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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

Why would a tiny exclusive island ever want anyone other than high income individuals to move there?

If it weren't the fact that US cities cannot restrict the free migration of individuals, almost all of them would ban anyone moving there who didn't make above the average income for the area. Hawaii's last Republic governor tried every possible step to kick out the Marshallese, which is fucking hilarious considering how few of them there are globally.

If it wasn't for the US constitution you'd have giant slums in the interstitial space between cities, with a few zones stylized after the Jewish Autonomous Oblast here and there as well.

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This is simply not accurate. The US was historically and is currently built by accepting poor immigrants. As the famous poem by Emma Lazarus says, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free".

The US is and always has been a place where the poorest can make something for themselves. No matter what rhetoric you spout, this is still demonstrably true: 40 million Americans are first generation immigrants. Another 40 million second generation.

So when I, as an American, see these heavy restrictions, it highlights a couple things for me:

1) Just how different US immigration culture is from anywhere else. And how despite all the anti-US rhetoric, all the political nonsense, we are still the most welcoming place in the world for immigrants, and it isn't even close.

2) How unwilling other nations are to provide opportunities for people outside their borders. I want to go a little further and say these nations don't have much interest in being a part of the world if they can't exploit it.

> despite all the anti-US rhetoric, all the political nonsense, we are still the most welcoming place in the world for immigrants, and it isn't even close.

Haha, hardly. I've seen Indians genuinely discussing that if your life plan is to move permanently to the US the best way to do it is to first move to Canada and get citizenship there.

Yes, the US is more welcoming of immigrants than a small, wealthy, tight-knit island with extensive (and expensive) social services, at least on some measures (OTOH one could argue that Iceland not providing healthcare to immigrants shouldn't count against it when the US doesn't provide healthcare to immigrants either). But Iceland is hardly representative of non-US countries in general.

The US doesn’t have the highest proportion of immigrants, nor is it the most welcoming to most (I am myself an immigrant to the US, and was welcomed).

It’s in the top quartile of both criteria, though.

The US had the advantage of mostly eliminating the indigenous population. The only Americans who aren't immigrants are natives and the descendants of slaves. Other countries have large native populations.

Natives are also immigrants.

I'm talking about migration within US borders. It has nothing to do with immigration.

> I want to go a little further and say these nations don't have much interest in being a part of the world if they can't exploit it.

Is the implication here that the US is not busy exploiting the rest of the world, starting with the fundamental economic reliance on migrant workers that aren't good enough to actually be working there legally?

Iceland isn't tiny.

It's only not tiny in terms of geographic area.

Population wise and urban area wise, it's miniscule.

Yep. For comparison, there are 53 incorporated cities in the United States that have a greater population than all of Iceland (372,520). If you expand it to metropolitan areas, it's 147.

Edit to expand: 37 of the 50 United States have a greater land area than Iceland too. So Iceland is pretty small in both regards.

My city in Poland that's not the biggest one has still more population that the entire Iceland.

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