskell - all pure and no side effects! Just a promising startup with some kick-ass tech ready to disrupt shit!
Think of all the marketing opportunities there are in this sort of evil. It's so positively lucrative.
You could televise drone camera footage and have bets on which drones shoot the most fleeing brown people. You could have an e-sports league, but instead of playing Star Craft you could have nationally recognized "players" manning the drones. People would fill stadiums!
You could even, with a little thought on the tech stack, have machine gun turrets that the public could operate for $20 for 20 minutes. Hell they could do it through the internet from the comfort of their bunker. So long as the turrets were pointed south there wouldn't be any risk of any of the "important" people being killed.
Maybe this is too off topic for HN, but I'm genuinely curious what is the best argument for why it is bad/racist to enforce immigration laws? I've heard people argue that a wall won't be effective. But some people seem to have the view that immigration laws shouldn't be enforced at all and we should allow people to use whatever loopholes (refugee status, traveling w/ children) there are to get in and then not show up for their court hearing. Im genuinely puzzled that this is so controversial.
I'll bite because I'm ambivalent about immigration laws. Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out? You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country, not everyone is interested in activism, why should this be the fight of their life instead of stuff they actually want to do? You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.
I like the idea of a fundamental human right to "mobility". In the grand scheme of things a human being should be able to move anywhere as long as they obey local laws, pay local taxes, etc.
The standard counterargument is that not allowing mobility is what enabled us to have any nice places to begin with, in an "ant and grasshopper" way. Building a "nice" and affluent country is generally a multigenerational project involving plenty of individual sacrifice for the sake of a future that the sacrificing individuals will rarely themselves experience. If Norwegians knew that they all could move to any country they choose at their pleasure at all times, why would they save their oil money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of quitting work, blowing it all on blackjack and hookers right now, then taking out the greatest national credit line their country can secure to buy some more blackjack and hookers, and relocate a few 100km into Sweden once it's all used up? Knowing that the Norwegians would be thinking along those lines, what would stop the Swedes from racing to beat them onto the blackjack-and-hookers train?
Now, in reality, Norwegians and Swedes are sufficiently similar and familiar with each other that they probably would be able to predict the other's actions and jointly avoid racing to the bottom, but could you say this about, say, Germans and Egyptians, for more complex downward spirals than "burn through our assets faster than the others get to"? Add to it that the short-sighted policies that actually make the difference between successful and failed countries rarely are so straightforwardly bad as buying blackjack and hookers: more commonly, we'll be talking about economic experiments, corruption and kickbacks for interest groups, and really a handful of policies where we still can't confidently say if they were actually good for a given polity in the long run (space programmes, social programmes , infrastructure megaprojects...), but have to rely on history to naturally select for political processes that crystallise better instincts for their selection.
In less abstract terms, I think that especially many right-leaning Americans feel that Latin-American socialism gets close to being an instance of "blackjack and hookers" in the sense of the above metaphor, and in the same vein Germans feel that Levantine... sectarianism?... does. (As in, sitting down and negotiating a sustainable peace with people from other ethnic groups who might be heretics and devil-worshippers is the hardship-and-sacrifice option, whereas using any momentary advantage to enrich your friends and blow up infidels is short-term fun.)
This counterargument conveniently ignores the history of 'European colonization of America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the colonies into the United States of America [0]'.
I'm not the most well-versed on these topic (colonization / mobility) but it would seem that that mobility is what helped shape America into what it is today rather than "not allowing mobility".
Well, the original autochthonous inhabitants of Americas would almost certainly preferred to be left alone than getting the Germs, Gold, and Guns "gifts" from the explorers and colonists...
Come on Norway, cheer up. You're wonderful people. I don't believe you'd all go on blackjack-and-hooker downward spirals if your government gave you freedom. Throw off the yoke of state tyranny. Your countries are nice places due to the virtues of your people, not your governments. I had a Norwegian roommate for about a year, here in California. I have to admit I found it a little creepy how her government would do things like keep calling her on the phone every few weeks, to find out what she was doing, how much money she was making, etc. I also got the impression that some of the ideas she was exposed to, in her childhood environment, were going to make it much harder for her to thrive in an economic environment like California, versus an oil rich country like Norway. Very sad, almost like a limiting of potential.
Because a country is not a house. The analogy is fundamentally flawed. Our government can provide for immigrants in ways that individuals simply cannot.
Governments provide nothing. They make someone else provide.
If the government needs a couch, they don’t poof a couch into existence and everyone’s happy. They either take your couch or have someone sit down and make one.
It’s bizarre though how many people think governments can simply “provide”. America now can’t even provide for all the struggling people who already live there. You could argue that they could redefine their priorities and focus on immigrants, but that comes at a cost of something else, and people affected by those cuts would not be happy.
Not really. Your ancestors worked hard to improve the environment you were born in. It wasn't luck that created western civilization, it was the hard work and ingenuity of the generations that came before us.
> Sure, but none of that has anything to do with you or your accomplishments which is where luck enters the equation as to your starting place.
We didn't earn it, but we were given it by our ancestors. While it does behoove us to be generous, it is still ours by right. We also have an obligation to our descendants to preserve it for them.
What good is it working to improve the fate of our descendants, if it is only going to be taken away from them because they didn't "earn" it?
Yes you were given it, which means you were lucky in what you received. By all means try to do the same for your descendants I didn't say anything to the contrary, just that they would be lucky in the same way
> Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out
What about someone born in a Mississippi housing project where everyone around them is illiterate? Or in some rust belt slum with drug-addicted parents? What about someone simply unable to get the mental health they need so they end up living on Skid Row?
Lots of people are born into very shitty circumstances, and if we have problems taking care of American citizens I don't see how you can make the argument we need to open our borders for everyone in the world born in tough circumstances.
>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.
Yes, thats life? Of course where there is abundance we ought to use it to fix the unfairness. But life is unfair.
I think it comes down to where do we actually draw the line of abundance. Some feel we're well past it, enough that we shouldn't even have borders, others feel we aren't even close and ought to be quite selective of who gets to stay.
>>>You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country,
Uh, yes I can. The US exists because the population staged a rebellion. I don't find it unconscionable to expect others to undertake the same effort our forebears did to improve their situation.
>>>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.
Some of us are also taller than average as well, which is directly correlated with total career earnings. Sheer luck and unfair. Outcomes will ALWAYS vary due to the inherent genetic variations and capabilities in the human population.
There's a tragedy of the commons problem. While I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to move your family from a poorer country to the US, if in theory every person who wanted to do this did do this - from every country (Latin America or otherwise) - it'd eventually become unsustainable. At least not without a huge government program to try to manage it all, which may or may not succeed. Another issue is that criminal organizations can try to exploit this for their own gain, to the detriment of all, and it can become harder and harder to detect or prevent this as the rate increases.
Perhaps we'll eventually be in a future where surplus and government and security improvements makes this much easier to manage, and then maybe more countries will start moving to a more open-borders / global union model, but that future is probably at least a century away (probably several centuries). I think we should strive for that future, but that we should also accept pragmatic reality until it happens.
And I do think we should probably increase the amount of families we currently accept every year. Especially war refugees. Totally eliminating national boundaries is very different from that, though.
If a sizable fraction of a country started to leave or plan on leaving, it could also force these countries to get their shit together to become more attractive and retain them. Similar to what we have now with counter-measures to brain drains.
If anything, I think they'd just be relieved that dissenters are leaving while true believers / "patriotic citizens" are staying put. Makes politics a lot easier. But I'm sure the reaction would vary a lot by country.
I was wondering about this topic not long ago as well and came across this article: http://dieoff.com/page99.htm (not sure if that's the original link I saw but it is the same paper).
Basically it's about there being a curve for population size vs standard of living. We can't control the size of the population for the entire world, but a country can for themselves.
I don't really have much of an opinion on it, and can't say whether the article is bunk, but I did find it an interesting read.
If our immigration laws were sane and humane I’d feel better about enforcing them, but sometimes laws are so unjust that the right thing to do is violate them.
It’s funny that you’ll see people on one hand talk about the laws Uber breaks or laws on piracy as bullshit inconveniences that need to be disrupted and on the other hand talk about immigration law as if it was holy writ.
Your question is quite loaded and rests upon false premises - for example, your assertion that people don't show up for court hearings rehashes an anti-immigrant trope that has little basis in fact. Attendance rates are actually quite high, close to 100% for those who have attorneys and still high even for those who don't: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/
It's a deep complex subject that can't be summed up in a short (or even a long) comment. If your understanding of it is based on misleading tropes that you've heard from pundits or political figures, it might be worth taking up the issue as a research project or taking some classes so that you are not taken in by slanderous misinformation.
I think you've been misinformed. The trac study is looking at people who have been here for years who have been going through the system. They show up to court at very high rates.
The "don't show up for court" people were part of a program by the EOIR (which is part of the DOJ) to expedite the cases of newly arrived family units in 10 cities. They very largely did not show up. You can read about it here:
It's not bad or racist to enforce immigration laws. Very few people in America support legitimately open borders and I do not either; the only ones that do are purist libertarians. Faux concern for these issues however is a hammer used by bad and, yes, racist people in order to batter people who are overwhelmingly poorer and non-white.
There is no evidence that a physical wall is a necessary investment and there are zero lives improved by separating children from their families as a "deterrent" during a massive humanitarian crisis.
A decade ago, I used to think that the Republican concern over illegal immigration (which is absolutely a legitimate concern), was truly out of concern for those exploited by the system and out of concern for the American worker. I thought that those calling this concern as "anti immigrant" were being disingenuous. Of course, that was before I realized people like Stephen Miller are really saying the quiet part loud these days.
As I understand it, separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children. This is because of court decisions which say children can't be detained more than 20 days. The alternative is to just release the parents and children and tell them to show up for their court date, which they usually don't do. So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders.
The humanitarian crisis at the border is caused by lots of people showing up at the border, right? It seems like the only way to stop the crisis then is to get people to stop showing up at the border, and the only way to do that is to enforce immigration laws. Is there another answer?
> separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children.
We've spent 230+ years having borders without separating children at gunpoint to give up for adoption [0]. It was explicitly called a deterrent by Jeff Sessions [1]. The cruelty is the point.
the argument is mostly that it gives people white guilt to enforce immigration because most of the immigrants are non-white. and the people supporting the unlimited migration don’t have to deal with the consequences themselves
it also wins millions of future and current hispanic votes by pandering
Why super-villain? This is a responsible alternative vs. building a monstrous, ugly wall that is a travesty to nature and could potentially save taxpayers billions. We still need to protect our borders but we need to do it in the most non-invasive way with technology.
People illegally present in the US cannot work legally. That means they work under the table and are subject to all sorts of abuse, and their presence promotes gray market/black market economies.
While I think it is unfair to deport people who have been here for decades and giving them amnesty (again, like we did in the 1980s) is a reasonable solution especially for those who were kids when they came here, I don’t have any problem with stopping new people from crossing illegally.
If we want to increase immigration we should do it the right way by raising legal quotas and allowing people to come via the visa process.
So let people have work permits as long as they don't commit serious crimes and the illegal work problem goes away. There is no necessity for the control freakery that has driven much immigration policy in recent years.
1. People entering the country outside of defined points of entry. We can't issue a work permit to people we don't know are here. Anduril's products are meant to address these gaps in the border, which should lead to all traffic being forced to official points of entry.
2. Illegals who commit crimes get released.[1] Sometimes released domestically, sometimes deported. Some of the deported ones return. Which brings us back to #1.
That's not propaganda, it's a legal term. Casting commonly accepted terms of the relevant lexicon in a political light only reveals your own political bias.
Recasting legal terminology into dehumanizing nouns is a propaganda technique. It's very obvious that you're here to grind an axe and your axe is a style I'm very familiar with.
That’s open borders and it isn’t a popular policy with the country, which is why it hasn’t happened. (I don’t think any first world country has such a policy, the USA is hardly alone here)
People are worried that a dramatic rise in immigrants willing to work for less (since it’s still better off than their home countries) would undercut their jobs by affecting the supply/demand relationship of the labor market.
I’m not sure unrestricted immigration could work but I think we could increase the numbers of visas we do give out by some number less than unlimited.
Name one country with better-than-average standard of living that has opened its borders and thrived. There will always be a wall around something nice — either around your house, or your neighborhood, or your country.
The United States itself had "open borders" for a long period of time. There was mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and many other places and it worked out quite well for us.
Even today, we have "open borders" within the US. People are free to move from from poor (or poorly run) communities to places with more opportunities and it's a win-win.
Similarly Europe has 26 countries in the Shengen area. Some of the countries have a "better-than-average standard of living" and they're doing just fine.
> The United States itself had "open borders" for a long period of time. There was mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and many other places and it worked out quite well for us.
There was no welfare state back then, and the economic situation was vastly different. Also saying it went "quite well" looks over all of the ethnic tension that took decades to fix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans#Discrimination
> Similarly Europe has 26 countries in the Shengen area. Some of the countries have a "better-than-average standard of living" and they're doing just fine.
Do you live in Europe? Schengen is only about passport control at the border, but any EU citizen had the right to work in the UK, no visa required. Eastern European workers lowering wages and quality of work for most British tradesmen and low skilled workers is probably the main reason for Brexit.
This is completely unresponsive to the comment you’re replying to. Canada is extremely far from having open borders, controls temporary and permanent immigration vigorously and doesn’t border any poor countries anywhere with substance populations.
LOL! Canada does not have even close to open borders. They have refugees and they have merit immigration which has been decried as racist in the US. Merit immigration needs a better ambassador than Trump. Perhaps Bernie Sanders.
This. Things are not good everywhere in the world right now, we have to make trade offs. Humanity will progress and eventually things will be much much fairer, where we could have all of these things simultaneously, but we've got a long way to go as a species.
To add further, it would be horrible if inequality were perpetuated forever. But we have made a lot of progress by instituting liberal order and Western values in our own demarcated nations. This order is uplifting the world and other nations are able to copy it at their own pace. To eliminate the demarcations threatens a race to the bottom wherein the system has to accept people who do not know how to participate in our way of life, in greater numbers than it can accept.
If you think open borders and ongoing orderly nationare an option you're wrong.
Whoever walks into your nation will shape it. Your children's voices don't matter. There are far more children outside the country than in it and democracy can't work with open borders.
I think for most any given policy you could find some constellation of trade-offs and counterbalances that would make it work. Maybe for a certain value of "work" because in many cases those trade-offs would have to violate values or principles that we consider more important.
I think that a nation could in theory have open borders and prosper, but the trade-offs would have to be such that only like-minded people who can fit in and succeed would have an incentive to immigrate. This means that their children's voices would be saying the same thing as your children's, but there would be e.g. no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.
So I agree with you that borders are preferable, but I don't think getting rid of them is totally impossible, but I do think that doing so would be even worse for the compassion that makes people want to in the first place.
>I think that a nation could in theory have open borders and prosper, but the trade-offs would have to be such that only like-minded people who can fit in and succeed would have an incentive to immigrate.
You have no control over who comes in when you build a system that requires like minded people.
It makes it just as easy for people completely against those like minds to come in, in any number, and vote with equal voice.
If you have a successful nation/economy, people will want to come whether like minded or not.
>This means that their children's voices would be saying the same thing as your children's, but there would be e.g. no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.
The Cartels would take over the the southern united states in a hurry. It would turn the "border" into a series of criminal empires even beyond what exists now. Asian and other gangs would experience massive surges as they import members from overseas.
Insane policies that have no connection to reality and assume there are no bad people.
>no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.
while I agree that you cannot incentivize "free riders", I don't think your system is viable with open borders either way.
You will be conquered and you will have no national unity because everyone will bring with them their own ideals and concepts, regardless of your belief that only people who agree with you will come.
And it will be a massive betrayal of your citizens to give away their future to anyone who walks in, all in a massive
self sabotaging effort of malignant empathy.
No, it's just: if you can't provide a solution, there is a lot of money to be made in prolonging the problem. The climate in the U.S. is xenophobic, so there will be dollars to be spent (wasted) on companies who sell technobabble.
By technobabble do you mean all the tech companies that claim they are "changing the world" by whatever it is they are doing? I've seen so many "content platforms" that claim to be "revolutionizing" or "democratizing" or whatever other buzzword you like, access to data, when in reality, they're doing no such thing.
No. I met Thiel a decade ago and he struck me as very reactionary then. While I admire his intellect and he had valid critiques of how government operates at this point in history I felt many of his arguments were facile and self-serving. I've moved quite a bit to the left since then, but that was my contemporaneous impression rather than my current opinion of him.
I find it ironic that Andreessen tweeted this yesterday:
"If you’re on the right side of the issue, just keep driving until you hear glass breaking. Don’t quit." —T. Boone Pickens, founder of Mesa Petroleum, RIP
I'd love to say I wish them well, but I hope this company goes out of business due to a public outrage. But they'll always find someone to sell to, like authoritarian governments, and make money hand-over-fist.