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American is built on immigration, and nearly all of us are immigrants or very recent descendants of immigrants. How in the world has immigration harmed American
by spankalee 9mo ago
American is built on immigration, and nearly all of us are immigrants or very recent descendants of immigrants. How in the world has immigration harmed Americans?
- robin_reala 9mo agoAsk the indigenous Americans.
- spankalee 9mo agoI think if you're going to argue that we shouldn't have contemporary immigration because of the harm to native Americans, then you should show what harm is caused _now_, that native Americans actually oppose immigration, and probably that you support other ways of helping them like giving them land back.
- throwaway173738 9mo agoIf you go back far enough everyone comes from a line of invaders, so I fail to see how this contributes to anything.
- gavin-1 9mo agoNot a fair comparison. Immigrants are not killing Americans en masse nor taking the land by force.
- JoshTriplett 9mo agoIt's a NIMBY policy, pulling up the ladder. It's rooted in zero-sum thinking, that can't imagine "make the pie bigger" and can only imagine a fixed-size pie where their slice is getting smaller. Given the impact the economy has on people's lives, it's an understandable fear. There's plenty of evidence for this not being the case (and in fact evidence for the "brain drain" strategy having substantial positive impact), but getting people to let go of a fear typically requires more than just hard evidence that it's unfounded. (There's a separate branch of that fear, that imagines immigrants to be a drain on public assistance programs, but there's plenty of evidence that that is not the case.) (Also, as always, policy is complicated and no comment that fits on a page is going to capture all the nuance of it or facets of it.)