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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

I've upvoted you because your heart is in the right place and you're making very good arguments which people should stop to consider.

In an ideal world, people should not be discriminated against because of their birth-location. The fact that we do, is indeed a great injustice.

However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture and institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in the first place.

I think that successful countries have a moral obligation to absorb as many immigrants as they can assimilate - no more and no less.

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> However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture and institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in the first place.

I have to steelman this position with something now:

If you have a country which accepts broad civil rights for sexual minorities, and you have a large influx of people coming into your country who prefer few or no civil rights for sexual minorities, what happens when you have enough immigrants to force a vote on rights for sexual minorities? Don't tell me that can't happen; ultimately, there's always a threshold beyond which the government loses legitimacy if it refuses to put certain things to a ballot, and by "government" I mean "ruling party or coalition" if you're lucky.

If I were a sexual minority, I'd see border restrictions as being an existential issue.

I'm trans. Please dont use us as a cover for your arguments, thanks.

People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis, that many people born in this country think doctors should be able to deny care to LGBT people based on their religious beliefs -- meanwhile everyone I know who's immigrated from a different country has been nothing but wonderful to me -- I would argue that believing immigrants will somehow reverse progress on civil rights is ridiculous and not justified by the facts.

> People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis [snip]

You aren't making your own case very well.

so whats your point? yes people going back 10 generations can be intolerant fucks, meaning there is no difference between the people who've been here for a long time vs people who just came here, proving my point. the segment of people who are intolerant, in my experience, is much more people who have been here for a very long time and not immigrants.

The idea that one's "birth location" is some sort of free-floating, independent quality is itself a very western, specifically American-centric idea. In countries that have hundreds or even thousands of years of history, there is a very real difference between "native" and "recent arrival."

I don't really have a strong opinion on the topic of immigration in general, but I don't think it's very fair to look at a country or culture that has spent centuries fighting for its survival and say, "Well, your historical connection to this place and country is now meaningless in the face of global capitalism."

The people who did the fighting are completely different from the children and teenagers who were recently born. Do you think that certain people should get special legal privileges because of what their family has done in the past? That the aristocrats and nobility are entitled to more privileges than the common serfs, because of the accomplishments of their ancestors? That is the logical conclusion of what you're suggesting.

To some degree yes, because otherwise there will be very little societal incentive to struggle in the present in order to have a better life in the future.

Consider the case of Poland. The country has a pretty brutal recent history: dozens of wars, uprisings, border changes, and other chaos over the last 250-300 years. Many, if not most, of the people fighting against the oppression were doing so with the expectation that they’d be building a future free country for themselves and their family. More broadly, for their culture.

If suddenly Poland were composed of X group of people that had zero relationship with the country and zero interest in learning the language or promoting the culture, would all this struggle then not be in vain? More importantly, would Poles have instigated numerous revolutions, uprisings and protests if they weren’t trying to preserve their culture? Would the Soviet Union even have been overthrown?

I think one can make a very strong argument that a culture with no future has no present, either. Inherited wealth between individuals and families may be a problem, for sure, but inherited “cultural capital” seems absolutely necessary if you want your civilization to continue existing.

I agree with everything you've said. That's a very strong utilitarian argument. If you're going to make utilitarian arguments, you might as well embrace utilitarianism and reject competing moral philosophies. That's exactly my critique of Anderson's proposal.

Successful society is usually predicated on genocide to remove dissent between factions. (Examples: USA, China, the current European ethnically-self-determined nations) Is that utilitarian?

In what way is the USA predicated on genocide to remove dissent between factions?

Are you counting Native Americans as a "faction"? That seems like an odd definition of the word "faction".

Are you referring to the Civil War? That seems like an odd definition of the word "genocide".

Are you referring to the current state of politics? Also not a genocide and, please God, it will continue to remain not a genocide.

What exactly did you have in mind in your statement?

what happened to native americans was a genocide, yes. smallpox blankets, the trail of tears, forced adoptions, resedential schools -- it literally ticks every box of the genocide definition and then some. arguing not is willful ignorance of history.

I never said that it was not genocide. I said that Native Americans were not a faction.

cool pointless pedantry, irrelevant to their main point. native americans were seen asa homogenous group by white colonizers, despitr the fact that they weren't actually. quibbling about technicalities doesn't change the fact that america was built on genocide of a group of people seen as different and inferior.

Uncool pointless yelling, because I never said it wasn't.

I just wanted gowld to clarify what, exactly, his/her point was, because it seemed to be rather incoherent. Was gowld talking about Native Americans? I honestly can't tell.

I'm typing, not yelling.

I think it's pretty obvious that they were talking about the "manifest destiny" genocide of native people, considering that "freeing up" that land was considered pivotal to "completing america's destiny". though i guess they could have been talking about the genocide of african enslaved people through forced labor. or the genocide of people in the Philippines during the Spanish American war, which birthed the American empire. lots of genocide to choose from, actually, so i guess your confusion is understandable.

in what way are native americans not a faction?

i have no opinion in this argument, i am just trying to understand yours

I'm trying to understand gowld's opinion. Is the USA reference to the treatment of Native Americans? If so, why call them a "faction"? That's kind of weird.

Is the Europe reference to Germany? I could kind of see that (genocide, yes, and also a "faction"), but tarring all of Europe with it is rather a stretch. The claim seems to be that European nations achieved ethnic unity via genocide, which seems to me to be rather a stretch historically.

gowld seems to be taking behavior that has occurred at times, to the shame of both the US and Europe, and making it the defining element of their history. But I'm trying not to accuse gowld of selectively reading history before I'm sure that's what he/she is trying to say. I'm trying to find out what that opaque little paragraph actually was supposed to say, so that I then can accurately criticize it, if it needs criticism.

why is calling native americans a faction weird? a faction is a group that is in some form contrasted (not necessarily opposing) to another group.

native americans were certainly a different group of people than european settlers. i think that is clear enough.

but i am not a native english speaker, so maybe my understanding of faction is different from yours, and you define faction in a way that is incompatible with its application here.

however for the sake of discussion i'd like to ask if that is important? isn't the definition that should be applied into the context of this discussion rather clear?

i mean, go back to the original statement and replace faction with something else:

Successful society is usually predicated on genocide to remove dissent between groups.

it doesn't seem to me that that would change anything in that statement. we still don't know exactly which groups are actually referred to.

faction, group, party, nation, ethnicity, opponents, whatever it seems you got hung up on that word when you really want to know more specifically which examples are being referred to.

What happened to the Native Americans was genocide, but I wouldn't call them either a faction or a group. To me, either "faction" or "group" means "a set of persons in your society". You don't use "faction" for those outside your society.

And, to me, the Native Americans were not part of US society. US society was a European society carved out of land that had previously belonged to Native Americans.

In the same way, when the US fought the Germans in World War II, you wouldn't say that the Germans were a faction. They were a foreign entity.

You might also note that the US negotiated treaties with the Native Americans. You do treaties with foreign entities, not with factions within your own society.

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