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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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Well, okay, so just like this article talks about, people often find it easier to declare a source of a problem, rather than describing a symptom they're having.

Illegals aren't taking their jobs - there's plenty of studies evidencing that that's not true. *BUT*, people are feeling:

  1. under-employed
  2. under-paid
  3. in some level of pain, economically
  4. feeling insecure, financially

And they're saying "it's those damn illegals takin' my job" to reflect that pain.

Sure, propaganda plays a part of the experienced pain people have; but it's often not all of it. Propaganda is less effective when people are comfortable.

It's looking a lot like when you say "believe them", you mean "rewrite what they say and believe that thing instead". Yeah, I can do that for any political affiliation.

Not at all. I believe the experience they're expressing, when expressed in the most positive light. I'm not going to entertain a racist perspective, such as "there's too many brown people here" or similar; but I will entertain a more favorable perspective: "I feel like I can't get a different job if I lost mine", "I can't afford groceries", "My rainy day fund isn't large enough for a rainy day and this makes me scared". "It doesn't feel like there's enough jobs to go around". All of these could be very real, underlying statements to the statement "Illegal immigrants are taking all the jobs". Obviously more conversation would be necessary to get the exact issue they're actually experiencing.

But just like a patient coming to a doctor and saying "my back hurts, I must have a herniated disk"; or a customer coming and saying "your website sucks, you should rewrite it in React", there's not enough information there to get to the true, underlying cause; *BUT* you can wholly believe the patient that they are in pain, or at that there is something about the website that isn't meeting this user's needs. That's step 1. Believe the person in their experience, then investigate and address the real root cause of their pain.

Sometimes the patient says that the arm they no longer have hurts, or that everything hurts but the opiates you gave them last time did the trick, more opiates please, or that the world is sad and empty and the only way out is offing themself. And sure, you can rightly believe that they're in pain in all three situations, but not in a way that is informative about which side to take on vibecession.

It is hard to understand how we can import unskilled labor and not have that impact the value of unskilled labor domestically.

Unskilled labor is a myth. When we kicked out all the agricultural workers, it wasn’t just that it’s hard to find replacements, the replacements also learned how hard it is to actually do that kind of actually skilled work.

We're going with "unskilled labor is a myth"? Really? You could have given me 1 million guesses and I never would have come up with that. Unskilled labor is not a myth. It's a description of work that requires a shorter amount of training time for someone to be able to do the work, as opposed to, say, a dentist who needs years of schooling. Jobs where the primary requirements are physicality often qualify, with professional sports being a notable exception.

And if the work is really hard so no one wants to do it, labor markets generally have a pretty reliable mechanism for correcting that situation by raising prices. You could argue that higher food prices would be a problem, but you can't argue that imported labor doesn't impact it. No "study" will ever prove that importing labor doesn't suppress wages or that "unskilled labor is a myth".

They're saying gas is too expensive.

They're saying rent is too high.

They're saying houses cost too much.

They're saying a cocktail shouldn't cost double digits.

They're saying they can't afford doctors or health insurance.

The complaints are specific about specific changes in affordability, not 80's AM radio talking points. They mostly aren't suddenly saying illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.

(Certainly some people are, but it's not really a bigger contingent than any other time in the last... 30? 40? years...)

But they are also saying no to build more houses. They are also screaming and clamoyring to tariff the world 500 percent and then some more. Many people say many things, many people are also economically and mathematically illiterate and or pretending to be due to some vested interest.

That’s them attempting to solve problems. The pain they experience is still experienced pain.

Is some of it trauma-related? Sure! But that’s a lot of people experiencing a real or perceived hurt that we should pay attention to.

I think there comes a point when people are so adamantly illiterate and antimathematical (and a good helping of other fun things like racism), they are beyond help.

Agreed. The DOW is over 50,000, what's not to celebrate about the current economy?

No? Dawn of War has only released up to DOW 3.

We shouldn't be giving participation trophies to people who slept through world history class and then fall for recycled demagoguery about how it's the poor who are sucking up all the wealth and not the rich.

Well “believe them” seems to have been a system that survived a few hours. Unsurprising.

White Americans’ feelings of being “last place” are associated with anti-DEI attitudes, Trump support, and Trump vote during the 2024 U.S. presidential election - https://advances.in/psychology/10.56296/aip00046/ | https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00046

Abstract: Due to racial wealth inequality in the U.S.—inequality that benefits White Americans on average—many Americans associate White people with wealth. Yet, many White Americans report feeling like they, personally, are “falling behind.” We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study with a representative quota sample of non-Hispanic, White Americans (N = 506) during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We found that White Americans who feel they are falling behind White and Asian Americans, while also being close to being passed by Black and Hispanic Americans, within a perceived tight status hierarchy, reported the most support for DEI bans and Trump, controlling for objective status. Further, White Americans with these status perceptions were most likely to vote for Trump in the 2024 election. We conclude that White Americans’ subjective perceptions of their position in the racial economic hierarchy meaningfully relate to political attitudes and behavior.

The Findings: Using a statistical technique called Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified distinct groups based on where people subjectively ranked themselves and other racial groups on the American status ladder.

* We found a specific group of White Americans (~15% of our sample) who perceived themselves as "tied for last place" with Black Americans.

* Crucially: This group was the most likely to vote for Donald Trump and support bans on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

* Importantly, this effect held true even when we controlled for their actual income, education, age, and gender. In other words, feeling like you are losing status predicted voting behavior more strongly than actually having low status.

Reddit AmA with the authors: https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qz9158/we_are_pr...

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