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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

The older generations are whiter (it did used to be illegal for non-whites to emigrate to the USA, leading to an odd series of legal cases where different nationalities tried to prove their whiteness) so it may well skew figures in one direction or another if you include people who are too young to work or old enough to retire.

I tried to find out what numbers Google were using, but I can't find your quote on the page you link to? Edit: ah it's from the article.

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> it did used to be illegal for non-whites to emigrate to the USA

You must be mistaken. It's well known that the USA was conceived as a "melting pot nation", a nation of immigrants, and those agitating for the opposite are rightly rebuked as un-American. Diversity is our strength, e pluribus unum, etc.

That is simply not compatible with ever having had white-only immigration laws, let alone so recently that it would still affect the age-structure.

Well, non-whites were not generally eligible for citizenship until the Civil War (14th amendment).

We have a long and illustrious history of discriminating against different races, when it comes to immigration. Just to list a few examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790

"The law limited naturalization to "free white person(s) ... of good character", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks and later Asians, although free blacks were allowed citizenship at the state level in a number of states." (note that Dred Scott v Sanford later explicitly declared that black people couldn't receive citizenship.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

(followup to the Page Act of 1875, which banned Chinese women so Chinese male laborers who came over to build the railroads wouldn't reproduce.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

"The Immigration Act of 1924 ... prevented immigration from Asia, set quotas on the number of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, and provided funding and an enforcement mechanism to carry out the longstanding ban on other immigrants."

Only in 1952 with the McCarran-Walter Act was this exclusion on Asian immigrants lifted, and the National Origins Formula (attempting to keep the racial composition status quo) was in place until 1965.

The person you are replying to seems not to be disputing this history, but moving onto the "..but if it did happen it was a good thing" stage of the argument.

Certainly it was not a good thing for anyone non-white that wanted to immigrate or was already a resident - I'm not sure what part of my comment implies otherwise.

I am only highlighting that the oft-repeated claim that America was conceived as a nation of non-discriminatory immigration is a lie. It only moved in that direction with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

It's very weird to be so specific that you're not saying <famous example of racism> was a good thing for <the victims of that racism>. You could have just stopped after saying that you weren't saying it was a good thing, but you chose not to for some reason.

But I sense you're having fun being so vaguely edgy and contrarian so I don't want to further encourage it.

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