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Comment by jdasdf | Hacker News Reader

>The big question is what can a nation do to stop this?

Thats why navies exist.

You send a handful of frigates and bombers there and start sinking ships.

You don't even need to sink the ship doing the "trawler wars" of the 1970ies when British pirate trawlers were plying Icelandic water(with the protection of the royal navy) Iceland manage to destroy enough trawls by dragging wires though them that the Brit's eventually gave up trying to fish in Icelandic waters.

A few trawlers got boarded but no shots were fired.

Yes, I’m surprised at how little the Western countries use their military (and police) when facing an obvious act of territorial dispute. The border police’s role now seems to be to prepare meals for immigrants rather than turning them back, just as it is common to let the fishers fish for 10 years (the problem clearly isn’t new) until the population starts noticing that our ecosystems are destroyed, rather than arresting/sinking ships.

Like any navy is supposed to.

Democracies do tend to have rules preventing military action at home, yes. And they also tend to sign on to things like human rights treaties, that say arbitrarily killing people (even foreigners breaking the law) is not ok.

> The border police’s role now seems to be to prepare meals for immigrants rather than turning them back

Nations like ours with low birth rates and aging workforces depend on immigrants to maintain vibrant economies. The alternative is to become like Japan, where the economy stagnates and abandoned houses litter the countryside.

At least in European context, many migrants who cross the border illegally lack sufficient education to do well in modern labour market, and end up having a very low employment rate & high dependency on welfare. Even those who do find employment are likely to have low salary that doesn't bring much tax income.

Thus uncontrolled migration can never be a solution to our population issues. Instead effort should be put into attracting more skilled workforce that is in demand, and they should come in legally.

Maybe the solution should be to work on the big problem that is male-female resentment. One resents the other because of 2000 years of domination, the other for being in social priority and not being effectively competent in the same position despite 60 years of fight for equality, and instead of working on bringing our citizen together, we bring new ones. I don’t know to what problem this is the solution.

Long story short, many people still want to have children, and not having fertility should be the problem that is getting addressed.

I don’t know about the resentment part but it is more challenging to have and raise quality kids than it should be.

Our lazze-faire(sp?) attitude towards who can have children will come back to bite us, someday. The most "successful" parents are those who invest very little into their offspring.

> Maybe the solution should be to work on the big problem that is male-female resentment.

Male-female resentment is not the reason fertility rates around the globe have fallen precipitously over the past century. That's a bizarre idea.

When women have access to contraception and opportunities to participate in the workforce and pursue higher education, it turns out they are less interested in raising large families.

There are tools we could be using to encourage people to have more children, such as universal childcare and pre-K, generous financial support for low-income families, and high quality public schools. Unfortunately, opponents to immigration typically also oppose these policies, too.

So why not selectively import the people (workers, professions) the country needs?

There are competent engineers "waiting in line" for years, while illegals are allowed to stay... it's basically rewarding the criminals and punishing the honest ones.

You’re talking to much sense. Fact is, a portion of the people advocating for not enforcing immigration laws profit from the off-the-books labor. The greater portion are useful idealists. The difference between the two is that the latter imagine a world that concurrently has an endless supply of low skill laborers and a meaningfully high minimum wage law that would be respected. Perhaps there’s another fraction that believe in growing minimum wage for citizens and (as today) no such law for black market labor pools of non-citizens, but I like to think that level of maliciousness is not as common as hapless idealism.

We can do both. We don't have to choose between welcoming the many highly skilled professionals who want to work here, and welcoming the asylum seekers and economic refugees who are fleeing violence or poverty and eager to build a better future here. We can do both, and we would benefit from both.

Is the situation in Japan really that bad? Their economy seems vibrant to me, I buy lots of products from them.

> Yes, I’m surprised at how little the Western countries use their military (and police) when facing an obvious act of territorial dispute.

Immigration is generally not territorial dispute, indeed, its far more often voting for an alternate regime with one’s feet than asserting a hostile territorial claim.

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