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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

What is special about the number 65,000?

Absolutely nothing. It's central planning for something that doesn't require it: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

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That's a pretty ignorant article. The limiting factor for immigration is how quickly you can Americanize immigrants, not land area.

As for why it's imperative to Americanize immigrants. Look at how much trouble the U.S. has had cultivating democracy in places like Iraq. Most people acknowledge that the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy. Do you think they would be any more ready for democracy if you moved them en masse to Minnesota?

> how quickly you can Americanize immigrants, not land area.

Well that's an easily defined metric, isn't it...

There's nothing that says you must let immigrants become citizens right away, or give them all the same privileges citizens are entitled to. For instance, it wouldn't be at all unfair to kick people out for certain classes of crime.

I'm not talking about privileges. I'm talking about getting immigrants to buy into the attitudes and values that make America worth living in. I'm talking about integrating immigrants into American society as neighbors so they're not living in their own neighborhoods where they can insulate themselves from the prevailing culture. There is a limit on how quickly you can do this.

> the attitudes and values that make America worth living in.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that codifying exactly what those are and if someone is going to be able to accept them in X months/years is not going to be an easy task.

Just because delineating something isn't easy doesn't mean the line has no distinction. Here's an example. I'm an immigrant from the subcontinent. Even among educated people there, coming out as gay can be downright dangerous.[1] I'll go out on a limb and say that we should not allow people to immigrate here any more quickly than we can expect to disabuse them of these sorts of beliefs.

[1] I'm cognizant of the fact that it can be dangerous in some Americam communities too. Alas, we're stuck with that. But there is no need to make the task of progress and civilization harder than it already is.

I see your point, but realistically, you have to put something down into laws, and I have no idea how you would do that. There are plenty of people in the US who loathe gay people and would deny them a variety of rights. Look at what this guy has to say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas#Scalia.27s_d...

Perhaps the problem is that he is the son of an immigrant?

Historically, "people not like us" has been used for far more bad than it has for good.

You can't ignore the fact that, statistically, those outside the U.S. and certain other countries have many attitudes and values we don't want to encourage in the U.S., at a higher rate than the prevalence of those attitudes within the country. Of course you can't impose ideological tests to get into the U.S. Which is all the more reason to limit immigration to what you can comfortably assimilate.

As an immigrant myself I'm really thankful for our melting pot policies. Life will be better for my daughter growing up surrounded by American attitudes. Had our family immigranted en masse with a million other Bangladeshi families, she might very well have been deprived of that.

So why are you even arguing about H1B's? That's a drop in the bucket compared to people on family visas.

I'm pretty much ok with anyone who accepts the rules and laws even if they don't think like me. I'd like them to integrate to some extent prior to gaining citizenship, but that's different than a work visa.

> There's nothing that says you must let immigrants become citizens right away [...]

There's nothing that says you must let immigrants come.

Fixed that for you.

Actually, there is: economics. You can't have a successful country and exclude everyone who wasn't smart enough to be born there. In a world of N billion people, a lot of talented people are going to be born abroad. Keep them out, and they'll concentrate in other places.

Do you realize how much of the tech world was built be people from all over? HTTP, Linux, Google, Java, C++ and so on.

Restricted immigration that allows the top talent of various countries is not the same as mass immigration that replaces the host population and culture. Your dream of an open-borders utopia is incompatible with a successful country.

Israel has had a strict immigration policy, far more restrictive than the post-1965 US policy. They don't seem perturbed by your claimed economic requirement of not "exclud[ing] everyone who wasn't smart enough to be born there" (while you've already shown you really mean open borders).

The US prospered with very restricted immigration for decades.

> Keep them out, and they'll concentrate in other places.

Let them concentrate, especially those from the Third World, so their countries have a chance to benefit from their talent and develop. I don't understand why you are against their home countries prospering.

Xenophobia-at-a-distance has no place in modern civilization.

Israel has seen a lot of immigration: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/fore...

What part about "strict immigration policy" don't you understand?

Israel's "lot of immigration" has been those very people that their government wants to make up the demographics: Jews. Your "lot of immigration" bears no resemblance to what you advocate for the US.

http://www.oecd.org/migration/internationalmigrationoutlook2...

Permanent migration to Israel - almost all "ethnic" by Jews and their families - was particularly high in the early 1990s.

Israel has seen a lot of deportation and arrests. Deportation, not amnesty, is normal practice there.

Why do you deny that the US citizens have as much right and duty to protect their country for themselves as Israel does? Perhaps the US immigration authorities should look at open borders advocates' motives towards the US and their fitness for residence, in the manner that Israeli authorities do.

Israel, in one month, deports what would be the equivalent of 277,000 US illegal immigrants:

Report: Migrants leaving Israel being sent to Rwanda, Uganda

http://www.jpost.com/International/Report-Migrants-leaving-I...

The state’s policy, including placing new illegal migrants in closed detention for up to one year, but also allows placing up to 4,000 (so far) already in Israel in open detention for an indefinite period, was initiated in mid-December 2013 under pressure from a mid-September 2013 High Court ruling striking down the old policy as unconstitutional.

Since the new policy’s initiation, 3,988 migrants have left the country, including 1,510 in March alone.

Crackdown Begins: 400 Illegal Entrants Arrested

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132548

The special police unit “Oz” has begun a large-scale operation aimed at cracking down on illegal entry to Israel. Over the past three weeks, members of the unit have checked the documents of more than 4,000 workers.

Of those 4,000, 600 were detained for questioning. Four hundred were arrested after police discovered that they had entered the country illegally.

Israel’s Chilly Reception for African Asylum Seekers

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/31/opinion/sunday...

In May, I attended a graduation party in Tel Aviv for Taj Jemy, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan… The celebration was interrupted by the Israeli police, who burst into the room, scattering the crowd. The partygoers recalling their skills of hiding, ducking and fleeing, spilled onto the street to find it barricaded and surrounded by horses. Seven people were arrested that night for not having their visas with them.

Israel’s policy toward African asylum seekers is to pressure them to self-deport or, as the former interior minister Eli Yishai put it, to “make their lives miserable” until they give up and let the government deport them.

As of Friday, Infiltrators Can't Export Money

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/275652

Interior Minister Gid`on Saar signed regulations, Monday, that make it illegal for someone who illegally infiltrated the country to send money out of the country. The goal of the measures are to make the infiltrators leave with what they accumulated instead of regularly sending it out to their countries of origin.

Milestone: No illegal African migrants enter Israel in August

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=11...

Population and Immigration Authority says August is the first month in which no illegal infiltrators entered Israel through Egyptian border

168 migrants from Sudan and Eritrea leave Israel voluntarily

Interior minister: We are progressing day by day.

> There's nothing that says you must let immigrants become citizens right away, or give them all the same privileges citizens are entitled to.

You already have a process of green card + a bunch of time leading to eligibility. Isn't that good enough?

> For instance, it wouldn't be at all unfair to kick people out for certain classes of crime.

you mean prior to them getting citizenship right?

> Most people acknowledge that the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy.

This is a really contentious statement that you just drop in both as fact and as the basis of your entire argument.

No, I would not say that 'the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy' is a true statement. I also wouldn't say that what 'most people [in the US]' think about the Iraqi people's readiness for democracy [in Iraq] is really relevant to the question of whether they are ready for democracy [in Iraq]. I also wouldn't say that the question of whether they (as a group) are 'ready' for democracy in Iraq is relevant to answering the question of whether individual Iraqi people are 'ready' for democracy in Minnesota (whatever that means).

> Look at how much trouble the U.S. has had cultivating democracy in places like Iraq.

It also doesn't help that we have a long history of doing the exact opposite of 'cultivating democracy' in the Middle East (ie, going in and deposing democratically-elected leaders so that we can install dictators that are friendly to the US).

The US has had trouble cultivating democratically elected regimes that are friendly towards us in countries like Iraq. In the US, we tend to conflate 'democratic government' with 'government that shares our objectives and goals'.

It's an idea that was invoked by the American left to explain Bush's failure in Iraq, and eventually conceded by key figures on the right as well: http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-rumsfeld-admits-that-e.... So I'm not sure it's all that controversial.

And we're not talking about whether individual Iraqis in Minnesota are ready for democracy. We are talking about the link posted earlier in the thread, which suggested that the optimal number of immigrants in the U.S. would be two billion. That's not encouraging immigration of selected individuals, it's endorsing wholesale migration of huge populations.

> which suggested that the optimal number of immigrants in the U.S. would be two billion.

It suggested no such thing. Please reread it:

"What is the optimal number of imported tomatoes? Soviet central planners tried to figure things out this way. Americans shouldn’t. We should decide on the optimal terms on which tomatoes can be imported, and then let the market decide the number."

Fair enough, but I don't think there is much of a distinction. The market would just import people wholesale to get the cheapest possible labor. The market hates the islands of civilization built in the sea of entropy. It wants to bring everyone to the global average, which for those fortunate enough to be already in the developed world, is a precipitous drop.

In 1945, most Americans would have believed that the Japanese people and the German people were not ready for democracy. Luckily the Truman administration and its allies were not as feckless and irresponsible as the Bush administration.

I don't think your assertion about 1945 is correct. Both Germany and Japan had functional and stable democracies before that date which was excellent evidence that they could support it.

I'm not sure you could call Germany's "stable", at least not in the 1930s. I'm not certain you could call Japan's "functional" - wasn't it more ornamental than having any real ability to change the course of government policy?

Belsen and Bataan beat anything ISIS has done.

Note that my assertion was not about Germany and Japan.

I am deeply saddened that this borderline racism passes for civil discourse these days. :(

I am amused that you think your feelings about perceived "racism" have any place in this civil discourse.

Funnily enough, his argument is that it doesn't mean much for the whole economy for there to be more immigrants. It sure as hell means a lot for individual communities! He seems to approach the economy as a race to the bottom / free market fiasco that has ended up concentrating all the profit in those who already own the land and capital.

It is good for a laborer when there is more available work than there is labor - they can command better rates and generally have a better quality of life (see: almost everyone in the tech industry right now). It is good for someone with lots of capital to have as much excess labor as possible (assuming there's still people that can afford to buy that person's products). When a person with capital can make cheaper products because the labor is cheap, it doesn't necessarily mean that all products become cheaper. You end up with the walmart economy where you have the people who own and manage in their mansions and everyone else unable to generate any meaningful wealth.

If you upgrade the H1-B's to green card after 12 months, that "65,000" number is irrelevant.

Once you remove the "indentured" part from H1-B's, we'll never hit the cap again.

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