12 ms·

Abolish the borders. Anyone who can pass a criminal background check gets in, no more questions asked. Immigration is our #1 competitive advantage in the US, as

Abolish the borders. Anyone who can pass a criminal background check gets in, no more questions asked. Immigration is our #1 competitive advantage in the US, as the entire rest of the industrialized world slips into a demographic abyss.

jpollock 3y ago
A criminal background check is more investigation than is currently done. That’s usually only done for multi-year visas.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rayiner 3y ago
    This attitude displays a fundamental lack of understanding of human society. People from different cultures are different. Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country. In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. There are perfectly good reasons why the people in new country wouldn’t want to live with those changes. For example, my parents come from Bangladesh, which was disarmed by the British. They cannot understand—for deeply cultural reasons—why anyone would need a gun. My wife’s parents, meanwhile, come from a frontier tradition, where you need guns to protect yourself from mountain lions or in places far from the reach of the law. Insofar as everyone votes their culture, why shouldn’t the people who are already here be able to say “we don’t have anything against your culture, but we prefer ours, and we don’t want you coming her and changing our society?”
    - ramesh31 3y ago
      > People from different cultures are different. Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country. In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. Yes, this is indeed the precise excuse given for every single wave of immigration in US history for hundreds of years. Yet somehow we're still here, leading the world economically, politically, and culturally, watching as the frightened closed societies of Europe and Asia circle their wagons and fade into oblivion.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - triceratops 3y ago
      > Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country Citation needed. Especially for the "generations". From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down. My personal thesis is that some countries are really good at absorbing and integrating immigrants, and they see the benefits. America is exceptional at it, possibly the best in the world.
      - skissane 3y ago
        > America is exceptional at it, possibly the best in the world. Is the US actually better at absorbing immigrants than Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand? I’m unconvinced.
      - xyzzyz 3y ago
        For citation, I recommend a book by Garret Jones, “The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left” https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Transplant-Migrants-Make-Economies/dp/1503632946 https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Transplant-Migrants-Make-Econ...
        forgingahead 3y ago
        Hilarious that the person you're replying to had their smug reddit "CITATION NEEDED" gotcha-attempt, and when you and rayiner provided some, I see nothing but downvotes. I can hear the reeee'ing from here.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        > Citation needed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016517652300304X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651... ("Under this model, immigrants do not fully assimilate; rather, they transmit certain old-country values and behaviors to their descendants in the new country. Empirical support for culture transplant varies depending on the particular trait in question. Social trust, for example, shows strong evidence of transplant over different time periods and in many different countries.... the results suggest that a 'transplant' does occur in the U.S., as a strong relationship exists between individual savings and ancestral savings rates. The relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In a midrange estimate, a 1 percentage-point increase in ancestral-country savings rates is associated with a 1 percent increase in retirement savings among second-generation immigrants.") > From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down. Only superficially, despite coming from a very westernized family in a former british colony. There's an enormous gap in "deep culture" between me and my wife's family and my wife and her family (who came here before the American revolution from Britain). You think you're well-assimilated until your kid wants to "express themselves" and you realize you abhor how Americans raise their kids, interact with their families, view the world, etc.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      You should watch Gangs of New York. It highlights how the original white anglo saxon Protestant population of americans had the same fears as you mentioned with catholic italian and irishmen coming in and changing the culture of the country. It turns out, everyones kids assimilate into american culture just fine. Today you can’t tell whether a kid came from an anglo or irish or italian background. In some parts of the US that is already true for latinos, who are now the dominant population in many american cities, and whose youth population engaged with the same things as any other american youth population today.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        > It highlights how the original white anglo saxon Protestant population of americans had the same fears as you mentioned with catholic italian and irishmen coming in and changing the culture of the country. But they did change it, into something completely different. America was supposed to be like what you might still see in some small New England towns, with decentralized power and an actively engaged, self-governing citizenry. If you were someone in 1920 who thought WASP culture was a good thing, your fears were completely validated. That country doesn't exist anymore.
        wmorgan 3y ago
        I live in one of those New England towns where everyone piles into the gym at the high school to argue about whether we really need a new fire engine. It’s not clear to me who you think lives here, but from what I can see it’s mostly Irish, Italian, Polish, and Indian. To meet someone whose four grandparents were born here is rare. Something like 30% of the population of Massachusetts was born in another country. Whatever else happened in history to make it this way, it sure wasn’t keeping out immigrants.
        rayiner 3y ago
        If you sort the states by percentage of British ancestry, it’s pretty much a list of places that are “the way the American republic was designed to be”: Utah, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon.
    - dctoedt 3y ago
      > People from different cultures are different. Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country. You've said that your wife's family has been in this country since before the American Revolution. So your kids aren't exclusively products of your (recent-immigrant) family's culture. > In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. That's how evolution works: Through the combined effects of variation — especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction — plus selection for that which provides an advantage in the relevant environment. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.) > There are perfectly good reasons why the people in new country wouldn’t want to live with those changes. Different people dislike a wide variety of changes. (We love novelty, we hate change.) Robert A. Heinlein said, "Never argue with the weather"; in the modern world, population migration falls into that category. Footnote: I'm re-reading David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest, about the origins of American involvement in the Vietnam War — which was a subject of not a little personal interest to me and my generation back then. It's saddening to read again how U.S. policymakers' insistence on unrealistic premises — rejecting knowledgeable advice from experienced Asia hands — led to delusions that we could interfere in a colonial war on the cheap. Modern global migration presents similar opportunities for policy f*k-ups.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        > If you imagine that y'all's kids are exclusively products of your immigrant family's "deep culture," then your wife and her family would doubtless like a word. The super-majority of every group still marries within their group, so our case is unusual. (My wife still has 7/8 British ancestry.) Our kids are a negotiated mix: Bangladeshi dad morality and career expectations, Oregonian mom austerity and disciplinary techniques. Regardless, my point is that they’re far from Oregonian. Folks in Eugene, OR probably wouldn’t want my daughter running the town. > In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. That's how evolution works — variation, plus selection for that which works, especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.) I would characterize what’s happening to America as more like entropy. Or maybe “worse is better.” Regardless, I view society as democratic project, not a free market or evolutionary one. People get to design the kind of society they want to live in. And they should realize that who they invite to join that society has a big effect on that.
    - onetimeusename 3y ago
      Post WWII, imo, there is a view by the "public service" class that being anti-immigration, in the West only, is morally akin to Nazism. I don't feel like the US's immigration policy, official and unofficial, is really democratic. Especially over the last few years. It feels like it was crafted by judges, lawyers, and people with a vested interest in more immigration to achieve a certain outcome and that plan has worked tremendously well for them. I am not sure what the future will bring from this. It's probably unprecedented in history.
rayiner 3y ago
Immigration isn’t a competitive advantage; it’s a symptom not a cause. America was already the richest country in the world per capita in the early days of the republic. That wealth attracted immigration, not the other way around. Immigrants bring their “deep culture” with them to their new countries: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-transplant-review-immigrations-legacy-11670794152 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-transplant-review-i.... Even generations later, Americans originating from different parts of Europe depict the same differences in basic cultural attitudes like social trust as their counterparts in Europe. (E.g. German Americans are much more trusting than Italian Americans, as are Germans versus Italians in Europe.) Eliminating the border would be a great way to turn the US into Mexico.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rexpop 3y ago
    > that wealth (in the form of raw resources) was completely useless and dormant without the labor to exploit it Arguably, the bulk of the "raw resources" which have accumulated to US business interests came from eg Latin America, from which Europe and later America pulled rubber, silver, beef, copper, chocolate and a thousand others. Neither have we stopped; where do you think Nestlé's palm kernel oil comes from? Not the raw resources within our borders. I recommend everyone read "No Wall They Can Build" and "Open Veins of Latin America".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - blackhawkC17 3y ago
    > For all of their fussing, practically nothing in this country for the past two centuries was actually built by the white European protestants who claim "ownership" of America. They built the legal, political, and cultural structure that enabled America to flourish. Wonder why Africans didn’t build many Washingtons back in their home countries.. P.S: I’m African (Nigerian)
unethical_ban 3y ago
Ah, education, scarcity of resources, and common culture (at least respect for democracy and our history) mean nothing.
mc32 3y ago
Would Turkey, Ukraine, Iran, Israel and China, be receptive to the proposal of abolishing borders? I’m a bit doubtful given the active hostilities going on on some regions…
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kjkjadksj 3y ago
It is pretty ironic that americans can grow up broke in west virginia and freely chase economic prospects around the continental US with little trouble. But be born in mexico and now you have this entire byzantine process to do the same thing just because of where the hospital was located in. It is pretty stupid. People are fungible. Arguments for borders are arguments for irrational xenophobia when you distill them, since they never seem to use these same arguments to contain poor americans in poor states.
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  > People are fungible. People are anything but.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    People are brainpower and labor. They are fungible. Its politics and religion that tries to make you think this person with a brain and two hands is fundamentally different than this other person with a brain and two hands.
    - peterfirefly 3y ago
      That's the Kang and Kodos Theory of Humans. Actual humans have ideas, values, beliefs, religions, obligations, loyalties, desires, etc... And they also differ a lot in brainpower and ability (and desire) to work!
      - kjkjadksj 3y ago
        Sure, theres a distribution for everytbing. But on the whole I dont believe these distributions are much different. If anything its the born american in the coddled middle class suburban upbringing thats likely to slack off and not ever have learned what hard work actually means. They are playing roblox and pushing the average age to start driving back by the year, while a kid their age half the world away might be laying brick 12 hours a day knowing if they don’t they don’t eat that night.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> Abolish the borders. > Anyone who can pass a criminal background check gets in "In" to what? You have to have borders for there to be anything to get in to.

jpollock 3y ago

A criminal background check is more investigation than is currently done. That’s usually only done for multi-year visas.

ramesh31 3y ago
[flagged]
- rayiner 3y ago
  This attitude displays a fundamental lack of understanding of human society. People from different cultures are different. Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country. In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. There are perfectly good reasons why the people in new country wouldn’t want to live with those changes. For example, my parents come from Bangladesh, which was disarmed by the British. They cannot understand—for deeply cultural reasons—why anyone would need a gun. My wife’s parents, meanwhile, come from a frontier tradition, where you need guns to protect yourself from mountain lions or in places far from the reach of the law. Insofar as everyone votes their culture, why shouldn’t the people who are already here be able to say “we don’t have anything against your culture, but we prefer ours, and we don’t want you coming her and changing our society?”
  - ramesh31 3y ago
    > People from different cultures are different. Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country. In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. Yes, this is indeed the precise excuse given for every single wave of immigration in US history for hundreds of years. Yet somehow we're still here, leading the world economically, politically, and culturally, watching as the frightened closed societies of Europe and Asia circle their wagons and fade into oblivion.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - triceratops 3y ago
    > Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country Citation needed. Especially for the "generations". From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down. My personal thesis is that some countries are really good at absorbing and integrating immigrants, and they see the benefits. America is exceptional at it, possibly the best in the world.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > America is exceptional at it, possibly the best in the world. Is the US actually better at absorbing immigrants than Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand? I’m unconvinced.
    - xyzzyz 3y ago
      For citation, I recommend a book by Garret Jones, “The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left” https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Transplant-Migrants-Make-Economies/dp/1503632946 https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Transplant-Migrants-Make-Econ...
      - forgingahead 3y ago
        Hilarious that the person you're replying to had their smug reddit "CITATION NEEDED" gotcha-attempt, and when you and rayiner provided some, I see nothing but downvotes. I can hear the reeee'ing from here.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      > Citation needed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016517652300304X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651... ("Under this model, immigrants do not fully assimilate; rather, they transmit certain old-country values and behaviors to their descendants in the new country. Empirical support for culture transplant varies depending on the particular trait in question. Social trust, for example, shows strong evidence of transplant over different time periods and in many different countries.... the results suggest that a 'transplant' does occur in the U.S., as a strong relationship exists between individual savings and ancestral savings rates. The relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In a midrange estimate, a 1 percentage-point increase in ancestral-country savings rates is associated with a 1 percent increase in retirement savings among second-generation immigrants.") > From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down. Only superficially, despite coming from a very westernized family in a former british colony. There's an enormous gap in "deep culture" between me and my wife's family and my wife and her family (who came here before the American revolution from Britain). You think you're well-assimilated until your kid wants to "express themselves" and you realize you abhor how Americans raise their kids, interact with their families, view the world, etc.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    You should watch Gangs of New York. It highlights how the original white anglo saxon Protestant population of americans had the same fears as you mentioned with catholic italian and irishmen coming in and changing the culture of the country. It turns out, everyones kids assimilate into american culture just fine. Today you can’t tell whether a kid came from an anglo or irish or italian background. In some parts of the US that is already true for latinos, who are now the dominant population in many american cities, and whose youth population engaged with the same things as any other american youth population today.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      > It highlights how the original white anglo saxon Protestant population of americans had the same fears as you mentioned with catholic italian and irishmen coming in and changing the culture of the country. But they did change it, into something completely different. America was supposed to be like what you might still see in some small New England towns, with decentralized power and an actively engaged, self-governing citizenry. If you were someone in 1920 who thought WASP culture was a good thing, your fears were completely validated. That country doesn't exist anymore.
      - wmorgan 3y ago
        I live in one of those New England towns where everyone piles into the gym at the high school to argue about whether we really need a new fire engine. It’s not clear to me who you think lives here, but from what I can see it’s mostly Irish, Italian, Polish, and Indian. To meet someone whose four grandparents were born here is rare. Something like 30% of the population of Massachusetts was born in another country. Whatever else happened in history to make it this way, it sure wasn’t keeping out immigrants.
        rayiner 3y ago
        If you sort the states by percentage of British ancestry, it’s pretty much a list of places that are “the way the American republic was designed to be”: Utah, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon.
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    > People from different cultures are different. Not because of race, but because of cultural socialization, which persists for generations even in a new host country. You've said that your wife's family has been in this country since before the American Revolution. So your kids aren't exclusively products of your (recent-immigrant) family's culture. > In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. That's how evolution works: Through the combined effects of variation — especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction — plus selection for that which provides an advantage in the relevant environment. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.) > There are perfectly good reasons why the people in new country wouldn’t want to live with those changes. Different people dislike a wide variety of changes. (We love novelty, we hate change.) Robert A. Heinlein said, "Never argue with the weather"; in the modern world, population migration falls into that category. Footnote: I'm re-reading David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest, about the origins of American involvement in the Vietnam War — which was a subject of not a little personal interest to me and my generation back then. It's saddening to read again how U.S. policymakers' insistence on unrealistic premises — rejecting knowledgeable advice from experienced Asia hands — led to delusions that we could interfere in a colonial war on the cheap. Modern global migration presents similar opportunities for policy f*k-ups.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      > If you imagine that y'all's kids are exclusively products of your immigrant family's "deep culture," then your wife and her family would doubtless like a word. The super-majority of every group still marries within their group, so our case is unusual. (My wife still has 7/8 British ancestry.) Our kids are a negotiated mix: Bangladeshi dad morality and career expectations, Oregonian mom austerity and disciplinary techniques. Regardless, my point is that they’re far from Oregonian. Folks in Eugene, OR probably wouldn’t want my daughter running the town. > In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. That's how evolution works — variation, plus selection for that which works, especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.) I would characterize what’s happening to America as more like entropy. Or maybe “worse is better.” Regardless, I view society as democratic project, not a free market or evolutionary one. People get to design the kind of society they want to live in. And they should realize that who they invite to join that society has a big effect on that.
  - onetimeusename 3y ago
    Post WWII, imo, there is a view by the "public service" class that being anti-immigration, in the West only, is morally akin to Nazism. I don't feel like the US's immigration policy, official and unofficial, is really democratic. Especially over the last few years. It feels like it was crafted by judges, lawyers, and people with a vested interest in more immigration to achieve a certain outcome and that plan has worked tremendously well for them. I am not sure what the future will bring from this. It's probably unprecedented in history.

rayiner 3y ago

Immigration isn’t a competitive advantage; it’s a symptom not a cause. America was already the richest country in the world per capita in the early days of the republic. That wealth attracted immigration, not the other way around. Immigrants bring their “deep culture” with them to their new countries: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-transplant-review-immigrations-legacy-11670794152 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-transplant-review-i.... Even generations later, Americans originating from different parts of Europe depict the same differences in basic cultural attitudes like social trust as their counterparts in Europe. (E.g. German Americans are much more trusting than Italian Americans, as are Germans versus Italians in Europe.) Eliminating the border would be a great way to turn the US into Mexico.

ramesh31 3y ago
[flagged]
- rexpop 3y ago
  > that wealth (in the form of raw resources) was completely useless and dormant without the labor to exploit it Arguably, the bulk of the "raw resources" which have accumulated to US business interests came from eg Latin America, from which Europe and later America pulled rubber, silver, beef, copper, chocolate and a thousand others. Neither have we stopped; where do you think Nestlé's palm kernel oil comes from? Not the raw resources within our borders. I recommend everyone read "No Wall They Can Build" and "Open Veins of Latin America".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- blackhawkC17 3y ago
  > For all of their fussing, practically nothing in this country for the past two centuries was actually built by the white European protestants who claim "ownership" of America. They built the legal, political, and cultural structure that enabled America to flourish. Wonder why Africans didn’t build many Washingtons back in their home countries.. P.S: I’m African (Nigerian)

unethical_ban 3y ago

Ah, education, scarcity of resources, and common culture (at least respect for democracy and our history) mean nothing.

mc32 3y ago

Would Turkey, Ukraine, Iran, Israel and China, be receptive to the proposal of abolishing borders? I’m a bit doubtful given the active hostilities going on on some regions…

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kjkjadksj 3y ago

It is pretty ironic that americans can grow up broke in west virginia and freely chase economic prospects around the continental US with little trouble. But be born in mexico and now you have this entire byzantine process to do the same thing just because of where the hospital was located in. It is pretty stupid. People are fungible. Arguments for borders are arguments for irrational xenophobia when you distill them, since they never seem to use these same arguments to contain poor americans in poor states.

peterfirefly 3y ago
> People are fungible. People are anything but.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  People are brainpower and labor. They are fungible. Its politics and religion that tries to make you think this person with a brain and two hands is fundamentally different than this other person with a brain and two hands.
  - peterfirefly 3y ago
    That's the Kang and Kodos Theory of Humans. Actual humans have ideas, values, beliefs, religions, obligations, loyalties, desires, etc... And they also differ a lot in brainpower and ability (and desire) to work!
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      Sure, theres a distribution for everytbing. But on the whole I dont believe these distributions are much different. If anything its the born american in the coddled middle class suburban upbringing thats likely to slack off and not ever have learned what hard work actually means. They are playing roblox and pushing the average age to start driving back by the year, while a kid their age half the world away might be laying brick 12 hours a day knowing if they don’t they don’t eat that night.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

> Abolish the borders. > Anyone who can pass a criminal background check gets in "In" to what? You have to have borders for there to be anything to get in to.