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Comment by zulux | Hacker News Reader

Pretty normal in other places: Most banks in Japan are for Japanese customers. Foreign users have quite a few hoops to jump through.

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Several places also have a "hostile loop":

    - can't get a job without a local bank account
    - can't get a bank account without a residential address
    - can't get a (rented) residential address without proof of employment
    - getting a local phone number may also depend on / be required for any of these steps

There's usually "fixer" services which help people get out of this mess, but it can be a real problem even for 100% legitimate professional class immigrant workers.

I don't think exceptions or confined bad side effects make for very good arguments against general policy. You wouldn't ban planes, because sometimes they crash. This isn't math. We're not proving that a rule holds for every element of the domain.

.. unless you're the person to whom the side effects are happening. How many citizens is it acceptable to wrongly deport or debank, potentially without trial?

You have to consider

1. the moral status of the process or parts of the process as such

2. whether the evil of undesirable side effects exceeds the good effects of the policy

Like most things on HN it's only ever a moral panic when the U.S. (or U.K.) does it.

The US and the UK have the unique situation of backing themselves into national ID requirements without ever actually issuing national ID, which makes for stupid outcomes.

Was just reading that headline the other day. Economic darling Japan emerges from the Lost Decades with perfect banking policy.

Compared to the effect of Plaza Accords the influence of banking policy on economic development is within statistical error.

It seems predictable that people on a mostly English-speaking forum will be most concerned with stuff that the US and UK are doing.

Most HN users aren't even posting during Anglophone hours though [0]. Based on the style of English as well as the type of post content, HN engagement seems to be increasingly filled with DACH and CEE residents during American mornings (which is ironic as YC doesn't follow GDPR and retains full rights to use HN comments as they so wish in perpetuity).

[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news

> during Anglophone hours though

I suspect I mostly post outside American working hours because I am (a) working then and (b) a night owl.

Maybe, but most HNers didn't work in high finance which messes with your sleep cycle :').

I'm still processing the dataset but there is a significant shift in HN usage from aligning with average American hours to non-American hours over the past few years.

And most HN users bashing the practice will defend the practice when another country does it.

Japan is well known in their acceptance of foreigners. Their economy is sputtering, the population is aging, and no matter how many economists tell the politicians they need to invigorate their economy they would rather build shitty robots.

Not just Japan. Stats are pretty miserable across the developed world.

The main reason for demographic decline and low fertility is liberal consumerism. Liberal consumerism is the religion of the developed world, and like all religions, it is a worldview that shapes one's understanding of what life is about. Consumerism's implicit anthropology is hostile to fertility, because fertility is at odds with the consumerist imperative. It also shapes how people view relationships and society. Consumerism is totalizing and produces a culture that smothers everything in the logic of consumerism.

Immigration is just an extractive and parasitic bandage over a gangrenous limb. The solution is to destroy consumerism and replaced with something better and more human. This will happen sooner or later, as consumerist societies will be eradicated through selective pressure (they'll go extinct), but it is better to voluntarily wage a religious, cultural, and political war against consumerism to save these societies.

Japan continues to have an HDI comparable to similarly sized France [0] despite having almost double it's GDP and a median age comparable to both Germany and Italy, and a TFR comparable to other European states [1].

It is also able to field a navy and armed forces that is independently able to hold off against China. Meanwhile, look at Europe and how it's managed the Ukraine Crisis.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...

Other countries also provide free and mandated forms of identification without all of the hassle and bullshit we have to go through in the US.

I spent most of my time in Texas using either my passport or my old forms of ID because my schedule never aligned with the DMV and I didn't have a driver's license to surrender.

There's a large portion of citizens here that would not have valid or current identification in order to open up an account nor the means to immediately obtain it.

Neither of the two countries I’ve opened bank accounts in, the UK and Finland, have a free form of ID available for their citizens (and absolutely not for immigrants!), and yet the banks have certainly wanted to be sure of my citizenship and status.

Surprising to see that the cost of a passport is lower than the identity card.

https://poliisi.fi/en/identity-card

Yes for the most part Finnish bureaucracy works fairly well but some parts don't make sense. To get a bank account as a non-EU foreigner just follow these simple steps:

- Receive the residence permit card. This is good enough for the men with guns at the airport to let you in to the country, welcome!

- Get municipality of residence. To do this you need an address, to get an address you need a bank account. To get a bank account you need the following ID card. To get the following ID card you need municipality of residence.

- When you find some way to break the above loop, go to the police station and apply and pay for an ID card. Take the first residence card with you.

- Now take this ID card to a bank along with your passport and residence permit.

The data printed on the ID card is effectively less than that printed on the residence card. But as the residence card is not considered an official form of ID, banks won't let you use it. Heck, the corner shop won't let you use it as ID to buy booze and smokes.

The border police in ~20ish other Schengen countries should be fine with it though. Not the ID card of course, that has 'NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL' printed on it in big letters unless you're an actual Finnish citizen.

Having an EU passport means you get to replace the first step with 'register your right of residence at an office at an appointment 3 months in the future' and also means you get to skip the ID card bit, but you can't jump straight to bank account.

Of course - Finland being a solid member of SEPA, why do you even need a local account? Just use Wise or whatever. In that case, I hope you like filing everything on paper and in person because the only practical way to identify online here is with a local service provider (bank, mobile phone certificate, or smart ID card). I hear you say eIDAS, but that's not widely adopted by private companies so things like setting up internet or electricity connections are not going to be possible with that.

America is quite unique in a lot of ways. We became the worlds superpower as a result of being willing and able to share our resources with immigrants seeking a better life, and building it here, free of restrictions like that.

The obvious difference is that the US, more or less by deliberate design, had a remarkably lax approach to visa overstays and illegal border crossings for decades. This resulted in a population of more than 10 million "unauthorized" residents.

Any policy that suddenly pulls the rug on them is notable precisely because we created the problem (or not-a-problem, depending on your leanings) in the first place.

> Any policy that suddenly pulls the rug on them is notable precisely because we created the problem

Are you saying that it is wrong to ever solve a problem quickly, if you are the one who created it?

If other innocent people are collateral damage, then yes. Essentially the US "let this" happens and now wants to reverse course, but they're gonna be taking down a lot of good, hard working people with them.

Also, this will negatively affect a TON of citizens, which always sucks ass even if you think immigration is evil.

It depends on what problem and how you're "solving" it.

More accurately, half the country wants a deliberately lax approach to visa overstays and illegal border crossings, and the other half doesn't. Right now radicalized anti-immigrationists are in poltical power and they are going hard in the direction of anti-immigrant policies, under the expectation that the pro-immigration party might win the next election and attempt to reverse those policies.

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