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Comment by lhopki01 | Hacker News Reader

This demonstrates a tragedy that happens all too often. How many talented people out there have their talents wasted because of barriers like this. How many people can't fulfil their potential because they're born into a poor family or on the wrong side of an arbitrary border?

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Sometimes a border is not a border, it is scar. An ethnic group was already living in that area and one day they find themselves at one side of the fence.

All to protect mafiosos who pretend to be organizing "unions" for the "workers" benefit (which is illogical if you think about it due to the Principle-Agent problem, and makes no sense economically- the bosses will cut deals best for the bosses, not for the union membership.)

Keeping talented people down is just a side effect.

You are actually right, historically speaking. After the United States victory in the Mexican-American War, there was a movement to annex all of Mexico.[1] The decision to not do so was based on racial concerns. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina who opposed the annexation of Mexico, made this speech to Congress:

We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_of_Mexico_Movement

You are very right, especially places like colonial Africa. However in the context of California, Arizona, etc much of the immigration is from Guatemala, Central America, etc, not the true native tribes like the Chumash, Luiseño, et al who are still here.

Just pointing this out because "division" gets bandied about a lot inaccurately.

I am thinking about "El Norte".

http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in...

The number of such people is probably many orders of magnitude fewer than the number of ordinary people who benefit from economic migration to the potential detriment of citizens already living in the country. Existing immigration policies reflect this fact.

Do you have any basis for this claim of fact?

Yes. Extraordinary people are significantly less common than ordinary ones. Therefore, admitting large numbers of people indiscriminately will result in admitting significantly larger numbers of ordinary people. Perhaps I was wrong to say "many" orders of magnitude, but other than that I stand by the remark.

The last part of your claim doesn't follow from your justification. I think I'll leave it at that, however.

I find it interesting that immigrants are blamed for this. Lets take the hypothetical situation of a baby boom. 5 years down the line our hypothetical city needs twice as many schools yet doesn't have them. Now do we blame the parents who had the babies or government that didn't build the schools. Or lets take another hypothetical example a certain part of the country gets a new factory and there's lots of internal migration of people coming to work in the new factory. Now this hypothetical location suddenly doesn't have enough hospital beds to cope. Do we blame the people that moved for the government that took all their income taxes yet failed to build a new hospital.

TL:DR Governments take taxes from immigrants but don't spend the money improving services then complain that immigrants are overloading services. Blame the government not the immigrants.

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