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Comment by siphon22 | Hacker News Reader

That sounds nice and all but the DMV analogy does not hold up. Think about if there were no limits by country population, India has more people and therefore the most applicants, so we would be mainly giving limited numbers of work visas to Indians while others would have no chance.

Imagine if there was a company with a white CEO who was only hiring/putting other whites into high level positions because they happen to be in a majority white area. If that makes you cringe, you should have the same reaction regarding this.

Diversity = various countries/peoples around the world getting a fair chance

Not diversity = Only Indians get work visas

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>a white CEO who was only hiring/putting other whites into high level positions because they happen to be in a majority white area

If 90% of a town is white and 10% is black, 9:1 is a fair ratio for executive boards on average. Anything else would mean that the probability of a person holding a board position given their race would be different for different races. Imagine if every company in Mombasa was required to have an even split between white and black: being born white would guarantee you any job you wanted because you would be competing with less than 1% of the population, while in contrast every other ethnicity would be crowded in to half the number of jobs. In fact if racial quotas were instituted in Kenya and every race was given the same percent quota, 98% of Kenyans would be forced to be unemployed.

By all means you're right and I would agree. It's just that, if we are going to go with the diversity thing, we should uphold it equally and fairly. There is no avoiding natural majorities where we can't help it. But in the realm of green cards and work visas where they are limited and we CAN help it, I think avoiding incentivizing or allowing for majorities to form that will become problematic(and then too big to be helped later on) is a good thing.

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