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Unfortunately, I think this is the point. They want to push the needle so that even legal immigration is restricted or difficult (unless you happen to pay them

• joe_mamba 5mo ago
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  • blizdiddy 5mo ago
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    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
      @dang, @tomhow, how about application of HN rules here please?
  • rohansood15 5mo ago
    Let's say the government can't care for 100M people because of lack of doctors. Now they could train one over 10 years, or you could have one of the smartest doctors in the world come be 100M+1. Would you take that? Now expand that across socio-economic spectrum (not enough plumbers, teachers, AI experts, researchers etc). That is what legal immigration is meant for.
    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
      >Let's say the government can't care for 100M people because of lack of doctors. Then the government is proven to be severely incompetent and shouldn't be trusted with more migration because it will guaranteed fumble that too. Barring mass migration, populations don't naturally just explode overnight for you to suddenly end up with 100 million people and no doctors. Governments have all the tools and data at their disposal to see population trends, piramid, emigration, immigration, job statistics, housing, etc. all this data you can use and plot out to determine how many doctors you'll need in the future as the population follows the trajectory and plan training and recruitment of doctors ahead of time so that when population reaches 100 million or 500 million there will be an proportional number of doctors. So then why didn't the government do this preemptively when they had all the info and levers at their disposal? Could it be because they simply don't give a shit and they only care about winning the next election and not what happens in 20+ years when the population reaches 100 million and there's no doctors? Because they won't be in charge then when the shit hits the fan so they don't care to be preemptive for something that's not a pressing issue now. So then given this, why would you trust these same people with enabling mass migration on your behalf? They clearly don't care about the long term future planning and second order effects of their actions. > or you could have one of the smartest doctors in the world come be 100M+1. Would you take that? In which case do 1 million of doctors and only doctors and nothing else but doctors show up at your borders because if that were the case I guarantee you everyone would take them in no questions asked. That's the classic bait and switch. Merkel also told Germans they're getting "doctors and engineers" in 2015 and the only thing that increases is sexual assaults rates, crime and welfare spending to the point where "doctors and engineers" became a meme phrase for migrant crime in the news. >That is what legal immigration is meant for. In theory yes, but just like Germany, in practice the system has always been abused to dupe voters to accept anything other than doctors so that corporations can get cheap labor and landlords more tenants. The overton window has gotten so bad on this topic that if you complain about migrant crime, they'll maliciously ask you back "but what about doctors, you don't want them either?". No, we want doctors, We just want the doors shut to people who aren't doctors, it's really that simple.
      • deleted 5mo ago
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      • rohansood15 5mo ago
        So ask for it. Seems like your issue isn't immigration, it is abuse. The recent changes don't do much to fix that, imo.
        • joe_mamba 5mo ago
          >So ask for it. Nobody in government wants to listen. They're too afraid of being called "far right" if they give airtime to people wanting less migration so what happens is that that only breeds resentment and a rise of the actual far right, leading to a self fulfilling prophecy that could be avoided if they just enable discourse to things they don't like to hear but are pressing issues of large voter base. >Seems like your issue isn't immigration, it is abuse. Because governments don't make the distinction between the two, you give them an inch, they take a mile. If you let them enable any migration over time they will abuse it to flood the market with cheap labor as their corporate lobbyists push them to, like they did with H1B since 1990, which was initially a a scheme to import top soviet scientist after the USSR collapsed(kind of like operation paperclip) and is now used for US companies to import "Microsoft Certified Specialists" from India. If you want to stop the abuse you have to stop migration completely and then start political negotiations from that point of leverage, on a controlled points based migration system that accounts for actual shortages and domestic public resources.
    • invalidOrTaken 5mo ago
      But if the justification for immigration is prior immigration, is there a stopping point here? Like, after you import a bunch of doctors, is it going to turn out that now you need a bunch of fast food workers, back and forth?
      • collingreen 5mo ago
        What? Population growth can happen with or without immigration. Also, what? Are you describing a healthy economy?
    • qsera 5mo ago
      >Let's say the government can't care for 100M people because of lack of doctors. Now they could train one over 10 years, or you could have one of the smartest doctors in the world come be 100M+1. Would you take that? But that is not what usually happens, right? What usually happens is that some hospital employs a doctor educated from some other country where standard of education is less, instead of someone who is educated from native institutions, because they accept to work for 10x less salary. In this case both the US Society as well as the US educated doctor losses, and the US Hospital and the migrant gains. Feel free to expand this across socio-economic spectrum..
  • salthearth 5mo ago
    You can't complain immigrants are flooding your boarder while your government is actively working on destabilizing the world. Such arguments are extremely malicious and hence why everyone is downvoting you. You want a hermitical state, it has to go both ways. You lock yourself in, but also stop fucking around with military and non-military interventions on every contanent on earth.
    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
      >while your government is actively working on destabilizing the world I live in Europe, small landlocked country. My government isn't destabilizing anyone but still has some of the highest illegal migration rates per capita in OECD.
      • r-w 5mo ago
        Alternate take: Consider strategically avoiding exporting your anti-immigration views for visibility here in the US. That way an intelligent administration can take hold that doesn't cause further havoc in the Middle East and accelerate the rate of emigration from there. Deal?
        • joe_mamba 5mo ago
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  • Barrin92 5mo ago
    >Clearly not for curious discourse. This isn't "curious discourse", whatyou're doing is JAQing off (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions) immigrants don't need to be 'taken care off' because legal immigrants in the US are net social contributors (in fact particularly large ones because the US government didn't subsidize their upbringing and education). Five minutes on Google would have told you this, that is why "folks I'm just asking questions" gets downvoted, everyone can see through these pseudo gullible provocations
    • indianwashlet 5mo ago
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  • slg 5mo ago
    These hypotheticals tend to accidentally reveal a disturbing worldview in the way they treat immigration as a natural phenomenon rather than people with agency of their own. It's dehumanizing. For example, where does that 99,999,999th person sleep on the night they arrive in this country? What is their immediate plan? How and why did they come here? Your hypothetical has them almost emerging from the ether as an inherent problem rather than a person making an active decision to move to somewhere they think they will have a better life. If we stop providing them a better life, they'll stop coming. But the primary path to doing that is making life worse for everyone already here and none of us should want that.
    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
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      • slg 5mo ago
        You know what, I made a mistake in engaging. The way you moved the goal posts from open immigration to the obligation to provide social services to immigrants above and beyond any services provided to citizens and they way you're combining the concepts of immigrants and refugees tells me it isn't worth having this conversation with you.
        • joe_mamba 5mo ago
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      • rossjudson 5mo ago
        If you live in a Red State, it is highly like that my Blue State money pays for your health care, highways, narcan, and a myriad of other transfers. Like, I feel for you and your situation, but I just don't think it's sustainable for Blue States to keep being patsies by letting the Red States control what happens with Blue State money.
  • djeastm 5mo ago
    >it was already downvote bombed in less than 10 minutes with no counter argument Your submissions to HN evince a pattern that suggests engagement with you would likely fall on deaf ears.
  • nielsbot 5mo ago
    Immigration is a net positive for social services, housing, childcare, healthcare, etc. over the long term. This country was built by immigrants. There can be negative effects with large inflows locally, but that's a policy failure that can be addressed.
    • rayiner 5mo ago
      The British who came to this land weren’t “immigrants.” They were settlers. They came to this land, and created a country based on British law, British civic institutions, British political philosophy, and British economics. The Germans and Scandinavians came here for the most part also developed towns and cities that weren’t there before. Immigrants are the people who then moved into those places.
      • collingreen 5mo ago
        What? You make a distinction between settlers and immigrants? Is "invaders" on that list to?
        • rayiner 5mo ago
          The distinction between settlers and immigrants is extremely salient from a sociological standpoint. In the U.S., we have a right to a jury trial. To decide whether a jury trial right exists in a particular case, we look to whether that case would have been tried to a jury in 1791 in a particular country. Which country is that? The people from that country were the settlers. If you look at American legal theory and elide people’s names, you might not realize there was anyone here besides British people. There’s more influence in our legal system from ancient Rome than modern Italy.
        • nielsbot 5mo ago
          surely this is sarcasm
      • dwa3592 5mo ago
        you are just BS'ing!! native people lived here before that - they had their own version towns.
  • harrall 5mo ago
    That’s like saying the free pizza parties are draining the company’s resources and so we need to cut them. The pizza parties ARE indeed draining the company, but it’s so minor and ultimately spending your big brain on cutting pizza parties is diverting attention from your real problems that led to this point. I don’t support illegal immigration but it has little to do with our current major problems. It’s just a political tool to distract the voter.
    • deleted 5mo ago
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  • manbart 5mo ago
    One reason is population growth. Our current system is based on the assumption of an ever growing labor force to fund things like social security, medicare, fund our massive debt, and evrything else we want the government to spend on. In their current form, these systems will break down in the face of population decline. Since existing Americans are having fewer kids and trending downward, immigration is the only way to sustain the model. This doesn't neccisarily.mean the is the best, or even desireable, way to structure society, but I also think the political system is dysfunctional to the point major change is currently impossible I didnt down vote you by the way. Just throwing out a counter point to consider
  • mbgerring 5mo ago
    You lost me in the first sentence, with the premise that immigrants are “overburdening” our social services. Most immigrants work. Most immigrants come here specifically to work. They pay taxes. Immigrants who commit social security fraud have taxes deducted from their income that they will never collect in the form of social services. Most of the immigrants receiving public assistance (like, for example, asylum seekers) are doing so because our government doesn’t allow them to work, even if they want to. The solution is to let immigrants work.
    • qsera 5mo ago
      > with the premise that immigrants are “overburdening” our social services. Most immigrants work. I just want to point to a flaw in your reasoning.The point is not that immigrants are some special kind of human beings that require more assistance. It is just that immigration can unlike natural population growth, result in arbitrary population growth in a short amount of time. From that view point, it makes sense that immigrants can overburden the social services, because the latter does not get a chance to accommodate the increased population properly, causing additional suffering to existing population.
      • Dylan16807 5mo ago
        It would have to be an extremely fast influx to cause real problems along those lines. Social services are able to handle a growing case load with growing budget pretty well.
        • qsera 5mo ago
          That totally depends on the existing population of the state/region in question...
          • bigyabai 5mo ago
            Immigration trends are also localized, so that largely cancels out.
        • 5mo ago
  • rossjudson 5mo ago
    I have a habit of upvoting attempts at civilized argument, so I upvote once again. For the "people who understand supply/demand", why use "want a limit" language? What you actually mean is "want a lower limit, from Y to X". It's flat-out amazing to me that you blame immigrants for the problems of the American medical system -- which are entirely political in cause and financial in nature.
  • shimman 5mo ago
    The only people over burdening the system are billionaires demanding corporate welfare while denying the same welfare to civilians.
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• davidw 5mo ago
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  • rayiner 5mo ago
    Thinking that immigration should be slow enough that they can be thoroughly assimilated before they change American culture isn’t “hating immigrants.” Many of the people doing this are themselves children of immigrants. They recognize that individual immigrants can be fine but the large-scale flow of immigrants can create undesirable changes.[1] Don’t assume people are irrational just because they don’t agree with you. [1] Trump narrowly won the naturalized citizen vote. Saying “you wouldn’t want America to become more like the place you left” is a compelling message to many immigrants.
    • belkinpower 5mo ago
      How are they supposed to assimilate if they have to leave the country to apply?
      • knollimar 5mo ago
        clearly in detention centers
      • rayiner 5mo ago
        It slows down the flow, which facilitates assimilation of the smaller pool people who go through the process. You’re much more likely to assimilate if you’re not living in a place with thousands of other people from your origin country.
        • deleted 5mo ago
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        • dwa3592 5mo ago
          Define assimilation please! - i started watching football with my american friends - i studied the american political system enough to have educated discussions about it - i caught healthcare fraud at federal level which was mainly hurting very old americans. - i started doing barbeque - i started going out on the weekend - i tip heavily what i don't do: eat at drive throughs, buy stuff that i don't need, guns etc. I still carry a chip on my shoulder and worry about ICE just detaining me for no reason. "They don't assimilate" is just a cover for "They don't look and talk like us".
• Fnoord 5mo ago
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  • crm9125 5mo ago
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  • thehappypm 5mo ago
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    • lunchbucket 5mo ago
      Maybe you should look into where statistics that are "going around" are sourced from. This seems to be something an anti-immigration lobby cooked to in 2014, which was an artifact of their analysis; they considered workers aged 16-65, and the effect disappeared if you considered workers of all ages. Trump resurrected it in 2024 to claim that all job growth under Biden had gone to immigrants. It wasn't true then either.
      • joshfraser 5mo ago
        wait, how many workers fall outside the 16-65 range??
        • chimeracoder 5mo ago
          > wait, how many workers fall outside the 16-65 range?? A little less than 10% of the workforce. GP is correct - basically there was a report making that claim about the decline in employment rates of US-born workers over a certain time period. It was almost immediately debunked because it excluded workers older than 65, who are almost exclusively US-born, and excluding them heavily skews the average. Many of these workers also aged out of that bucket during that time period, which makes the comparison misleading, since the actual size of the studied workforce varied, and the workers who were excluded from the studied cohort were strongly correlated with the effect they were trying to demonstrate. Furthermore, that effect is also exacerbated because of the uneven distribution of baby boomers.
• tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Why don't they just say what they mean, and ban immigration completely? Are they trying to trick most immigrants into leaving voluntarily so they can deny re-entry?
  • riffraff 5mo ago
    I think big companies still want H1B visas but mostly as indentured servitude.
    • QGQBGdeZREunxLe 5mo ago
      H1B is transferable. How is it remotely considered "indentured servitude"?
      • MaxL93 5mo ago
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• risyachka 5mo ago
  >> so that even legal immigration is restricted or difficult like it was simple and easy before that. Now it becomes borderline impossible