5 ms·

Why can't a person be opposed to mass immigration even if it won't bring economic benefits? I'm not in UK frankly, but I'm definitely ready to sacrifice part o

Why can't a person be opposed to mass immigration even if it won't bring economic benefits? I'm not in UK frankly, but I'm definitely ready to sacrifice part of my income if that would curb mass immigration. Unfortunately, nobody ever proposed so.

thebokehwokeh2 10y ago
Ok. I'll bite on this one. Why are you opposed to mass immigration?
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  First of all, nobody asked me. I feel excluded from decisions on this policy and you can see how this amplifies my hostility to it. Because even if we have a debate on mass immigration and I lose every argument, I'm still entitled to have my vote weighted. Is it my country or whose it is? By default I don't owe people of other countries anything. It's our common right to let them in; but it's also our common right to kindly ask them to stay outside. That's the basic outline, and I'll try and explain my unique reservations in another comment. UPD to the sibling comment: It's not that I have any obligations to not be a racist. Maybe I am. Maybe I am not. Maybe I'm racist on even days and not racist on odd. I my country I have rights to be whatever pleases me. On other hand, if you want me to not be a racist, or at least not act as racist, you have to tell me what's in it for me.
- lkrubner 10y ago
  I admire your willingness to be open minded and ask the question, but I've asked the question in the past, and I've never gotten a straight answer. Instead I get some pat pre-package talking points, and if I dig deeper I get a confusion of ideas. And that's because the people opposed to immigration tend to be motivated by racism, but they don't want to say that, so they every other imaginable thing. It's simply impossible to have an honest conversation with someone, if they aren't willing to be honest about why they favor a particular policy.
  - moultano 10y ago
    Isn't self-interest enough of an explanation? Mass-immigration is unlikely to be a short term benefit to the host country, particularly to low skill workers in that country. Why should they oppose their own self interest? (I'm personally a very pro-immigration American, so I'm talking about this to understand the debate not to advance any particular objective.)
    - thebokehwokeh2 10y ago
      Self-interest is a valid explanation. And the question you pose is a very valid statement. I am sure that immigration poses problems when it is at the scale of modern society. Not everyone shares the same values and beliefs but the optimist in me is the of the thinking that humanity is no longer the tribal, "us vs them", neanderthal who only sticks to persons who visually look like them. The United States of America was built on this idea and it thrives today. What I've noticed is that this issue of different-ness, seems only to surface when money or resources are scarce. The global rich are getting richer and richer, but counter-intuitively, this resource hoarding is not visible to the masses, who see a huge influx of new "different" people. These people will "potentially" take their jobs and their benefits, and then they "potentially" will bomb their buildings and rape their daughters and wives, because they are the boogeyman. What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share.
      - rdtsc 10y ago
        > What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share. It is not either or. Why are there all of the sudden a lot of "different" people around, hmm strange? Is that correlated with wealth redistribution? Is there a causal relationship, or are they completely orthogonal phenomena that those who are wealthy just use to distract the masses? I agree with wealth disparity, but I am hesitant to buy the "racism" slant here (which I think I detect. i.e. people who don't want immigrant just hate people with a different skin). Countries and cultures still exist. Scots are different than Englishmen. They almost voted to leave as well. We don't and probably will never live as a one universal, global, happy country, all citizens of the earth, singing peace songs together, dreaming of exploring space and so on. Now, I wish it was that. Sort of a world wide cataclim or aliens invading, I don't see that happening. People have been and will be tribal. It is a pretty well ingrained instict. And people will want to preserve their tribe's identity, culture, language and so on. Perhaps many see immigrants eroding that. That doesn't have to be tied to skin color. Painting it as racism discredits and that make your argument a bit too superficial.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  Now to the specific. The country in question is Russia and mass immigrants mostly come from Ukraine, Caucasus and Central Asia. People from Ukraine, and fellow Russians coming home, I have no reservations against. They're as good cultural fit as anybody already in the country. I'll make the process smoother if I could. People from Caucasus, they're often poor cultural fit. They're first to bend laws, they're sometimes violent, they form diasporas faciliating ethnic crime and corruption. Will definitely have at least visa regime introduced with their countries, to only let people in either as tourists or on definite work/enterpreneur visas. People from Central Asia. Those are poor countries, and less than 25 years ago they participated in ethnic cleansings against any non-title nations in their own newly-born nationalistic republics. Drove millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, Koreans etc as refugees out. Why should we turn blind eye on this? Never forget I'd say. But instead policy makers can't even implement visa regime with those countries. Many of them are also islamic, poor cultural fit, not speaking Russian, praising "traditional values". Who would like neighbours like that? What do they have to offset that? They also avoid paying taxes, and business employing them also avoids paying taxes by never reporting people they employ. They siphon tens of billions dollars from our economy to their countries. What's there to love? Have to repeat again that I have no obligations whatsoever to let them in. "Default Deny" sounds just right. After all, that's exactly what I'm getting WRT entering US or EU or UK.
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    Are you Russian ? Russia already has Muslim republics, like Bashkortostan.
    - guard-of-terra 10y ago
      Yes I am Russian. First of all, they're (Bashkirs, Tatars) mostly "culturally muslim" - as in, while having preference for mosques and green color, they, en masse, drink wine; have no objections against drawings; equal rights, education and employment for women. Not trying to stone people dead. Good culture fit. People from Central Asia - another kind of muslim. Much less desired if you ask me. Second, if we have something, doesn't imply we want more of it. I'm quite content with muslim staying minority.
rdtsc 10y ago
It is interesting that you got downvoted without a reason. You asked a question and it didn't seem obscene or mean. It just didn't toe the line here, and well "down with you!" I saw someone below basically saying everyone who opposes immigration is a racist deep down. It seems people are pretty angry at the moment, so they jump straight to the "r" word. Can understand that. Anyway, I see the point. Yeah I am immigrant as well to US. It was a very hard process and very painful, more than it needs to be. But I understand that national identity, culture, borders, are there now and will stay there. Opposing immigration is something countries can decide and should be able to decide one, so yes, I can see immigration specifically being a reason many would vote based on (well, I don't just see, they clearly did vote already).
AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
You can be opposed to whatever you like. Voicing your sentiment will, however, shine a light upon your understanding of the world. Maybe you could ask "Why do people think that I'm a bad person if I'm against mass immigration?" Assuming this comes closer to your request, I will try to answer that. But I will have to digress a bit, so please bear with me. I have the feeling that how you see the world is very much characterised by whether you are (what I call) an inclusionist or an exclusionist. Let me explain what I mean by that. Since we're on HN, I will use an analogy that might be up your alley. In CS, there is something called local search [1] for optimisation problems. The basic idea is: let's say, we have a number of states and we want to find the best one. And let's say, we have a method of determining how "good" a state is. A simple approach would be to start at some state, look around at the neighbour states and pick the better one. Then we move to that state and look around again. And so on, until we're at a state that is surrounded by only less or equally "good" states. The problem with this method is that we might end up in a local maximum or on a plateau, but we're stuck there forever. To get past that, we can choose a random state now and then. This is what simulated annealing [2] does or the mutation in genetic algorithms [3]. Even though at times we might be distracted from the best state right in front of us by following serendipity, this strategy is overall superior to the myopic, greedy strategy. This is an interesting insight: by including something into our consideration that is most likely worse than what we already have, we achieve an overall better strategy. This is not very intuitive. Let's keep that in mind. This concept can be applied to (we're leaving the realm of science here, but being scientific wasn't the point in the first place) our world view in general. Let's call it the inclusionist view, while the opposite would be the exclusionist view. The exclusionist would prefer everyone to stick to the generally accepted way of life, while the inclusionist sees the need to allow deviation from the norm. Since the insight from above is not very intuitive, the inclusionist might think that whoever is for making an end to deviation and all for following the one true normative way must be a myopic exclusionist who is too single minded to grasp the bigger picture. If you're in the inclusionist camp, you will have had a lot of frustrating conversations with exclusionists who will insist that going with the most likely less "good" option is stupid and you're a beady eyed, gullible philanthropist. While you might come to the conclusion that the exclusionist is a myopic, uneducated, neanderthal. If you have witnessed many political discussions, a certain pattern emerges, and you get the impression that the racists, nazis, fascists, philistines are all the outcome of exclusionism. Now, let's go back to the original topic. Immigration is one of those topics where the views of inclusionists and exclusionists play a role. Everything is kind of fine as long as the numbers are small and the places of origin for immigrants are not too outlandish. But when someone calls for caps or selective admittance or anything else to quickly deal with "mass immigration", the inclusionist smells an exclusionist. Someone who did not grasp, the inclusionist assumes, the greater ramifications of applying broad selections, etc. The inclusionist will also be wary of not allowing the exclusionist to make too much ground, because he suspects the same shortsightedness that goes with racism. So, this is basically why you get a negative response if you use certain words or raise topics in a certain way. I have no idea, in which camp you are or if either camp actually exists, but maybe this might provide a glimpse into the slightly elitist mindset of oh so sophisticated people like me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

thebokehwokeh2 10y ago

Ok. I'll bite on this one. Why are you opposed to mass immigration?

guard-of-terra 10y ago
First of all, nobody asked me. I feel excluded from decisions on this policy and you can see how this amplifies my hostility to it. Because even if we have a debate on mass immigration and I lose every argument, I'm still entitled to have my vote weighted. Is it my country or whose it is? By default I don't owe people of other countries anything. It's our common right to let them in; but it's also our common right to kindly ask them to stay outside. That's the basic outline, and I'll try and explain my unique reservations in another comment. UPD to the sibling comment: It's not that I have any obligations to not be a racist. Maybe I am. Maybe I am not. Maybe I'm racist on even days and not racist on odd. I my country I have rights to be whatever pleases me. On other hand, if you want me to not be a racist, or at least not act as racist, you have to tell me what's in it for me.
lkrubner 10y ago
I admire your willingness to be open minded and ask the question, but I've asked the question in the past, and I've never gotten a straight answer. Instead I get some pat pre-package talking points, and if I dig deeper I get a confusion of ideas. And that's because the people opposed to immigration tend to be motivated by racism, but they don't want to say that, so they every other imaginable thing. It's simply impossible to have an honest conversation with someone, if they aren't willing to be honest about why they favor a particular policy.
- moultano 10y ago
  Isn't self-interest enough of an explanation? Mass-immigration is unlikely to be a short term benefit to the host country, particularly to low skill workers in that country. Why should they oppose their own self interest? (I'm personally a very pro-immigration American, so I'm talking about this to understand the debate not to advance any particular objective.)
  - thebokehwokeh2 10y ago
    Self-interest is a valid explanation. And the question you pose is a very valid statement. I am sure that immigration poses problems when it is at the scale of modern society. Not everyone shares the same values and beliefs but the optimist in me is the of the thinking that humanity is no longer the tribal, "us vs them", neanderthal who only sticks to persons who visually look like them. The United States of America was built on this idea and it thrives today. What I've noticed is that this issue of different-ness, seems only to surface when money or resources are scarce. The global rich are getting richer and richer, but counter-intuitively, this resource hoarding is not visible to the masses, who see a huge influx of new "different" people. These people will "potentially" take their jobs and their benefits, and then they "potentially" will bomb their buildings and rape their daughters and wives, because they are the boogeyman. What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      > What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share. It is not either or. Why are there all of the sudden a lot of "different" people around, hmm strange? Is that correlated with wealth redistribution? Is there a causal relationship, or are they completely orthogonal phenomena that those who are wealthy just use to distract the masses? I agree with wealth disparity, but I am hesitant to buy the "racism" slant here (which I think I detect. i.e. people who don't want immigrant just hate people with a different skin). Countries and cultures still exist. Scots are different than Englishmen. They almost voted to leave as well. We don't and probably will never live as a one universal, global, happy country, all citizens of the earth, singing peace songs together, dreaming of exploring space and so on. Now, I wish it was that. Sort of a world wide cataclim or aliens invading, I don't see that happening. People have been and will be tribal. It is a pretty well ingrained instict. And people will want to preserve their tribe's identity, culture, language and so on. Perhaps many see immigrants eroding that. That doesn't have to be tied to skin color. Painting it as racism discredits and that make your argument a bit too superficial.
guard-of-terra 10y ago
Now to the specific. The country in question is Russia and mass immigrants mostly come from Ukraine, Caucasus and Central Asia. People from Ukraine, and fellow Russians coming home, I have no reservations against. They're as good cultural fit as anybody already in the country. I'll make the process smoother if I could. People from Caucasus, they're often poor cultural fit. They're first to bend laws, they're sometimes violent, they form diasporas faciliating ethnic crime and corruption. Will definitely have at least visa regime introduced with their countries, to only let people in either as tourists or on definite work/enterpreneur visas. People from Central Asia. Those are poor countries, and less than 25 years ago they participated in ethnic cleansings against any non-title nations in their own newly-born nationalistic republics. Drove millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, Koreans etc as refugees out. Why should we turn blind eye on this? Never forget I'd say. But instead policy makers can't even implement visa regime with those countries. Many of them are also islamic, poor cultural fit, not speaking Russian, praising "traditional values". Who would like neighbours like that? What do they have to offset that? They also avoid paying taxes, and business employing them also avoids paying taxes by never reporting people they employ. They siphon tens of billions dollars from our economy to their countries. What's there to love? Have to repeat again that I have no obligations whatsoever to let them in. "Default Deny" sounds just right. After all, that's exactly what I'm getting WRT entering US or EU or UK.
- spriggan3 10y ago
  Are you Russian ? Russia already has Muslim republics, like Bashkortostan.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    Yes I am Russian. First of all, they're (Bashkirs, Tatars) mostly "culturally muslim" - as in, while having preference for mosques and green color, they, en masse, drink wine; have no objections against drawings; equal rights, education and employment for women. Not trying to stone people dead. Good culture fit. People from Central Asia - another kind of muslim. Much less desired if you ask me. Second, if we have something, doesn't imply we want more of it. I'm quite content with muslim staying minority.

rdtsc 10y ago

It is interesting that you got downvoted without a reason. You asked a question and it didn't seem obscene or mean. It just didn't toe the line here, and well "down with you!" I saw someone below basically saying everyone who opposes immigration is a racist deep down. It seems people are pretty angry at the moment, so they jump straight to the "r" word. Can understand that. Anyway, I see the point. Yeah I am immigrant as well to US. It was a very hard process and very painful, more than it needs to be. But I understand that national identity, culture, borders, are there now and will stay there. Opposing immigration is something countries can decide and should be able to decide one, so yes, I can see immigration specifically being a reason many would vote based on (well, I don't just see, they clearly did vote already).

AnonymousPlanet 10y ago

You can be opposed to whatever you like. Voicing your sentiment will, however, shine a light upon your understanding of the world. Maybe you could ask "Why do people think that I'm a bad person if I'm against mass immigration?" Assuming this comes closer to your request, I will try to answer that. But I will have to digress a bit, so please bear with me. I have the feeling that how you see the world is very much characterised by whether you are (what I call) an inclusionist or an exclusionist. Let me explain what I mean by that. Since we're on HN, I will use an analogy that might be up your alley. In CS, there is something called local search [1] for optimisation problems. The basic idea is: let's say, we have a number of states and we want to find the best one. And let's say, we have a method of determining how "good" a state is. A simple approach would be to start at some state, look around at the neighbour states and pick the better one. Then we move to that state and look around again. And so on, until we're at a state that is surrounded by only less or equally "good" states. The problem with this method is that we might end up in a local maximum or on a plateau, but we're stuck there forever. To get past that, we can choose a random state now and then. This is what simulated annealing [2] does or the mutation in genetic algorithms [3]. Even though at times we might be distracted from the best state right in front of us by following serendipity, this strategy is overall superior to the myopic, greedy strategy. This is an interesting insight: by including something into our consideration that is most likely worse than what we already have, we achieve an overall better strategy. This is not very intuitive. Let's keep that in mind. This concept can be applied to (we're leaving the realm of science here, but being scientific wasn't the point in the first place) our world view in general. Let's call it the inclusionist view, while the opposite would be the exclusionist view. The exclusionist would prefer everyone to stick to the generally accepted way of life, while the inclusionist sees the need to allow deviation from the norm. Since the insight from above is not very intuitive, the inclusionist might think that whoever is for making an end to deviation and all for following the one true normative way must be a myopic exclusionist who is too single minded to grasp the bigger picture. If you're in the inclusionist camp, you will have had a lot of frustrating conversations with exclusionists who will insist that going with the most likely less "good" option is stupid and you're a beady eyed, gullible philanthropist. While you might come to the conclusion that the exclusionist is a myopic, uneducated, neanderthal. If you have witnessed many political discussions, a certain pattern emerges, and you get the impression that the racists, nazis, fascists, philistines are all the outcome of exclusionism. Now, let's go back to the original topic. Immigration is one of those topics where the views of inclusionists and exclusionists play a role. Everything is kind of fine as long as the numbers are small and the places of origin for immigrants are not too outlandish. But when someone calls for caps or selective admittance or anything else to quickly deal with "mass immigration", the inclusionist smells an exclusionist. Someone who did not grasp, the inclusionist assumes, the greater ramifications of applying broad selections, etc. The inclusionist will also be wary of not allowing the exclusionist to make too much ground, because he suspects the same shortsightedness that goes with racism. So, this is basically why you get a negative response if you use certain words or raise topics in a certain way. I have no idea, in which camp you are or if either camp actually exists, but maybe this might provide a glimpse into the slightly elitist mindset of oh so sophisticated people like me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm