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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing "weak" about standing up for your own economic interests. The H1B program has largely been based on a fiction--using a handful of superstars as marketing cover for tens of thousands of mid-skill developers. But with AI now coming for everyone's job the pretext of a "skills shortage" is unsustainable.

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Mid-skill developers? It's now become common to just contract out dev work to folks in Eastern Europe, for example. There are exceptional people there. And it's now really hard to get them to the U.S. so instead of having them pay taxes in the U.S. and spend their wages in the U.S. and maybe found their own startups and thereby grow the U.S. economy, they just do all that in their home country.

All that immigrant hate is so short sighted, it's hard to believe that you think that's actually in your own interest. Both common sense and history disagree with you.

(Though I admit that xenophobia has evolved in ancient human societies for good reasons. No reason to not realize it's bad though, not just morally but economically too. Very suitable for populism though, clearly.)

Immigration implicates economic and cultural issues, trying to reframe them as being about "hate" or "fear" is misdirection. When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.

Similarly, dismissing the concerns as "short sighted" is just ignorant of history. Plato was thinking about the challenges of reconciling immigration with democracy 2,000 years ago. Alexander Hamilton presaged the destabilizing effects of immigration on democracy at the inception of the U.S. https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2016/12/21/hamiltons-actual-vie...

> When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.

Indeed, that is a problem. The fraction of such folks is rather small though, if you take an honest look at the statistics. It's quite rare to actually see this, apart from videos at politically leaning talk shows or youtube or a rally of certain folks. At least in a menacing way -- nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?

It needs adressing nevertheless, I'm with you there. Helping immigrants to integrate better rather than just dumping them into ghettos would be an idea. But it's rather unpopular especially in affluent neighborhoods to let little blond caucasian princess share school with the dark skinned kid whose parents have a strong accent and don't celebrate christmas. Integration sure, but not at the expense of my precious darling!!!1

> nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?

A member of my wife's family is Swedish American. Her Swedish identity is superficial, a historical curiosity. Swedish Americans aren't glued together in any meaningful way by a common identity, they don't seek each other out to live near each other. Nor can you influence them by appealing to their Swedish heritage. By contrast, I have on multiple occasions gotten comped meals from hotel workers based on being Bangladeshi. Bangladeshis in the US and Canada feel real affinity for each other--they live in Bangladeshi neighborhoods, marry within their communities, etc. And you can influence them by appealing to their shared identity.

Irish identity is largely superficial today, but for a century it wasn't. They lived in Irish enclaves, they did favors for each other based on shared identity, and they organized politically based on ethnic background, not ideology or issues. And that had real social and political consequences for the country for a long time.

Indeed, Americans underestimate how different Irish and Swedish Americans really are from Anglo Americans even today. Americans descended from different European countries remain quite different in fundamental attitudes (e.g. social trust, views towards saving, etc). And they still vote quite differently as a result. It's also obvious just going around America. As a foreigner, it's blatantly obvious which parts of the country was settled by Italians, Scandinavians, Germans, different kinds of British, etc.

I think this is largely a function of when those waves of immigration happened, and how long ago it was. In another hundred years we'll see the Bangladeshi-American descendants having a fully superficial, historical curiosity type of connection to their heritage, like you describe for the Swedish-Americans. It just takes a few generations.

Studies show that 50% of the variation between cultural attitudes in European countries is still present in descendants of those people in the U.S. If you look at which communities have the highest levels of social trust, conservative attitudes towards spending and saving, etc., it’s exactly the places you’d expect based on where those same attitudes are prevalent in Europe. And obviously we’re starting from a much larger cultural delta with Bangladeshis to begin with.

But even putting that aside, there was a lot of pain for “generations” when we had Irish and Italian enclaves and the ethnic political machines they created. So we put up with that burden for 50-100 years and for what? To get, in the best case, a Bangladeshi version of the Jersey Shore?

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