22 ms·

I support immigration and oppose the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S.

• tonynator 2y ago
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  • minicoz 2y ago
    damn west coast elites living in fantasyland.
  • AnarchismIsCool 2y ago
    Immigrants are substantially less likely to be involved in crime than US born persons. Don't make stuff up if you can't find a reputable source. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31440/w31440.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31440/w314...
    • tonynator 2y ago
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      • AnarchismIsCool 2y ago
        If you're going to make the argument undocumented immigrants are murdering everyone, you have to actually cite something. This is conjecture.
        • tonynator 2y ago
          https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-arrests-171-noncitizens-pending-charges-or-convictions-murder-homicide-or-assault https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-arrests-171-noncitizen... > In fiscal year (FY) 2023 ERO arrested 73,822 noncitizens with criminal histories; this group had 290,178 associated charges and convictions with an average of four per individual. These included 33,209 assaults; 4,390 sex and sexual assaults; 7,520 weapons offenses; 1,713 charges or convictions for homicide; and 1,655 kidnapping offenses.
          • tonynator 2y ago
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          • AnarchismIsCool 2y ago
            Ok, we're learning how to cite stuff. Now, how do we use that to support our thesis?
        • sieabahlpark 2y ago
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  • maximinus_thrax 2y ago
    > Hundreds of Americans have been killed by illegal immigrants recently. Care to link any crime statistic from an official source to back up that statement?
    • tonynator 2y ago
      https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-arrests-171-noncitizens-pending-charges-or-convictions-murder-homicide-or-assault https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-arrests-171-noncitizen... > In fiscal year (FY) 2023 ERO arrested 73,822 noncitizens with criminal histories; this group had 290,178 associated charges and convictions with an average of four per individual. These included 33,209 assaults; 4,390 sex and sexual assaults; 7,520 weapons offenses; 1,713 charges or convictions for homicide; and 1,655 kidnapping offenses.
      • maximinus_thrax 2y ago
        Try again, this doesn't support your initial statement.
        • tonynator 2y ago
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  • harimau777 2y ago
    Do you have any evidence to back that up? Everything I've seen says that they statistically commit less crime.
    • tonynator 2y ago
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• golemiprague 2y ago
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• greenchair 2y ago
  correction: anti-illegal immigrant platform. the 3rd worlder influx of criminals is negative for the country not positive.
  • _heimdall 2y ago
    What is and isn't legal immigration is always a moving target. A majority of US history included open borders where it was legal for anyone to get off a boat, provide some basic info, and go on to try and make their way here. The idea of closed borders, immigration caps, etc is relatively modern and driven more by the fact that social entitlement programs cost money than a fear of dangerous people coming here.
    • mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Modern civilization has entitlements, if we get rid of entitlements, sure we can have open borders. We just can’t do both or the system collapses.
      • _heimdall 2y ago
        Agreed. That's where the question is really interesting, and important, though. If we can only have one or the other, and if a majority of Americans view our southern border as an untenable situation, can we maintain our entitlement programs? Entitlement programs only work if we can secure our borders. If we can't secure our borders it seems to be clear that we can't have the entitlement programs.
      • AnarchismIsCool 2y ago
        Why are some societies worse off than others, to the point where someone would need to move countries take their entitlements? Might it have something to do with what the entitled countries did to the ones that are worse off?
        • tonynator 2y ago
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• pton_xd 2y ago
  > the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success. Explain how unskilled illegal immigrants contribute to our success. I'm open minded but I've yet to hear anything convincing. No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.
  • torpfactory 2y ago
    There’s a very sizable number of low paying, dirty, dangerous, and/or boring jobs that we can’t find enough locals to do. Think farm hands, home care aides, meat processors, etc. Unskilled immigrants do those jobs because that’s what is available to them (I.e unskilled). If they weren’t doing those jobs, we’d have to pay significantly more for the goods and services that labor depends on. Immigrant labor is disinflationary or at least prevents or ameliorates it.
    • zozbot234 2y ago
      These jobs are low-paying because they're broadly unproductive. If some of them weren't doing these jobs, the wages paid for them at the margin would increase. We are vastly better off importing more skilled immigrants to high-income countries, compared to unskilled ones.
      • lrem 2y ago
        How can you call literally feeding the people “broadly unproductive”? It’s low margin, but you can’t have a society supporting your margins without someone doing the bottom jobs.
        • petesergeant 2y ago
          Labour productivity has a specific meaning
          • gertlex 2y ago
• gottorf 2y ago
  > I'm not concerned about the crime You may not be concerned about the crime, but many voters are. The author of the article you linked to also exhorts the Somali immigrant community to not engage in crime. > because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until the 2nd and 3rd generation is able to make it into established society. History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime). It's clear that the national interest is in accepting skilled immigrants who migrate legally and are able to integrate fully into the host society, a la Teddy Roosevelt's dropping of the hyphen. It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.
  • spamizbad 2y ago
    > History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher, for certain categories of crime). I'm not sure that's true. For example, in the United States, it took numerous generations of German-Americans to fully integrate into society, with towns in Wisconsin speaking a dialect of German well into the 1940s. Despite this lack of cultural integration, these cities experienced very little crime.
    • gottorf 2y ago
      Different immigrant groups have better or worse outcomes, hence my saying "some immigrant groups". The cultural distance between the English progenitors of the US to the large wave of German immigrants in the 1800s is not as great as, say, that of Turkish immigrants to Germany post-WW2, or Syrian immigrants to contemporary Denmark. Another way to look at it is that immigrant groups bring parts of their old world with them; German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture and established it in their new country.
      • 2y ago
• jeffbee 2y ago
  Isn't that the opposite of what the stats tell us? Immigrants are the most law-abiding Americans, and their descendants converge to typical amounts of lawlessness in 1 or 2 generations. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31440 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31440
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Republicans are strongly anti-illegal immigration, and that appears anti-immigration to some.
  • amanaplanacanal 2y ago
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    • yieldcrv 2y ago
      that's not my interpretation, the opposition party votes as a bloc against everything until they aren't the opposition party any more. democrats do that too. neither party can pass a filibuster in the senate so it doesn't matter, it isn't about any party position. republicans support setting H1B visas at the same standard it was created for in 1991. I support that. I support linking the standards of minimum compensation to inflation or some automatically moving metric. we already have several higher criteria work visas, H1B's is just the most popular. republicans support our education visas turning into residency or work visas more seamlessly. I support that. the party doesn't support the empathy arguments for people that are here without a visa. I think something more holistic should be considered than mass deportation. Its important to add nuance. We have many categories of immigration and many populations. As well as a porous mismanaged border.
      • amanaplanacanal 2y ago
        That’s wrong on its face, since some legislation does get passed. They don’t oppose everything, they are selective. It’s strictly for political points. If Republican voters supported more immigration, it could happen. They just don’t. And calling people brought here as children by their parents criminals is ridiculous.
    • hackinthebochs 2y ago
      This is disingenuous. What the term illegal is referring to is unvetted. We could make all illegal immigrants legal at the stroke of a pen, but that's completely missing the point. We want immigration to be in service to the existing population. Giving a path to citizenship to anyone who has made it here no matter the means is just to torpedo the idea that immigration should be in service to the needs of the existing citizens.
• api 2y ago
  Shutting off US immigration is national suicide. Immigration is our superpower. It’s like a company deciding they don’t want any more customers. Utterly beyond idiotic. As birth rates drop globally the countries that are magnets for the highest quality immigrants will explode and basically rule the world. The kind of immigrants we get are the envy of the world too. I am a little more sympathetic to European concerns because the immigrants they are getting are coming for different reasons. Many of them are refugees not people coming because they genuinely want to be there, and that is a different deal entirely.
  • cm2187 2y ago
    The number of actual refugees in Europe is tiny (ukrainians excluded). What is large is the number of people who pretend to be refugees, like it is at the southern border of the US. And even actual refugees are really economic migrants after they crossed half a dozen countries where they wouldn't be in danger.
  • tonynator 2y ago
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  • ryan93 2y ago
    That’s why it has to stop. It must be just that much worse for the countries losing their talent
• selfmodruntime 2y ago
  > it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success This enables wage suppression
  • konschubert 2y ago
    High skilled immigrants also create demand, which creates labour demand. So it’s not clear that they suppress wages.
    • selfmodruntime 2y ago
      How exactly is it that highly skilled tech immigrants create demand?
      • konschubert 2y ago
        They get a salary. And they spend it. Thought experiment: If you removed half of the population of a country, would that make the rest of the country richer or poorer?
• generatedtruth 2y ago
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• hnpolicestate 2y ago
  What if *some* highly intelligent immigrants oppose American values? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. They may use their capital and ability to politically undermine our civil liberties. Most people globally aren't used to the American interpretation of free speech or gun rights. I don't want people coming here using their talents to politically remove my rights. I think this is a fair point to make.
  • michaelhoney 2y ago
    the obsession with gun rights is doing your country far more harm than highly intelligent immigrants ever will
    • hnpolicestate 2y ago
      I honestly don't see it. Statistically or otherwise. Even if it were. It's a protected unalienable right. Cannot under any circumstances be circumvented. In my opinion of course.
      • bmicraft 2y ago
        > It's a protected unalienable right. Cannot under any circumstances be circumvented. Until the next amendment to it, be that in a couple of years or centuries
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_culture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_culture_in_the_United_Stat... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-gun-became-integral-to-the-self-identity-of-millions-of-americans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-gun-becam... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts... https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fourth-july-musings-americas-gun-culture-viral-photos-rcna36397 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fourth-july-musings-am... https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
      • 2y ago
• TheRoque 2y ago
  > there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success And I find it so tragic. It means that the best elements of a given country are being sucked out of it. How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ? Immigration exists because some parts of the world just suck, with corrupt governments, wars, you name it. I don't see how anyone can be happy of migrations, it means fleeing your home and leaving your roots. I don't think most migrations are something to be happy about.
  • zozbot234 2y ago
    > And I find it so tragic. It means that the best elements of a given country are being sucked out of it. How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ? They don't leave irreversibly, they can go back if the political and institutional milieu in their home country improves, and bring valuable insights from abroad. This dynamic has been quite common wrt. those who migrated to the Americas throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
    • TheRoque 2y ago
      I tend to believe you, but it's not something that's about a lot. I would be curious to know the facts of expats coming back after a while, or a least investing in their home countries
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    > How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ? By competing for their talent. I'm not a huge proponent of capitalism, but that's the world we live in and the world we'll die in. These countries simply aren't competitive in a way to encourage their people to stay. There are innumerous ways to combat this. But our current thinking is so clouded by short sighted profit that today's outcomes shouldn't surprise anyone.
  • sensanaty 2y ago
    Frankly, my home country doesn't deserve my brain, nor the brain of anyone else willing and able to leave it. It's a nice sentiment, but you also can't ignore that, if people like myself are willing to go through the oftentimes extremely stressful task of emigrating with all the things that entails, there's probably a reason for it. It's not like you can just pick up and leave, after all
• cryptoegorophy 2y ago
  Legal or illegal immigration? Should we background check immigrants for crime?
• carom 2y ago
  Building a class of undocumented workers who are outside the normal legal system is simply a gift to corporations. I am staunchly against illegal immigration while being very pro legal immigration. If we need workers, bring them in legally instead of allowing them to exist in a legal grey area as exploitable labor.
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    You can have protections for illegal immigrants that prevent a lot of abuse. California has some good laws about this.
    • deleted 2y ago
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• SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
  All fair points, however if we take everything you said at face value (which I mostly do, with some caveats) it does give give one pause to consider what a constant stream of new migrants means. It all sounds well and good to say that the problem is self correcting after a few generations, but if you are constantly "importing" new (1st generation) migrants, this lag-time becomes a serious issue quickly.
• wil421 2y ago
  Most people are against border hooping illegal immigrant not legal immigrants. There’s a huge difference. For some reason the internet puts them in the same camp.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • fishcrackers 2y ago
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• 29athrowaway 2y ago
  The first mistake when approaching immigration is to take all the different types of immigration and even non-immigration and lower the level of detail to simply "immigration". This means: 1. refugees 2. legal immigrants 3. non-immigrants magic beam of 3.1. temporary workers ──infinite──> "iMMiGraNTs" 3.2. tourists irrationality and "mIGrAntS" 4. students 5. illegal immigrants 6. stateless 7. prisoners of war 8. etc If you want to fix a problem you need to divide it into subproblems and solve each problem, not mix everything together and make a larger problem harder to solve. Mixing everything together is obfuscating the problem which is the modus operandi of those who want to prevent the solution of the problem as they have an incentive to keep the problem around. Politicians like keeping immigration a problem because it gives them a way to divide people into groups and rewarding those groups depending on their political needs, making you easier to rule. Which is what they do for everything else. In their case, you are the problem to solve, not the actual problem they so passionately talk about. And when you get angry you play right into their villain claws. The brain gain/drain dynamics between countries is real. Brain gain is what you definitely want as a country.
• vikingerik 2y ago
  Brain drain to the US helps the US, yes. The key word there is the brain. What doesn't help is taking in unskilled and manual laborers; that only creates downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing prices and other scarce resources, even before we get to any correlation with crime. Countries with a highly successful immigration system, notably Canada, do it by being highly merit-based, for education and professional skills. The US hasn't put together any significant plan for that. Trump briefly tried proposing merit-based immigration in his first term, but it was quickly shot down with all the usual accusations of discrimination and so on. The US kinda unofficially does it via H1-B and O-1 visas, though that's only for employment and mostly not for permanent residence.
  • codexon 2y ago
    > Countries with a highly successful immigration system, notably Canada You probably aren't aware of this but that is definitely not the sentiment with Canadians recently. https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaHousing2/top/?sort=top&t=year https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaHousing2/top/?sort=top&t=year
    • ckdarby 2y ago
      Canadian here, but not speaking on half of all Canadians. We do have a highly successful immigration system, but don't have a highly successful infrastructure. There is a housing crisis. The irony is I believe in the longer term Canada will face an immigrant shortage and not a housing crisis. As a born Canadian I am seeing less & less value to immigrating to Canada unless you're coming to employed as a Uber driver/Food delivery.
      • codexon 2y ago
        Ok and what about all the people in that subreddit complaining about lack of jobs and healthcare? It's not just a housing crisis.
• searealist 2y ago
  So you support skilled immigration. That sounds like a republican position to me.
• culopatin 2y ago
  But you need the friction for the brain drain, otherwise it will just be anyone. Brain or no brain. I’m an immigrant and I can tell you that without the difficulties you’d just get people that would save enough to buy a ticket and land here and just “figure it out”. There is already lots of surplus in the retail area. I’m convinced that the system expects a percentage of leakage by design as a strainer to keep the low effort migration out.
• sumedh 2y ago
  > I'm not concerned about the crime because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until Would you share the same opinion if you were a victim?
• rpmisms 2y ago
  I support immigration too, as long as it's people we vet. Smart people want to live here, and will jump through hoops to do so. We should make the hoops easier for them, and actually deport people who spit in their faces by waltzing over the border and staying. It's not fair to the hard-working honest people who played by the rules. Also, you should be concerned about the crime. Have you seen what the cartel does in Mexico? It's terrifying, and those (cartel members) are not people we want here.
  • timschmidt 2y ago
    > Have you seen what the cartel does in Mexico? The ones the DEA has partnered with[0], arms[1], and enables through backward drug policy[2]? 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaloa_Cartel#Alleged_collusion_with_US_federal_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaloa_Cartel#Alleged_collusi... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal 2: https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/how-100-years-failed-drug-policy-rise-mexico-cartels/ https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/how-100-years-failed-...
    • rpmisms 2y ago
      What, you assume I think the government is good? The cartel is worse by a fair margin, but we do not have a virtuous government. The difference is that government has a modicum of public responsibility and can't/isn't likely to simply murder most* of us for no good reason.
      • timschmidt 2y ago
        Did you find any assumptions in the references I provided? Since you evoked the cartels as a boogeyman it seems relevant to point out that they're one of our own creation. Changes to US policy no greater or more complex than those proposed for immigration could eliminate the economic conditions which drive their violence.
    • rangestransform 2y ago
      Well prescreening immigrants lets us avoid dealing with the consequences of our actions, so why not
• rayiner 2y ago
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  • e40 2y ago
    A lot of words but they really don’t explain why you are against immigration.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      To;dr — regression to the mean.
  • duped 2y ago
    I don't think the difference is European in nature, I think that immigrants 100 years ago have a totally different experience than today. I can only speak to my family's history and that I saw growing up, but my great-grandfather was an immigrant from a Slavic region (to be technical, Poland didn't exist yet, but he was a Catholic who spoke Polish). To make a long story short, none of his kids ever spoke Polish. That wasn't familial pressure, but the physical and emotional abuse inflicted on children in schools to beat the slav out of them if they acted or sounded "fresh off the boat" - to the point where four generations later, all of us know that phrase because it's been said to us one way or another. Contrast this with the most recent wave of Polish immigration to the same neighborhoods almost 80 years later. These are kids I grew up with. They had Polish clubs in school, they went to "Polish school," they spoke the language fluently and publicly, and to a certain degree that was celebrated by the rest of the community. The external pressure not to be Polish is essentially gone. I don't have a grand point here, it's just something I think about a lot in these debates. I learned what the experience of my ancestors was, and saw something of what happened to my peers, and the only difference was 100 years. It seems to me the difference between what we think of as assimilation is really how likely a community is to join the melting pot depending on the internal or external pressures on that community.
  • OfficeChad 2y ago
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  • 2y ago
• ericmcer 2y ago
  I thought the republicans wanted stronger border control. Border control and immigration policy are different things. If anyone can just hop the border and walk in and we don’t deport them then our immigration policy is irrelevant because we are choosing not to enforce it.
• bufferoverflow 2y ago
  > I support immigration and oppose the Republican anti-immigrant platform Republicans are anti-illegal immigration, not anti-immigration. Trump's wife is an immigrant. > because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success. It would only be a brain drain if you filter by skills or IQ. But if you just let everyone in, you can make things worse, not better. > I'm not concerned about the crime Of course, and we can see the results.
  • defrost 2y ago
    The FBI data also shows a 59% reduction in the U.S. property crime rate between 1993 and 2022, with big declines in the rates of burglary (-75%), larceny/theft (-54%) and motor vehicle theft (-53%). Using the BJS statistics, the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those captured in the FBI data. Per BJS, the U.S. violent and property crime rates each fell 71% between 1993 and 2022. Of course the real reason for comments such as that above are that: Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down. In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period. The only real uptick of note in recent years has been the murder rate in the US during the COVID years, staying home and feeling under threat led to an increase in US citizen on citizen crime - not immigration. Of course those with a blinkered news bubble (Fox, et al) tend to believe the hyped up overstaing of every low occurrence incidence and clutch their pearls in response. The data says otherwise. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
    • jwilber 2y ago
      “The data says otherwise” in aggregate, up to the year 2022. Posting aggregate stats just comes off iso a “gotcha” instead of a real discussion involving thought or context, both of which are needed in any discussion including data. There’s many angles someone could take this. You mentioned Fox News. They certainly don’t drone about crime in Little Rock — they complain about the “anarchist hellscape” of liberal cities (or whatever superlative they want to call it that hour). The worst of which? HN HQ San Francisco! (fwiw I love SF). Unfortunately, in stark contrast to your stats, property crime has certainly gone up in San Francisco since 2012 [1]. SF is also a hot destination of migrant relocation busses [2], so is probably a city Fox mentions when it comes to migrant crime. (Fwiw, Cubans often end up in liberal cities in conservative states, like Miami, Houston, Kentucky, not SF)[3]. Anyways, I have no horse in this race. I’m not really sure what my point is with this tangential response, other than to say your stats require context, and can just as easily factually be opposite to what you wrote, depending on that context. 1 https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/16/property-crime-rates-test-san-franciscans-values https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/16/property-... 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/abbott-texas-migrant-buses.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/abbott-texas-migrant-b... 3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/interactive/2024/us-immigration-where-migrants-live/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzIxMjc1MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzIyNjU3NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjEyNzUyMDAsImp0aSI6ImFkNzhhNDY0LWUxNjYtNDlkNC04NjVjLTA5NTlkY2RlOTVkMSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9pbW1pZ3JhdGlvbi9pbnRlcmFjdGl2ZS8yMDI0L3VzLWltbWlncmF0aW9uLXdoZXJlLW1pZ3JhbnRzLWxpdmUvIn0.0aT0gBg3ZJ4oTcmum6wysTL26g2XGY7k9u-nn7He6Ao&itid=gfta https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/interactive/2024/...
• anonu 2y ago
  > the Republican anti-immigrant platform It's just illegal immigration. We need more immigration. But people's first act as American citizens should be a legal one.
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Its an anti legal immigrant platform too as they work to limit visas.
• indulona 2y ago
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• TacticalCoder 2y ago
  98% of women in Somalia are sexually mutilated. Guess what Somalis are doing in France to their little girls? That s right: they re mutilating them. But I take it 98% of Somalis women getting sexually mutilated in Somalia is the fault of colonization or something?
  • AaronFriel 2y ago
    Blanket accusations like this are racist. Genital mutilation is an abhorrent practice. While the impact is uniquely horrible for women, it is definitely "throwing stones in glass houses" to act as though it's a strange cultural practice to damage the nerves of a child's genitals, a practice done to millions of boys in Europe by those of multi-generational European descent. Now, you could be opposed to both practices of course, but you are choosing to make a blanket accusation to suit a point of view.
  • danielheath 2y ago
    I mean, it’s drawing a _bit_ of a long bow, but there’s a pretty cogent argument to be made that European powers in many nations funded/armed criminal gangs (by buying slaves/selling weapons), and those gangs took over the country with that backing, which destroyed what public institutions existed, and normalised “strongman coercion”. There’s various points and counterpoints within that and I’m woefully ill equipped to evaluate them, but it’s not wrong “prima fasciae”.
• LunaSea 2y ago
  Careful, the "doctors and lawyers" mantra was already tried in Europe since 2015 and failed miserably.
  • Brechreiz 2y ago
    cringe rightoid opinion. you don't live in Europe and Fox News is lying to you.
    • LunaSea 2y ago
      I am living in Europe, always have and you should look at the studies made in Denmark and Germany to find out how this went down.
• renegade-otter 2y ago
  It's sad and painfully ironic that the same escapees of the regime will almost exclusively vote for Republicans. Cubans are very similar to ex-Soviet expats in that regard, something I can speak to firsthand. The GOP found a magic word to "unlock" these people. Say the word "socialism" and all logic centers immediately shut down. It is replaced by panic and fear. No data or common sense is helpful - ask them to choose between Democrats and We Are Going To Eat Your Babies Party, and they will ask what kind of condiments you would like for the baby. I am only half-kidding. Alexander Vindman's father from Soviet Ukraine's Odesa, for example, was all in for Trump until only well into the process of seeing his son's career destroyed and threats received for telling the truth under oath. My own father, who had a very close brush with the KGB - is the same way. They want to be authoritarian, they TELL them that this is what they want, musing about retribution, gulags, and "punishing" the enemies, and it's still not going through. They even showed just a taste of the cruelty by making migrant children orphaned. It's worse than the Soviet Union in that sense because repressions were a tool but sadism was not a public policy. Shit, even THEY left children alone. It's just so amazing, but it also shows you the power of words, branding, and marketing.
  • Nasrudith 2y ago
    The bolsheviks spared the Romanovs and their servants instead of brutally murdering them all? That is a very novel view of history.
    • renegade-otter 2y ago
      You had to go back all the way to the revolution, by its nature a violent, brutal event, to make a point? Which just proves mine.
• ReptileMan 2y ago
  Fair point. Everyone with education, practical skills and high iq is welcome legally. Any reasons why we need the rest? Especially crossing the borders illegally?
• 0dayz 2y ago
  That's because you guys vet them like crazy before allowing them in a lot of European countries don't.
• stainablesteel 2y ago
  i dont want to support the brain drain of other countries, it will leave too many hungry and desperate and this will sow seeds for future wars
  • xkcd1963 2y ago
    That is kind of a one-sided view. There is plenty of opportunity arising for those that stay too.
• bart_spoon 2y ago
  There is an important distinction between anti-immigration policies and anti-illegal immigration policies. I don’t know of many politicians who are against immigration of any kind. But there are plenty who are for doing something about the hundreds of thousands crossing the border illegally and/or abusing the asylum process. This isn’t even a partisan issue. Many of those opposed to fixing this problem did an immediate 180 the moment those illegal immigrants began being bussed to their city.
• marcusverus 2y ago
  > I support immigration and oppose the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success. If it's brain-drain you want, the Republican party's immigration plan seems superior, actually. The previous Republican administration attempted to replace our current lottery-based legal immigration program with a meritocratic, point-based system, but was blocked by the Democrat-led house. True, Republicans would reduce legal immigration and greatly reduce illegal immigration, but if your specific issue is bringing in brains, which seems like a better haul? 100,000 young, English-speaking, elite scientists, academics and professionals from around the world? Or two million randos picked out of a hat?
• diogenescynic 2y ago
  I'm for limited immigration but not how it is right now when there are millions entering the country each year and we're not building more homes to keep up with the new demand and we already have a housing crisis. Immigration should be orderly and law based.