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Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

(not an american citizen or resident) Open borders is not a serious public policy position for a western nation.

Western culture is difficult to bootstrap, and requires effort to maintain. In the US, civics are taught to all of your children through the education system. People have shared mythologies about freedom and duty and senses of right and wrong. Even with this, there are strong frictions between traditions.

If you resettled a city of people from Sudan or Afghanistan to a western city, those people would not suddenly become western by virtue of their new geography. In Sweden in the last twenty years, inadequately managed immigration has created a gang and gun crime culture.

I am astonished when I see westerners advocate for open borders. I think it comes from a mistaken assumption that live and let live is the default order in the world. It is not. Live and let live is a hard won cultural achievement, and needs to be tended.

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I recommend taking a look at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42867903. Some core points pertinent to your concerns are:

There is no precedence for lots of folks from ones location suddenly flooding a country just because they now can. There were huge fears Puerto Ricans would do this. Yet once they got the right to move to US states, only very, very few immigrated. It took up a little more once a Puerto Rican exclave formed somewhere and friends and family started following existing immigrants.

Immigrants typically commit fewer crimes than the native born population.

There is a wealth of precedence. For the last twenty years there has been a network of people smugglers in south east asia who fire up whenever the Australian government takes its eye off the ball.

I am currently in Malta and have had several conversations with hire car drivers who are living in difficult circumstances because they came here on boats as part of a plan to get to the UK and got stuck. There has been a significant controversy in the last month in the UK about that government’s attempts to dissuade unauthorised entries.

It is an ongoing project for European governments to manage fallout from the syrian civil war. Some of these people need to be monitored for terrorist tendencies, adding pressure to law enforcement.

In the US there is an ongoing project to ensure appropriate controls on its southern border.

These thing are happening right now, across the western world. Large investments from western governments trying to stay in control of their immigration arrangements.

manage fallout from the syrian civil war

but these people came as refugees, and the borders were opened for them. without the war, they would not have come.

so basically, for refugees, the borders are already open, and most people who are not refugees would not come even if borders were open for them too.

Americans prefer to breed our own gangs rather than import them.

> Americans prefer to breed our own gangs rather than import them.

We breed them and export them, which help exacerbate and sustain a lot of the stability problems in Central America.

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