5 ms·

This amounts to imposing a higher tax. One could go the Canadian route instead--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them becom

This amounts to imposing a higher tax. One could go the Canadian route instead--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them become citizens and fully integrate), and not treat immigrants languish on temporary visas, which IMO is belies viewing immigrants (i.e. new permanent residents) with disgust, hatred, callousness, and contempt. Also, Canada rapidly (like in one year) transitions most temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US. Imposing a higher tax based on national origin or immigration status which is quintessentially discriminatory, and IMO treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.

linuxftw 3y ago
[flagged]
- winter_blue 3y ago
  I'm just going to quote dang to you here: Could you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? Your account has already been doing it repeatedly. We're trying for something else here! If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- miroljub 3y ago
  I don't understand why so many people take any criticism of the USA as a personal insult. In many regards USA is a great country, in some/many regards it is not. Constructive criticism like from the parent comment would only make it even better. It's not like the parent just criticized for the sake of criticizing. He also gave a proposal to improve the whole system. You can agree or disagree, maybe provide a better proposal, but this dismissal brings nothing to the discussion.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    I didn't take it as an insult. I truly want other people to not want to come here. The downward pressure on IT salaries is impacting all other sectors of the economy and denying people here access to the economic ladder. Canada wants to keep their wages low, that's why their immigration is so wide open. If it wasn't mostly Arctic tundra, they would be inundated with immigrants by now.
infecto 3y ago
The trade off being that generally Canada pays half as much and most tech high skilled jobs are going to be in metro areas that Canada has few of. Top that with a worse housing crises than what we see in the US. I also think your argument would be more constructive without some of the strong language you use. For myself it takes away from a constructive conversation and reads poorly.
- winter_blue 3y ago
  The higher salaries in the US probably has to do with the concentration of highly-successful tech companies in the US. Not just FAANG et al, but the many small high-revenue-generating companies in the US. There probably isn't as much of a concentration of high-revenue successful tech companies in Canada. The lower salaries in Canada probably has more to do with that, than with Canada being more welcoming towards high-skilled immigrants. I used strong language in my comment earlier, since I've lived in the past for over a decade without basic rights in the US, and since moved to Canada. So this is real and personal to me. Whenever I talked about not having rights in the US on HN, many individuals on HN responded with intense hatred saying things that effectively amounted to "get the fuck out of this country you brown piece of shit", "we hate you", "you don't deserve to have any rights", "you have no right to expect to have any rights or freedom in this country" etc--and, no, they didn't use those exact words--I am paraphrasing their sentiment--but they expressed an equivalent sentiment / level of hatred using politer words. You can dig through my comment history to find those comments. To me, it was oddly reminiscent of the hatred white Americans must have shown black people during the Jim Crow era, or Germans towards Jews after the Nuremberg laws had been passed. I just didn't expect such extreme loathing and hatred toward immigrants to be so incredibly prevalent on HN.
  - infecto 3y ago
    Certainly, I won’t even begin to speculate why salaries are different and I am sure there are more high paying jobs there now but last time I had the chance to look they were always drastically lower for the same company that had locations in both Canada and the US. And often times the cost of living were higher in Canada when accounting for housing. I am sorry you had the experience you did and I make no argument about your experience. I think it’s hard to push for change in immigration law when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US.
Gareth321 3y ago
> This amounts to imposing a higher tax--which is discriminatory, and treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity. Not all discrimination is wrong. For example, the American immigration service currently discriminates against people by criminality, among many other factors. The purpose of the U.S. government is to serve and protect the American people. If that means discriminating against migrants, that is, literally, their entire raison d'etre.
- winter_blue 3y ago
  Do you think Canada doesn't "serve and protect the [Canadian] people"? Do you think Canada rolls out the red carpet to people with criminal backgrounds? Canada just chooses to welcome skilled immigrants, whereas the US has an immigration prohibition. See: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-nearly-impossible https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-n... Canada also has a ranking system that picks the best immigrants with the highest scores (unlike the lotteries the US relies on). But charging immigrants a higher tax rate is discrimination, 100%. Your comment is baseless, and entirely invalid.
  - nick__m 3y ago
    The problem with the Canadian way is that we allow family reunification. As a Canadian taxpayer I don't want to pay for the economic emigrants parents and grandparents social security and health care. For the refugees, I have no problem with family reunification because if the situation is bad enough to qualify for our humanitarian refugee program, chances are that it's also bad enough for the rest of that migrant family.
    - winter_blue 3y ago
      Canada only allows 28,500 parents and grandparents[1] as permanent residents per year (and that limit was 20,000 until recently). That's just 6% of the total immigration target. There is a temporary visa for parents and grandparents, but there is no access healthcare with it, which is serious matter[2][3][4]. For example: > She says he needs a different type of care and has even offered to pay out of pocket, but she can’t get him into a long-term care home without an OHIP number. Did you bother to google Canada's family immigration laws? [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/supplementary-immigration-levels-2023-2025.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/citizenship-immigration-ohip-elderly-nursing-care-1.4059150 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/citizenship-immigrati... [3] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/kingston-ont-woman-fighting-for-palliative-care-for-father-who-is-ineligible-for-ohip-1.5849611 https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/kingston-ont-woman-fighting-for-pa... [4] https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/no-ohip-no-health-care-kingston-man-struggles-to-access-long-term-care-due-to-immigration-status https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/no-ohip-no-health-ca...

linuxftw 3y ago

[flagged]

winter_blue 3y ago
I'm just going to quote dang to you here: Could you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? Your account has already been doing it repeatedly. We're trying for something else here! If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
miroljub 3y ago
I don't understand why so many people take any criticism of the USA as a personal insult. In many regards USA is a great country, in some/many regards it is not. Constructive criticism like from the parent comment would only make it even better. It's not like the parent just criticized for the sake of criticizing. He also gave a proposal to improve the whole system. You can agree or disagree, maybe provide a better proposal, but this dismissal brings nothing to the discussion.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  I didn't take it as an insult. I truly want other people to not want to come here. The downward pressure on IT salaries is impacting all other sectors of the economy and denying people here access to the economic ladder. Canada wants to keep their wages low, that's why their immigration is so wide open. If it wasn't mostly Arctic tundra, they would be inundated with immigrants by now.

infecto 3y ago

The trade off being that generally Canada pays half as much and most tech high skilled jobs are going to be in metro areas that Canada has few of. Top that with a worse housing crises than what we see in the US. I also think your argument would be more constructive without some of the strong language you use. For myself it takes away from a constructive conversation and reads poorly.

winter_blue 3y ago
The higher salaries in the US probably has to do with the concentration of highly-successful tech companies in the US. Not just FAANG et al, but the many small high-revenue-generating companies in the US. There probably isn't as much of a concentration of high-revenue successful tech companies in Canada. The lower salaries in Canada probably has more to do with that, than with Canada being more welcoming towards high-skilled immigrants. I used strong language in my comment earlier, since I've lived in the past for over a decade without basic rights in the US, and since moved to Canada. So this is real and personal to me. Whenever I talked about not having rights in the US on HN, many individuals on HN responded with intense hatred saying things that effectively amounted to "get the fuck out of this country you brown piece of shit", "we hate you", "you don't deserve to have any rights", "you have no right to expect to have any rights or freedom in this country" etc--and, no, they didn't use those exact words--I am paraphrasing their sentiment--but they expressed an equivalent sentiment / level of hatred using politer words. You can dig through my comment history to find those comments. To me, it was oddly reminiscent of the hatred white Americans must have shown black people during the Jim Crow era, or Germans towards Jews after the Nuremberg laws had been passed. I just didn't expect such extreme loathing and hatred toward immigrants to be so incredibly prevalent on HN.
- infecto 3y ago
  Certainly, I won’t even begin to speculate why salaries are different and I am sure there are more high paying jobs there now but last time I had the chance to look they were always drastically lower for the same company that had locations in both Canada and the US. And often times the cost of living were higher in Canada when accounting for housing. I am sorry you had the experience you did and I make no argument about your experience. I think it’s hard to push for change in immigration law when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US.

Gareth321 3y ago

> This amounts to imposing a higher tax--which is discriminatory, and treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity. Not all discrimination is wrong. For example, the American immigration service currently discriminates against people by criminality, among many other factors. The purpose of the U.S. government is to serve and protect the American people. If that means discriminating against migrants, that is, literally, their entire raison d'etre.

winter_blue 3y ago
Do you think Canada doesn't "serve and protect the [Canadian] people"? Do you think Canada rolls out the red carpet to people with criminal backgrounds? Canada just chooses to welcome skilled immigrants, whereas the US has an immigration prohibition. See: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-nearly-impossible https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-n... Canada also has a ranking system that picks the best immigrants with the highest scores (unlike the lotteries the US relies on). But charging immigrants a higher tax rate is discrimination, 100%. Your comment is baseless, and entirely invalid.
- nick__m 3y ago
  The problem with the Canadian way is that we allow family reunification. As a Canadian taxpayer I don't want to pay for the economic emigrants parents and grandparents social security and health care. For the refugees, I have no problem with family reunification because if the situation is bad enough to qualify for our humanitarian refugee program, chances are that it's also bad enough for the rest of that migrant family.
  - winter_blue 3y ago
    Canada only allows 28,500 parents and grandparents[1] as permanent residents per year (and that limit was 20,000 until recently). That's just 6% of the total immigration target. There is a temporary visa for parents and grandparents, but there is no access healthcare with it, which is serious matter[2][3][4]. For example: > She says he needs a different type of care and has even offered to pay out of pocket, but she can’t get him into a long-term care home without an OHIP number. Did you bother to google Canada's family immigration laws? [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/supplementary-immigration-levels-2023-2025.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/citizenship-immigration-ohip-elderly-nursing-care-1.4059150 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/citizenship-immigrati... [3] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/kingston-ont-woman-fighting-for-palliative-care-for-father-who-is-ineligible-for-ohip-1.5849611 https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/kingston-ont-woman-fighting-for-pa... [4] https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/no-ohip-no-health-care-kingston-man-struggles-to-access-long-term-care-due-to-immigration-status https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/no-ohip-no-health-ca...