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Comment by hoopd | Hacker News Reader

You've once again avoided giving even a qualitative answer as to what strain caused by immigration would look like. A first step would be admitting that it's even possible.

You've also made the mistake of thinking that just because you've found one problem that others must not exist. We can have broken systems and problems caused by immagration.

10% ESL students in our public education system should qualify as a strain. 17% of California's prisoners being born abroad should qualify as a strain. Are these numbers not high enough for you? If not, what does too high look like to you?

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I've been letting you identify the problems because frankly I can't see any. California has so many prisoners it doesn't have enough prisons for them all. The solution is easy: imprison fewer people. Too many ESL students? That solves itself over time as they become ESL (or even non-English) teachers.

If you don't know what a problematic level of immigration looks like then you have no idea if you're looking directly at it or not. You're telling me you haven't seen any chickens lately, I'm asking what you think a chicken looks like, and you're saying you don't see any right now.

A 10% ESL student population doesn't solve itself. That's like a child thinking that their refrigerator magically fills itself when it gets empty. If you ignore that solutions have costs than yes by your definition ESL students have no costs associated with them.

I asked about the strain on the legal system due to immigrant populations, specifically the prison system in California. You said we should put less people in jail. While that's true it doesn't solve the problem unless we're going to change our laws to the extent that aggravated assault is no longer a crime. Then we've once again solved the problem by refusing to admit it even exists.

So maybe California has more immigrants than it can handle. I can't see it from New Hampshire. Anyway there are several times more people in prison now than in the 80's even though the crime rate has dropped, so I don't think violent criminals make up the majority of the prison population.

As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes.

By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

If the prison system is working at all we would expect to see violent crime drop as the prison population increases. There's a profit motive as well but we have to remember why societies build prisons in the first place.

Only 10% of California's prisoners have never been convicted of a violent crime. I doubt they all need to be locked up but I'm not seeing those prisons as being filled with peaceful drug dealers like the rumor has it.

I would guess in New Hampshire there isn't much of an immigrant population. I just looked it up and it's about 93% white there. My state's about 2/3's white, I live in a part of town where I don't walk around after dark because I might get jumped for being white which does affect my perspective. I have neighbors who immigrated from Mexico decades ago and still don't even speak basic english. I'm not saying my state should become all white or anything like that, but maybe we've reached a good mix and we could deal with the problems our hispanic and black communities already have because that's a challenge as it is. We're struggling to get them to stop killing each other, make it through high school and to read at a basic level. If we can't do that I don't know why we think we can take on even more people.

NH has immigrants but most of the immigrants have been white so far. My great-grandparents were born in Italy, and one of my great-aunts who was born here only spoke French until she was 14. There are still significant French-speaking groups in the southern part of the state. Lately my hometown has been taking in refugees from Bhutan. They don't speak much English but they are great neighbors and businesspeople. 3% of the population of the city are refugees who have settled since 2008, not counting other immigrants.

I think if it's working that's great, I support a cultural plurality. It's like adopting kids - if you're doing well with the ones you have then have at it. If your kids are starving and can barely read, don't adopt more. In my state less than 7 of 10 of both our hispanic and black students are even graduating high school right now. We have too many districts with on-time graduation rates below 60% and those are the districts immigrants and refugees are most likely to flow into.

19% of high school graduates in the US are functionally illiterate[0]. Nationwide only half of black males are graduating at all. Half. We're already failing to take care of our poor. We're spending a very large amount of money trying to but it happens to be expensive.

If you go back to the start of this thread you'll see I've been consistent that there's a point where taking in more people is no longer a good thing. That doesn't mean I think it's always a bad thing, just that we should be honest that it can be.

[0] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3...

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