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Yes, it is difficult to uproot your family, take a huge risk, and relocate to a place with better employment and educational opportunities. Just ask the tens o

Yes, it is difficult to uproot your family, take a huge risk, and relocate to a place with better employment and educational opportunities. Just ask the tens of million of immigrants in this country who have done exactly that. In a sense, it's unfair that native-born Americans are forced to compete with people from all over the world who are highly motivated and have an extremely high tolerance for risk. But it's also what has actually made this country great.

atonse 8y ago
I'd upvote this 10 times if I could. Unless you're an immigrant yourself, it's hard to imagine how big of a deal it is to just uproot your family and go to a different country and start over, often from scratch with no real networks to build from.
- vfulco2 8y ago
  One of the greatest stories I ever heard was of my wife's grandfather. He was a Sikh Indian with a hugely prominent position running a 1,000 man unit in the Indian army. Because of weird US immigration laws in the 1970s and his family relations, if his sons wanted to move to the US for a better life, he had to go first. He gave up everything and "restarted" his career as a stockroom boy at a Buster Brown shoe store in NYC, later talking his way into an interview with the CEO of Met Life where he spent the rest of his career. In the interim, he pulled his son from India who became a successful accountant and consultant. I always looked at him with such admiration and said, "now there is the story of a hero". The Sikhs are an incredible people generally. Disclosure: I am 3rd gen Italian-American.
- haskellandchill 8y ago
  It is the only thing harder than being a poor rural American. I agree.
  - Fjolsvith 8y ago
    Being poor in rural America is a choice.
TheRealWatson 8y ago
Why is it unfair. Americans are highly motivated too. Or at least they should be. It's much less risky to have to get on the Greyhound back to your parent's house than back to the other side of the world. This is a great country and we are in the perfect industry to take risks.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Not everyone has the money for the bus trip, parents that would have them back, or parents that have a house. A lot of the people on HN come from a background of privilege (nothing wrong with that) but it effects how one perceives risk.
  - cafard 8y ago
    Not everyone has parents that own a house, not everyone has parents that can shelter them. However, a quick check on the Greyhound site shows that bus fare from Washington, DC, to Topeka, Kansas, could be about $120, and from Washington to Los Angeles can be done for $180 to $280.
    - throwaway5752 8y ago
      I know they sound cheap, but I think you're underestimating how hard an extra $250 can be for a lot of people and how little savings the bulk of the US has (particularly lower income areas/populations, since we're talking in the context of "when their town has no future"). You are also assuming 1 ticket, and if my memory's right then there's a negative correlation between income and family size/age of having first child.
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      $280 is more than a week's worth of take home pay for a minimum wage worker.
    - romwell 8y ago
      Yeah right, because the bus ticket is the most expensive cost of relocation. That's why when a company pays for relocation, they typically pay in the ballpark of $500 to account for the expenses associated with an interstate move for one person. ...which would be a nice narrative if it wasn't an order of magnitude off. Someone relocating has to pay for: -transportation of themselves (that's your Greyhound) -transportation of their goods OR re-purchases of all the basic necessities (something to sleep on, something to cook with, etc) - $1000 conservatively -transportation or purchase of a vehicle (because you really can't live and work without a car in most of the US), so in fact, let's forget about Greyhound. Throw in vehicle registration fees, increase in insurance (going from Podunk, MN to SF Bay Area will cost you $1000 just there, not accounting for gas/mileage). Of course, you can save by moving to an area with extensive public transportation networks, but that means you'll pay way more in... -security deposit AND first month's rent (which, spoiler! is usually going to be much higher in the city that people are relocating to). Again, for the Bay Rea, assuming you are a 20-something single who can live with room-mates (and not someone with a family who needs an apartment), that's around $1000 + $1000 if you are lucky. Add more for NYC where 2x rent is standard for a deposit (remember how you were going to save by going car-less? Put all that money here) -perhaps you don't have a job offer waiting for you, so a month's worth of expenses while you're looking for a job. Let's say you are frugal, so that's $500, assuming you don't want health insurance and your jalopy made it across the country without needing repairs. So somewhere around $5K for a single person for interstate relocation, assuming one finds a job within a month. (I moved with a job offer; typical tech relocation packages are around $5-10K) To all those looking at Greyhound costs, I need to ask: have you ever actually moved somewhere, tallying your expenses?
tenpies 8y ago
Could you not make the argument that a willingness to stay in a "doomed" city is critical for the re-emergence of desirable cities? Almost every great city in existence has had at least one awful moment at some point in its history. If everyone took the "times are tough, I'm going to migrate to X place which is doing better" approach, then our urban geography would look so much different. Ultimately, what gets a city out of tough times is its ability to retain the motivated people you mention. By losing those people, it seems that it's just reinforcing a winner-take-all approach to talent demographics.
- hardtke 8y ago
  “Will the last person leaving Seattle turns out the lights?” billboard went up after the founding of Microsoft.
  - intopieces 8y ago
    It went up after the Boeing Bust, in 1971. Microsoft wasn't founded until 1975. http://www.historylink.org/File/1287 http://www.historylink.org/File/1287 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
- lopmotr 8y ago
  What's wrong with winner-takes-all for cities? They're not people so it doesn't necessarily matter if they fail, as long at the people who lived in them end up OK. Maybe the country would be more productive and people more employed (thus happy) if most small towns didn't exist and most people lived in higher density cities. Of course some like the quiet places, but there would always be somewhere left for unemployed, retired, or work-from-home people who want that.
bwb 8y ago
Very well said.
jefurii 8y ago
> Just ask the tens of million of immigrants in this country who have done exactly that. Seemed like more of a thing when America was actually a land of opportunity.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
You're contrasting the people whose forefathers built the country, with the people who came later, after it was already built and there was no risk to be taken. How much risk is an immigrant really taking on, when there is a safety net in terms of social services available to them, that pays multiples of their yearly earnings back in "the old country"? Meanwhile, the native-born Americans have too much assets (even if in a crappy location, it still disqualifies them) to qualify for that same assistance...
- derefr 8y ago
  Off-the-wall idea: pay out Unemployment in multiples of the cost-of-living of whatever area you’re in, rather than in multiples of your previous wage/salary. Worked at a factory in small-town Michigan and qualify for six months’ “runway”? Move to SF and now it’s six months of SF-cost-of-living “runway” instead. (Would this be abused for nice vacations? Almost certainly. But maybe there’s a better version of this which couldn’t.)
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    A high cost of living is a market signal that "too many" people live there. If unemployment/basic income adjusts for cost of living, you wind up with a positive feedback loop that ignores these messages.
    - derefr 8y ago
      Hmm, you're right. I didn't mean to suggest that basic income should be based entirely on cost-of-living, though. My thinking was something more like: NewUI = OldUI * (CostOfLiving[NewJobMarketLocation] / CostOfLiving[PrevEmploymentLocation]) Thus, if you got paid the going rate for a factory-worker in Michigan, and you moved to SF, then you'd now be getting the UI that a factory-worker in SF would be receiving if they had been getting paid the going rate for factory-workers in SF. So you could afford to "switch" to the SF jobs market, or any other jobs market, and compete for jobs with the unemployed factory-workers currently living in the SF area: you'd be able to afford to live roughly where they live, feed the family you moved with to the same standard they were used to back home while you're job-hunting, show up in clothes of the same quality they show up in, maintain your car as well as they do to get to interviews at roughly the same time they do, etc. But that assumes that there are factory workers in SF. There aren't—running a factory in SF is an unprofitable proposition. Whether or not you could come to the area and job-hunt, supply of your job (or any job at your pay-grade) might just not be there to meet your demand. And that's not even accounting for the second-order effects: decreasing friction of movement between jobs markets would cause everyone else who ever wanted to live in SF to also come there to job-hunt. So, even if there were some factory-worker openings right at the beginning of this policy, they'd quickly be filled, and the markets in cities like SF would come to resemble Hollywood: a place where you have to put up with unreasonable amounts of shit to get anywhere, because there's so much more talent who has come from all over to vye for attention, than there are productions needing talent, that the productions take absolutely no care in how they treat their talent. In other words, at equilibrium, you'd just be back to where you started as far as "number of people employed" goes, at most levels†; and you'd also not see any change in the population density, demand for gentrification, or any other such thing in these cities, because Unemployment only lasts a fixed amount of time—you can't afford to stay if you don't succeed in finding a job. The one thing that would change is that companies the nation over would be seeing far more "talent liquidity", and thus thinking of employees as even more fungible/replaceable than they do now. (But, the flip-side of that statement: an individual new hire at an SF company would now have much more even probability of having originated anywhere in the country.) --- † Maybe you'd get more startups, from several people coming to SF (or other expensive cities) and deciding to spend their UI as initial runway to form a company together. But that'd be the exception, not the rule, I think. (Might still have nice knock-on effects for employment if those companies need to grow by hiring later on, though.)
forapurpose 8y ago
> it's unfair that native-born Americans are forced to compete with people from all over the world who are highly motivated Why is it unfair? Are Americans incapable and need protection? I thought America was built on opportunity, and free, fair competition.
mark-r 8y ago
The way to make immigration seem less risky is to have others who have done it before you. Minneapolis has a large population of Somalis because word got around that it was a good community for them. The same could happen for groups coming from a disadvantaged area of the US.
IloveHN84 8y ago
Hey, someone calls it "comfort zone".. the longer you sit in, the harder coming out of it is. Changing town/country is never easy and it has its own risks, but no pain, no gain
vilmosi 8y ago
> Just ask the tens of million of immigrants in this country who have done exactly that You're not really disproving his/her point as you're ignoring the many millions more who fail to move in the first place.

atonse 8y ago

I'd upvote this 10 times if I could. Unless you're an immigrant yourself, it's hard to imagine how big of a deal it is to just uproot your family and go to a different country and start over, often from scratch with no real networks to build from.

vfulco2 8y ago
One of the greatest stories I ever heard was of my wife's grandfather. He was a Sikh Indian with a hugely prominent position running a 1,000 man unit in the Indian army. Because of weird US immigration laws in the 1970s and his family relations, if his sons wanted to move to the US for a better life, he had to go first. He gave up everything and "restarted" his career as a stockroom boy at a Buster Brown shoe store in NYC, later talking his way into an interview with the CEO of Met Life where he spent the rest of his career. In the interim, he pulled his son from India who became a successful accountant and consultant. I always looked at him with such admiration and said, "now there is the story of a hero". The Sikhs are an incredible people generally. Disclosure: I am 3rd gen Italian-American.
haskellandchill 8y ago
It is the only thing harder than being a poor rural American. I agree.
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  Being poor in rural America is a choice.

TheRealWatson 8y ago

Why is it unfair. Americans are highly motivated too. Or at least they should be. It's much less risky to have to get on the Greyhound back to your parent's house than back to the other side of the world. This is a great country and we are in the perfect industry to take risks.

throwaway5752 8y ago
Not everyone has the money for the bus trip, parents that would have them back, or parents that have a house. A lot of the people on HN come from a background of privilege (nothing wrong with that) but it effects how one perceives risk.
- cafard 8y ago
  Not everyone has parents that own a house, not everyone has parents that can shelter them. However, a quick check on the Greyhound site shows that bus fare from Washington, DC, to Topeka, Kansas, could be about $120, and from Washington to Los Angeles can be done for $180 to $280.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    I know they sound cheap, but I think you're underestimating how hard an extra $250 can be for a lot of people and how little savings the bulk of the US has (particularly lower income areas/populations, since we're talking in the context of "when their town has no future"). You are also assuming 1 ticket, and if my memory's right then there's a negative correlation between income and family size/age of having first child.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    $280 is more than a week's worth of take home pay for a minimum wage worker.
  - romwell 8y ago
    Yeah right, because the bus ticket is the most expensive cost of relocation. That's why when a company pays for relocation, they typically pay in the ballpark of $500 to account for the expenses associated with an interstate move for one person. ...which would be a nice narrative if it wasn't an order of magnitude off. Someone relocating has to pay for: -transportation of themselves (that's your Greyhound) -transportation of their goods OR re-purchases of all the basic necessities (something to sleep on, something to cook with, etc) - $1000 conservatively -transportation or purchase of a vehicle (because you really can't live and work without a car in most of the US), so in fact, let's forget about Greyhound. Throw in vehicle registration fees, increase in insurance (going from Podunk, MN to SF Bay Area will cost you $1000 just there, not accounting for gas/mileage). Of course, you can save by moving to an area with extensive public transportation networks, but that means you'll pay way more in... -security deposit AND first month's rent (which, spoiler! is usually going to be much higher in the city that people are relocating to). Again, for the Bay Rea, assuming you are a 20-something single who can live with room-mates (and not someone with a family who needs an apartment), that's around $1000 + $1000 if you are lucky. Add more for NYC where 2x rent is standard for a deposit (remember how you were going to save by going car-less? Put all that money here) -perhaps you don't have a job offer waiting for you, so a month's worth of expenses while you're looking for a job. Let's say you are frugal, so that's $500, assuming you don't want health insurance and your jalopy made it across the country without needing repairs. So somewhere around $5K for a single person for interstate relocation, assuming one finds a job within a month. (I moved with a job offer; typical tech relocation packages are around $5-10K) To all those looking at Greyhound costs, I need to ask: have you ever actually moved somewhere, tallying your expenses?

tenpies 8y ago

Could you not make the argument that a willingness to stay in a "doomed" city is critical for the re-emergence of desirable cities? Almost every great city in existence has had at least one awful moment at some point in its history. If everyone took the "times are tough, I'm going to migrate to X place which is doing better" approach, then our urban geography would look so much different. Ultimately, what gets a city out of tough times is its ability to retain the motivated people you mention. By losing those people, it seems that it's just reinforcing a winner-take-all approach to talent demographics.

hardtke 8y ago
“Will the last person leaving Seattle turns out the lights?” billboard went up after the founding of Microsoft.
- intopieces 8y ago
  It went up after the Boeing Bust, in 1971. Microsoft wasn't founded until 1975. http://www.historylink.org/File/1287 http://www.historylink.org/File/1287 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
lopmotr 8y ago
What's wrong with winner-takes-all for cities? They're not people so it doesn't necessarily matter if they fail, as long at the people who lived in them end up OK. Maybe the country would be more productive and people more employed (thus happy) if most small towns didn't exist and most people lived in higher density cities. Of course some like the quiet places, but there would always be somewhere left for unemployed, retired, or work-from-home people who want that.

bwb 8y ago

Very well said.

jefurii 8y ago

> Just ask the tens of million of immigrants in this country who have done exactly that. Seemed like more of a thing when America was actually a land of opportunity.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

You're contrasting the people whose forefathers built the country, with the people who came later, after it was already built and there was no risk to be taken. How much risk is an immigrant really taking on, when there is a safety net in terms of social services available to them, that pays multiples of their yearly earnings back in "the old country"? Meanwhile, the native-born Americans have too much assets (even if in a crappy location, it still disqualifies them) to qualify for that same assistance...

derefr 8y ago
Off-the-wall idea: pay out Unemployment in multiples of the cost-of-living of whatever area you’re in, rather than in multiples of your previous wage/salary. Worked at a factory in small-town Michigan and qualify for six months’ “runway”? Move to SF and now it’s six months of SF-cost-of-living “runway” instead. (Would this be abused for nice vacations? Almost certainly. But maybe there’s a better version of this which couldn’t.)
- paulddraper 8y ago
  A high cost of living is a market signal that "too many" people live there. If unemployment/basic income adjusts for cost of living, you wind up with a positive feedback loop that ignores these messages.
  - derefr 8y ago
    Hmm, you're right. I didn't mean to suggest that basic income should be based entirely on cost-of-living, though. My thinking was something more like: NewUI = OldUI * (CostOfLiving[NewJobMarketLocation] / CostOfLiving[PrevEmploymentLocation]) Thus, if you got paid the going rate for a factory-worker in Michigan, and you moved to SF, then you'd now be getting the UI that a factory-worker in SF would be receiving if they had been getting paid the going rate for factory-workers in SF. So you could afford to "switch" to the SF jobs market, or any other jobs market, and compete for jobs with the unemployed factory-workers currently living in the SF area: you'd be able to afford to live roughly where they live, feed the family you moved with to the same standard they were used to back home while you're job-hunting, show up in clothes of the same quality they show up in, maintain your car as well as they do to get to interviews at roughly the same time they do, etc. But that assumes that there are factory workers in SF. There aren't—running a factory in SF is an unprofitable proposition. Whether or not you could come to the area and job-hunt, supply of your job (or any job at your pay-grade) might just not be there to meet your demand. And that's not even accounting for the second-order effects: decreasing friction of movement between jobs markets would cause everyone else who ever wanted to live in SF to also come there to job-hunt. So, even if there were some factory-worker openings right at the beginning of this policy, they'd quickly be filled, and the markets in cities like SF would come to resemble Hollywood: a place where you have to put up with unreasonable amounts of shit to get anywhere, because there's so much more talent who has come from all over to vye for attention, than there are productions needing talent, that the productions take absolutely no care in how they treat their talent. In other words, at equilibrium, you'd just be back to where you started as far as "number of people employed" goes, at most levels†; and you'd also not see any change in the population density, demand for gentrification, or any other such thing in these cities, because Unemployment only lasts a fixed amount of time—you can't afford to stay if you don't succeed in finding a job. The one thing that would change is that companies the nation over would be seeing far more "talent liquidity", and thus thinking of employees as even more fungible/replaceable than they do now. (But, the flip-side of that statement: an individual new hire at an SF company would now have much more even probability of having originated anywhere in the country.) --- † Maybe you'd get more startups, from several people coming to SF (or other expensive cities) and deciding to spend their UI as initial runway to form a company together. But that'd be the exception, not the rule, I think. (Might still have nice knock-on effects for employment if those companies need to grow by hiring later on, though.)

forapurpose 8y ago

> it's unfair that native-born Americans are forced to compete with people from all over the world who are highly motivated Why is it unfair? Are Americans incapable and need protection? I thought America was built on opportunity, and free, fair competition.

mark-r 8y ago

The way to make immigration seem less risky is to have others who have done it before you. Minneapolis has a large population of Somalis because word got around that it was a good community for them. The same could happen for groups coming from a disadvantaged area of the US.

IloveHN84 8y ago

Hey, someone calls it "comfort zone".. the longer you sit in, the harder coming out of it is. Changing town/country is never easy and it has its own risks, but no pain, no gain

vilmosi 8y ago

> Just ask the tens of million of immigrants in this country who have done exactly that You're not really disproving his/her point as you're ignoring the many millions more who fail to move in the first place.