7 ms·

They are not theoretical, free-market niceties when you have lived abroad for 6 years. Or when your parents are both from different countries. Or when your gran

They are not theoretical, free-market niceties when you have lived abroad for 6 years. Or when your parents are both from different countries. Or when your grandparent immigrated out of the U.S. to live 2/3rds of his life in the country you were born in and never encountered this level of pushback. There is a lot to be said for making welfare systems work together with immigration. But putting "fellow citizens" above everyone else is not an easy question for everyone (and yes, I advocate for immigration and non-discrimination for hiring in my country of origin too). Also, acting like the STEM jobs in the U.S. exist independent of globalization is disingenuous. They exist because S.V. software is used across global markets, so if protectionism for labor is ok as long as it helps your citizens, then I assume the same is true for trade protectionism or Internet 'great firewalls'? The problem is, that way, we all end up significantly worse for it.

TheBobinator 10y ago
The problem there is the propensity for foreigners, well-educated in the back-assward ways of their country of origin, to come to America, ostensibly to partake in our, in some way measurably superior economy and culture, then expect to introduce their back-asswards ways here and expect those ways to be successful, then when they find out we think their entire country is as back-asswards as they are and refuse to put up with it, perhaps through inducing some event they might find traumatic like a firing, arrest, restraining order, and so forth, they want laws made to make everyone here back-asswards, because it's easier for them. When your immigration laws have a high standard of entry and you tell people, even en masse, "we lowered on this item this one time", then our expectations are stated and that creates the viewpoint that they need to assume their ways might be back-asswards. When immigration laws are as lax as ours, who can blame foreigners for being obstinate about coming here an us not adopting to their expectations? After all, when you give them welfare, you're paying them to do as such. You need to have a system in place to appropriately assess and adopt new cultural norms. Frankly, racism and bigotry has proven to do this nicely, although if you have suggestions on how we might do it better I'm all ears. Removing racism and bigotry, on the other hand, well that has had some seriously detrimental effects on our society. Right now, you've got 5% to 15% of the population in the US living here without seeking citizenship, and this is causing a demographic shift. The indigenous population, through feminism and marxist ideology, is being set up for a fall; look at marriage rates and the resulting reproduction rates of whites and blacks. They know it, and they've quite clearly voiced their intent to take the moral high ground and resolve those issues in a peaceful manner through civil means like deportations. If America really went Nazi Germany, we'd carpet nuke China and India, then tell the rest of the world "we solved the carbon emissions problem!". Then we'd invade Mexico, flatten the country, and promptly announce "THE WAR ON DRUGS IS WON!" and nuke Mecca pronouncing "ISLAMIC TERRORISM SOLVED" and other such nonsense. Really, what we're doing is very civilized. The foreigners even know there's plenty of time to propose a mutually beneficial solution, or simply leave on their own accord, before they're forced to leave. Obviously, the foreigners that are here are not happy with the situation they and their back-asswards ways have placed them into. Frankly, a lot of people here feel as though foreigners are coming here instead of fixing problems in their own countries. Mexicans voted for Trump because they can clearly see, now 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, how messed up Mexico is. Now you continue to fan the flames of cultural warfare, and say things like "we're going to out-breed whitey" or simply repeat the same high-and-mighty drivel the American media monopoly has pushed out for the last several decades. That pushes things towards not being civilized and creates incentives for biblical extermination events. Nobody views that as reasonable right now, but if people act like cock roaches, then there's only one way to reasonably handle that situation. I'd really like to think we're beyond that one as a world, but in 2017, there's still mass graves and still stupidity going on. We need a fresh take on the entire discussion, one that provides dignity for all parties. And you can talk about "borders are imaginary lines" all you want; everyone in IT has this mightier-than-thou notion, still high off of the 80's "I HAS A MODEM AND CAN TALK TO JAPAN, I'M SO CLASSY, ENTIRE WORLD IS HUMAN, KUMBIYAH" stupidity, they fail to see the point of borders. Fact is, there are irreconcilable differences in culture, language, religion, beliefs and economies and it's an extraordinarily good thing that these borders exist. We get a bunch of little social experiments that sometimes take decades to play out fully. Some experiments are extremely successful like America. Others countries, well, not so much. And there are reasons for that; technology can gloss over a lot of societal problems, e.g. the availability of hard liquor in the late 1800's. Globalism has largely been used to institute wage arbitrage, not the uplift the world as a whole, and you need to live in a bubble with a head full of cognitive pollution not to see that clearly.
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  Admittedly, I don't think there is anything I could reply that will change such a radicalized worldview. But I am going to state three facts: a) my grandfather immigrated from the U.S. to Mexico, brought the best of his ways with him and adopted the best of ours and was quite successful with that (as are many that make the opposite trip), he ran to Mexico after spending 4 years of so in the U.S. navy at war with people who think much as you do now, b) if you think that the reason Mexico is fucked up is 'backward culture' and not centuries of white colonialism and post-colonial exploitation, I should recommend you read a history book, c) if you carpet nuke China or India, they will nuke right back at you, the U.S. can't conquer the world any more than Nazi Germany could.
  - TheBobinator 10y ago
    America was once a white colony; your argument is factually flawed because you are stuck in the "might makes right" mentality of natural selection. Whenever resources get scarce, nature basically determines anything goes and the strongest survive. In that mentality you believe whatever you want to believe, or whatever is the most convenient to believe, as an instinctual response; effectively because of the context of the situation any action can be rationalized as moral or justified even though it is horribly sub-optimal. If you'd like I could continue this discussion with you, and we can exchange a rich dialogue involving centuries of accumulated racial slurs and stereotypes, and much like masturbation, exhaust ourselves with little actual reward. That would obviously, not be a novel approach. There was a really awesome article on HN awhile ago describing the disconnect we're having. I suggest you read it and approach the immigration discussion as an engineering problem: http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/ http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/ View this as an engineering problem; You are blinding yourself to finding a more optimal (we'll use the metric of dignified solution for all involved) by not fully understanding the entire problem at hand. Seek to understand the other parties viewpoint. Assume any solution to the engineering problem that results in a loss of life as sub-optimal and any solution that is not executed on a timely basis results in loss of life. Assume you and your current viewpoints are irrelevant, and any ancillary metrics such as "I want a big house and a big family" might also be impossible with a fully optimal solution. It's only when everyone recognized the severity of the problem that any good will can be generated, and that good will is necessary for discovering the problems might not be so unsolvable after-all. But if you're stuck believing whatever you want to believe, well. This post is going to be a great test of HN's scoring system I'll tell you that, the bias should go all over the place.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
But they are theoretical free-market niceties when you are a minority that has a low chance of getting a job in tech because companies would rather import cheap foreigners rather than work on building up a domestic workforce. The same goes for if you are a poor white person in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, the same people driving these conditions would also use the results of this to drive the two groups against each other for ideological reasons that are seen as good. The US is a nation of immigrants. Nobody should deny that. But when workers inside a nation are negatively affected because companies would rather source cheap labor, there's a problem. A country's job first and foremost is to protect the rights of its citizens. They exist because S.V. software is used across global markets, so if protectionism for labor is ok as long as it helps your citizens, then I assume the same is true for trade protectionism or Internet 'great firewalls'? No, they exist because software is used across the world. Presumably if we weren't artificially manipulating labor, it'd help the domestic industries of many countries. To your second comment, IP, labor and capital have always been separated. You are directly conflating physical and virtual goods and that would not hold up in an other discussion in this industry. You can make this into some kind of indignant us vs them thing but I assure you there are a lot of people who care about the rights of workers everywhere and the current situation clearly has detrimental aspects.
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  But I am not making it an us vs them, that's the whole point. Your argument is that we should all be trying to maximize the benefits to the citizens of our own country, and no one else, literally an us vs them position. For many countries, blocking U.S. Internet services and substituting 80%-of-the-way domestic alternatives does just that in terms of boosting employment. It might not be the same legal framework, but if you are advocating for putting co-national workers first at all costs, then that's very much an option. I consider an open web to be one of those principles that are worth maintaining, though. But it definitely is lower on the list than many other concerns that might count as 'nice to haves' under the nationalistic argument I am seeing made. Note that I am in favor of better conditions for workers, more progressive taxes, UBI, free higher education, some forms of fair-trade arrangements, you name it. What I am not for is "no foreigners until unemployment is strictly at zero". I think in the long run we should be able to come up with systems at the national and international levels that are fair to both local workers and immigrants. In the context of the current administration, though, I don't see us getting that, I see a lot of scapegoating, a lot of rash policies and an international industry supported by an international workforce, eventually either dying, fragmenting or leaving the U.S.
NetStrikeForce 10y ago
I have always found interesting that people try to chalk out freedom of labour movement as a "nicety, an ideological thing" - while I have to accept that Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon can become rich selling to my people while the US is protectionist with the well-paid job positions in those companies. You can sell your shit to me and I can't sell my labour to you. Ok, at least pay taxes locally and fund my universities, roads and infrastructures to pump up the local market.
- shard972 10y ago
  I mean, it's not like your people are being forced to use and buy products from these companies. So why should the US be forced to take in workers from other countries?
  - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
    I think you understood "free market" backwards mate. No one is forcing me to buy US or local for that matter, but demands are for those US companies to be "forced" to buy local labour.
  - winter_blue 10y ago
    > why should the US be forced You've got it backwards. Nobody is forcing the US to take anyone. Instead, employers in the US are instead being forced to hire native workers, and are effectively being prohibited from hiring from the rest of the world. It's this prohibition that needs to be defended. I'm an employer, and I want to hire a French software developer. I'm willing to pay him $160,000 a year. But now, immigration restrictionists are getting in my way and saying that I can't hire him. If I hire him disregarding the laws prohibiting me from doing so, I would get hit by heavy fines and might literally be thrown in jail. Immigration restrictionists effectively advocate for the use of state violence to block me from employing non-Americans. Now this isn't some hypothetical story that I came up with. I work for a French company that has an office in New York, and we've tried to bring a Software Developer from our Paris office for two years now. For two years in a row, he lost the H-1B lottery both times. The L-1B visa didn't work out either. My company which is French-owned and French-based and has to deal with this stuff. It's this restrictionism that has got to be justified.

TheBobinator 10y ago

The problem there is the propensity for foreigners, well-educated in the back-assward ways of their country of origin, to come to America, ostensibly to partake in our, in some way measurably superior economy and culture, then expect to introduce their back-asswards ways here and expect those ways to be successful, then when they find out we think their entire country is as back-asswards as they are and refuse to put up with it, perhaps through inducing some event they might find traumatic like a firing, arrest, restraining order, and so forth, they want laws made to make everyone here back-asswards, because it's easier for them. When your immigration laws have a high standard of entry and you tell people, even en masse, "we lowered on this item this one time", then our expectations are stated and that creates the viewpoint that they need to assume their ways might be back-asswards. When immigration laws are as lax as ours, who can blame foreigners for being obstinate about coming here an us not adopting to their expectations? After all, when you give them welfare, you're paying them to do as such. You need to have a system in place to appropriately assess and adopt new cultural norms. Frankly, racism and bigotry has proven to do this nicely, although if you have suggestions on how we might do it better I'm all ears. Removing racism and bigotry, on the other hand, well that has had some seriously detrimental effects on our society. Right now, you've got 5% to 15% of the population in the US living here without seeking citizenship, and this is causing a demographic shift. The indigenous population, through feminism and marxist ideology, is being set up for a fall; look at marriage rates and the resulting reproduction rates of whites and blacks. They know it, and they've quite clearly voiced their intent to take the moral high ground and resolve those issues in a peaceful manner through civil means like deportations. If America really went Nazi Germany, we'd carpet nuke China and India, then tell the rest of the world "we solved the carbon emissions problem!". Then we'd invade Mexico, flatten the country, and promptly announce "THE WAR ON DRUGS IS WON!" and nuke Mecca pronouncing "ISLAMIC TERRORISM SOLVED" and other such nonsense. Really, what we're doing is very civilized. The foreigners even know there's plenty of time to propose a mutually beneficial solution, or simply leave on their own accord, before they're forced to leave. Obviously, the foreigners that are here are not happy with the situation they and their back-asswards ways have placed them into. Frankly, a lot of people here feel as though foreigners are coming here instead of fixing problems in their own countries. Mexicans voted for Trump because they can clearly see, now 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, how messed up Mexico is. Now you continue to fan the flames of cultural warfare, and say things like "we're going to out-breed whitey" or simply repeat the same high-and-mighty drivel the American media monopoly has pushed out for the last several decades. That pushes things towards not being civilized and creates incentives for biblical extermination events. Nobody views that as reasonable right now, but if people act like cock roaches, then there's only one way to reasonably handle that situation. I'd really like to think we're beyond that one as a world, but in 2017, there's still mass graves and still stupidity going on. We need a fresh take on the entire discussion, one that provides dignity for all parties. And you can talk about "borders are imaginary lines" all you want; everyone in IT has this mightier-than-thou notion, still high off of the 80's "I HAS A MODEM AND CAN TALK TO JAPAN, I'M SO CLASSY, ENTIRE WORLD IS HUMAN, KUMBIYAH" stupidity, they fail to see the point of borders. Fact is, there are irreconcilable differences in culture, language, religion, beliefs and economies and it's an extraordinarily good thing that these borders exist. We get a bunch of little social experiments that sometimes take decades to play out fully. Some experiments are extremely successful like America. Others countries, well, not so much. And there are reasons for that; technology can gloss over a lot of societal problems, e.g. the availability of hard liquor in the late 1800's. Globalism has largely been used to institute wage arbitrage, not the uplift the world as a whole, and you need to live in a bubble with a head full of cognitive pollution not to see that clearly.

lazaroclapp 10y ago
Admittedly, I don't think there is anything I could reply that will change such a radicalized worldview. But I am going to state three facts: a) my grandfather immigrated from the U.S. to Mexico, brought the best of his ways with him and adopted the best of ours and was quite successful with that (as are many that make the opposite trip), he ran to Mexico after spending 4 years of so in the U.S. navy at war with people who think much as you do now, b) if you think that the reason Mexico is fucked up is 'backward culture' and not centuries of white colonialism and post-colonial exploitation, I should recommend you read a history book, c) if you carpet nuke China or India, they will nuke right back at you, the U.S. can't conquer the world any more than Nazi Germany could.
- TheBobinator 10y ago
  America was once a white colony; your argument is factually flawed because you are stuck in the "might makes right" mentality of natural selection. Whenever resources get scarce, nature basically determines anything goes and the strongest survive. In that mentality you believe whatever you want to believe, or whatever is the most convenient to believe, as an instinctual response; effectively because of the context of the situation any action can be rationalized as moral or justified even though it is horribly sub-optimal. If you'd like I could continue this discussion with you, and we can exchange a rich dialogue involving centuries of accumulated racial slurs and stereotypes, and much like masturbation, exhaust ourselves with little actual reward. That would obviously, not be a novel approach. There was a really awesome article on HN awhile ago describing the disconnect we're having. I suggest you read it and approach the immigration discussion as an engineering problem: http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/ http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/ View this as an engineering problem; You are blinding yourself to finding a more optimal (we'll use the metric of dignified solution for all involved) by not fully understanding the entire problem at hand. Seek to understand the other parties viewpoint. Assume any solution to the engineering problem that results in a loss of life as sub-optimal and any solution that is not executed on a timely basis results in loss of life. Assume you and your current viewpoints are irrelevant, and any ancillary metrics such as "I want a big house and a big family" might also be impossible with a fully optimal solution. It's only when everyone recognized the severity of the problem that any good will can be generated, and that good will is necessary for discovering the problems might not be so unsolvable after-all. But if you're stuck believing whatever you want to believe, well. This post is going to be a great test of HN's scoring system I'll tell you that, the bias should go all over the place.

aaron-lebo 10y ago

But they are theoretical free-market niceties when you are a minority that has a low chance of getting a job in tech because companies would rather import cheap foreigners rather than work on building up a domestic workforce. The same goes for if you are a poor white person in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, the same people driving these conditions would also use the results of this to drive the two groups against each other for ideological reasons that are seen as good. The US is a nation of immigrants. Nobody should deny that. But when workers inside a nation are negatively affected because companies would rather source cheap labor, there's a problem. A country's job first and foremost is to protect the rights of its citizens. They exist because S.V. software is used across global markets, so if protectionism for labor is ok as long as it helps your citizens, then I assume the same is true for trade protectionism or Internet 'great firewalls'? No, they exist because software is used across the world. Presumably if we weren't artificially manipulating labor, it'd help the domestic industries of many countries. To your second comment, IP, labor and capital have always been separated. You are directly conflating physical and virtual goods and that would not hold up in an other discussion in this industry. You can make this into some kind of indignant us vs them thing but I assure you there are a lot of people who care about the rights of workers everywhere and the current situation clearly has detrimental aspects.

lazaroclapp 10y ago
But I am not making it an us vs them, that's the whole point. Your argument is that we should all be trying to maximize the benefits to the citizens of our own country, and no one else, literally an us vs them position. For many countries, blocking U.S. Internet services and substituting 80%-of-the-way domestic alternatives does just that in terms of boosting employment. It might not be the same legal framework, but if you are advocating for putting co-national workers first at all costs, then that's very much an option. I consider an open web to be one of those principles that are worth maintaining, though. But it definitely is lower on the list than many other concerns that might count as 'nice to haves' under the nationalistic argument I am seeing made. Note that I am in favor of better conditions for workers, more progressive taxes, UBI, free higher education, some forms of fair-trade arrangements, you name it. What I am not for is "no foreigners until unemployment is strictly at zero". I think in the long run we should be able to come up with systems at the national and international levels that are fair to both local workers and immigrants. In the context of the current administration, though, I don't see us getting that, I see a lot of scapegoating, a lot of rash policies and an international industry supported by an international workforce, eventually either dying, fragmenting or leaving the U.S.

NetStrikeForce 10y ago

I have always found interesting that people try to chalk out freedom of labour movement as a "nicety, an ideological thing" - while I have to accept that Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon can become rich selling to my people while the US is protectionist with the well-paid job positions in those companies. You can sell your shit to me and I can't sell my labour to you. Ok, at least pay taxes locally and fund my universities, roads and infrastructures to pump up the local market.

shard972 10y ago
I mean, it's not like your people are being forced to use and buy products from these companies. So why should the US be forced to take in workers from other countries?
- NetStrikeForce 10y ago
  I think you understood "free market" backwards mate. No one is forcing me to buy US or local for that matter, but demands are for those US companies to be "forced" to buy local labour.
- winter_blue 10y ago
  > why should the US be forced You've got it backwards. Nobody is forcing the US to take anyone. Instead, employers in the US are instead being forced to hire native workers, and are effectively being prohibited from hiring from the rest of the world. It's this prohibition that needs to be defended. I'm an employer, and I want to hire a French software developer. I'm willing to pay him $160,000 a year. But now, immigration restrictionists are getting in my way and saying that I can't hire him. If I hire him disregarding the laws prohibiting me from doing so, I would get hit by heavy fines and might literally be thrown in jail. Immigration restrictionists effectively advocate for the use of state violence to block me from employing non-Americans. Now this isn't some hypothetical story that I came up with. I work for a French company that has an office in New York, and we've tried to bring a Software Developer from our Paris office for two years now. For two years in a row, he lost the H-1B lottery both times. The L-1B visa didn't work out either. My company which is French-owned and French-based and has to deal with this stuff. It's this restrictionism that has got to be justified.