The Berlin Wall was really about keeping people in. Make no mistake about it. It was erected as a response to losing too many people through emigration [0].

Can you say the same about U.S. border control? Hardly.

There's a very big difference between a wall that keeps unwanted people out and a wall that keeps wanted (or everyone) in by force.

In the latter case, even if you have whatever freedom you wish outside the wall, you can have it. In the former, you cannot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#Erection_of_the_in...

US recently lost illegal immigrants during the down turn, so it might be about keeping them in. More people went to Mexico than the US from 2005 to 2015, though only by ~150,000.

> In the latter case, even if you have whatever freedom you wish outside the wall, you can have it. In the former, you cannot.

That is obviously and blatantly false. If the world turns hardcore nationalist, then it will be impossible for Americans to move elsewhere, because all countries will have strict imigration policies. How would you move to Mexico if Mexico doesn't allow for imigration? Where would you go?

Having immigration policy and not allowing immigration at all is not the same thing. Even Japan, whose immigration policies are very strict, has both sizeable number of foreign workers and immigrants too. US currently has very open immigration policy (1M immigrating every year) and a problem enforcing the immigration laws it has (tens of millions of illegal immigrants). It's a long distance between this and "no immigration" and there are many points on this way which one could choose to stay in.

Yes, but the reverse is also true. The soviet union, for example, allowed scientists to attend conferences in the west. It also allowed families to visit the ocean. So they did let some people out sometimes. Just as you say that Japan lets some people in sometimes. The end result is the same. Most people will not be allowed to immigrate or even travel in a nationalistic world. Whether it is because countries don't let people out or that they don't let people in is of no consequence.

A good example of this is the case of North Korea and China. NK has a very heavily guarded border between SK and NK. Basically no one has ever escaped via that border. However, people do escape to China, and China deports them back to NK. Is there a difference between NK not letting people go to SK and China deporting people back to NK? The end result, is the same. No one can leave NK.

> The soviet union, for example, allowed scientists to attend conferences in the west

Some scientists, for some conferences. It wasn't easy to get these permissions, and if you have security clearance, no chance. Maybe if you're word-class celebrity, not otherwise.

> So they did let some people out sometimes.

Yeah. It required to pass a lot of checks and having some connections. And depended a lot on where you're going - Bulgaria or Mongolia is one thing, Hungary or DDR is another, France or Spain yet another, and UK or US is completely different. Depending on how ideologically far the target country is, you'd require to be in the more trusted circles and have more connections to be allowed to get there. It's not like you just wanted to go there, you buy a ticket and go, nowhere near it.

> Just as you say that Japan lets some people in sometimes.

Not even close. You obviously know very little of both to compare. You can visit Japan as a tourist anytime. If you want to stay and work, it's harder, if you want to become a citizen, even harder. But entirely not comparable with USSR exit restrictions, not even close.

> However, people do escape to China,

Ah, you misunderstand the situation quite a bit here. People don't just "escape" to China. NK has a huge underground economy which is completely dependent on China. That's how NK has been staying afloat for decades now (well, that and international humanitarian help, which NK openly extorts by nuclear threats), otherwise they'd die out (well, not all probably, China would take over before that, but they don't really want this poisonous radioactive dumpster fire as part of their country or their official responsibility). Of course, this can not be done openly, so it is all done on pretend basis - Chinese and NK powers pretend it doesn't exist and from time to time deport some people for show. But they all know it's a pretense.

> Is there a difference between NK not letting people go to SK and China deporting people back to NK?

Of course there is. Ultimately, the welfare of NK people is the responsibility (and continuing criminal failure) of the NK government. China is not responsible for them, but in fact is trying to manage the situation while keeping the pretense of situation not existing at all, because it's their fault NK exists in the first place.

What is the chaos in the immigration system in the US that benefits you? The uncertainty and delays in the H1B process for employees? Australian US visas are a special case but I assume you are talking about employees. I'd be de privileging family unification visas and removing per country caps, primarily. Also eliminate h1b but as part of improving immigrant visas to accomplish the same mission but with benefits to both domestic and immigrant workers, penalizing the abusive body shops.

Does the ability for people to historically (and to some extent, currently) illegally cross the southern border benefit your business? Does people overstaying visa waiver or other visas help? It would seem to me that being able to easily hire and have a simple, deterministic, and painless process would be a net win.

I didn't think the Berlin part of the wall was ever claimed to be for security; the other inner German border was. I didn't look this up recently so mah be wrong.

> What is the chaos in the immigration system in the US that benefits you?

Sorry I was not clear. The immigration system is absurd and it appears that all the plans are to make it worse for the US (All the announcements I've seen are of enormous benefit to Europe, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore et al). It's a major liability to trying to do business in the US.

I mean the general chaos of life in the USA. Day to day life here is a grind (you just have to spend so much time on useless shit that you don't deal with in other advanced economies) but in exchange you get people willing to adopt something new at the drop of a hat, who don't give a shit about credentialism, are willing to take outlandish and ludicrous risks, etc. Think of it as the social or meatspace equivalent of Black-Scholes: options with huge fluctuations have higher expected value than more sedate ones. It has made it worth putting up with the dreadful lifestyle crap of the USA. In terms of QoL, Australia, Germany and France (despite everyone being miserable) are much much nicer and a hell of a lot more fun. But for the work environment, hell, you just can't beat San Carlos<->Sunnyvale.

As for the "illegally cross the southern border" part: Of course it is a net positive. Sure. I used not just "legal" labor but union labor to build my house (had my construction supervisor check everybody's paperwork among other things). My housekeeper and gardener are US citizens, unlike me. H1B people are very difficult to get because of the arbitrary crap and uncertainty, but the fact that hiring a foreigner for a startup costs so much more than hiring a local doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

But it's a net positive because those folks who come here "illegally" are the private sector working around a fucked up immigration system: not only are they a huge economic net addition to the economy (one that's integrated across the border in a massive conurbation) not only by doing jobs that go otherwise unfilled (the whole point of the bracero system) but because they pay rent, buy iPhones etc, but they add spice with great cuisines, music, art, etc. They do tend to be very conservative (heavy on "family values", fiscally conservative etc).

You bring up a great example of the fucked up immigration system. Before the Obama-era border crackdown people moved back and forth more freely across the border. Over the past couple of years, despite the net emigration south, the number of people leaving would be even greater without the border crackdown (the human equivalent of a wall). yes, as with east Germany, increased border surveillance increases the risk of crossing (or the risk of returning) so people simply stay put. An already visible example of what the East Germans got.

> I didn't think the Berlin part of the wall was ever claimed to be for security; the other inner German border was.

Indeed the Berlin part was considered an integral part of the security system. Which it was -- it's just that the sign was reversed from how it was described. My wife grew up next to the larger internal border, so as a kid she liked watching East German late night TV shows that came across -- they showed soft porn on TV allegedly in the hopes of increasing the birth rate.

> you just have to spend so much time on useless shit that you don't deal with in other advanced economies

Just curious, can you provide some examples? (outside of healthcare, which is the well-known hell). Thanks!

For an example of the top of my head, take tax returns. In the UK the vast majority of people don't need to file one—your employer deducts the right amount each month from your salary and off you go. Moving to America I found I had to spend at least half a dozen hours trying to figure out what I had to do, eventually giving up and paying for a service to do it for me and am still unsure I filed correctly.

For another example, take getting a driver's license. In the UK you fill in a form online, they extract any other relevant details from your passport records and put in your credit card details and they send you a license within the week. It's a 15 minute process. In America I got to finding out I had to go to the DMV (and that I should go to the DMV in another city because it's somehow superior) and promptly gave up.

I know you said aside from healthcare, but even if you had the hypothetical best insurance available, with no co-pay or deductible, just keeping track of all of the arcane and opaque numbers, policies and restrictions is a huge administrative burden.

Now to be clear, I understand why some of these systems are the way they are and, in some cases, can see the necessity, but the fact remains that in almost any other developed nation there simply wouldn't be an equivalent administrative burden to just existing.

You've accidentally hit on a problem with much of the complexity of laws in the US: states have autonomy on a lot of things. Healthcare is a big one. It's regulated by the states. Insurance companies incorporate by state. Each state has it's own regulations. Some states are gun friendly, some are not. Although our federal government yields a lot of power, constitutionally, it doesn't have as much as its seems.

It's an interesting model. It was more like the EU in it's inception than today in that each state was it's own country under a thin umbrella of federal government. The outcome of the US Civil War changed that significantly, but not enough to have a coherent, omnipotent federal system. (The EU doesn't have one either; each EU country controls most of their own sovereignty). One main difference is US states can't secede from the US while EU countries can.

Another issue is free borders between states. If state A enacts universal healthcare, how does it prevent the sick inhabitants of neighboring states B,C,D,E from emmigrating and bankrupting the state? This model poses all sorts of problems. Even colleges have to deal with this. If you live in the same state as the college for a year, you are considered a permanent resident and get a significant tuition deduction (like 75% less). There are hundreds of examples of where autonomous states with free borders cause administration headaches.

Imagine if the EU decided to have a governing body that took taxes and distributed services, like healthcare, military, infrastructure, etc. It would have to cut out parts of the tax code for Greece and add parts for France, etc. Not only that, but by industry. Then tack on special interest lobbying. It would be a mess. Not only that, what if 1/4 of the countries didn't have universal healthcare?

Talk to an accountant with experience in dealing with tax both inside and outside the US, and watch them wither before your eyes when they describe the cacophony of the US taxation system. You gotta love a taxation system where everything changes depending on where something is sold versus where something is received versus where head office is, varying right down to the county level...

Most of the reason why Americans get so frothy about tax is because they've made it ridiculously complex to comply with.

Really. In the Czech Republic the tax form for physical persons is a single A3 sheet folded in half, and one quarter of it is notes.

One example is the very complex set of rules for specific professions in the US. There's no one-size fits all business licence as there is in some other countries. If you want to, for example, start a moving business you buy a truck, and then you have to register as a mover in CA, and if your client wants to move their stuff to WA you have to register as a mover in Oregon and Washington as well. You may then have to register into a special commercial fee system for using the highways commercially. This kind of thing really shocks the redneck crowd who thinks that if they've got a pickup truck then of course they can move that sofa for $20 bucks.

Apart from the other examples cited by others: back before paper checks completely vanished (mid 1990s) when I paid my housekeeper I used a special checkbook -- when she deposited the paycheck my taxes were paid automatically. Apart from that checks were already gone. Until the iPhone I could get a better mobile phone in Africa than I could buy in the US.

Paying all your bills is really complicated here, and full of hidden deceptive fees. Food is full of weird labels that don't let you know what you're eating. Send your kids to school -- my god, the TEACHERS pay for the kids' pens, and you have to send a huge number of things that were normally part of school (printer paper???). School lunches -- forget it! And working parents have to come help in school? WTF is up with that?

Buying a house -- what a nightmare (and a racket). This is one of the most corrupt systems in any country, but somehow the US adds insane complexity, at least in California. I have tried to explain this stuff to my kid who is going to university in the US but he doesn't see the point since he doesn't see much future here after graduation.

I could go on but it's too depressing. How about we talk about how people are willing to enthusiastically work for a startup even though chances are good it will go bust? That they will step up and take responsibility and complain less then most? That they are, in general, among the more law abiding people in the world? How great the national forests are? That the prices at the ski slopes are only outrageously high, but that I don't think anyone is trying to go beyond that to rip me off in a covert way?

I mean, living in the US is not much fun, but working sure is. And consider: some of my neighbors complain that poor Mexicans are driving poor "real Americans" out of work, that politicians are all corrupt and the economy is in tatters. A couple of years ago I flew to see my in laws in Germany and then my family in Australia (cheaper round the world ticket). In Germany, the richest country in Europe, the pub conversation was: poles were driving poor "real germans" out of work, that politicians were corrupt and the economy was in the toilet. When I got to Australia, in the pub I learned: that Vietnamese (or was it Indonesians?) were taking the work away from poor "real Australians", that the politicians were all corrupt, and that the economy was in the toilet (in something like the 20th consecutive year of expansion).

Well, I am inclined to like creative destruction and open borders too. But Australia and the US are democracies -- they are ruled by the people, most of whom seem to like a bit more orderliness.

Now if the democratic process is producing something like the White Australia Policy[1] then we have cause to cry out our moral censure from the rooftops. But whatever your view on the current points system, that's just a policy debate, not a great moral issue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy

The WAP has been dead for more than 40 years, and 28% of the Australian population was born overseas (21% if you discount poms and kiwis). In comparison, the UK has 12% foreign-born and the US 14%. If you exclude the refugee crisis last year as a once-off, the only sizable western countries taking in more migrants per capita are Spain and Norway.

As national policies go, there aren't many that have been so resoundingly reversed. The only thing that keeps the WAP alive is people that keep on referring to it, thinking it represents the current state of affairs.

Yes I'm an old fart, born in the (fortunately waning) days of WAP. When I first visited the US, we landed at D.C. and drove north, because to drive south would have meant we would have to split up the family to stay in different hotels. Still, it seemed less racist than Australia.

Nowadays, both have improved but I feel like the positions have reversed. Then again, I don't think America throws kids off navy ships into the water. And they have only one overseas concentration camp that I know of, and I don't think the people in America's wanted to enter the US, unlike the people AUS sticks in camps.

Nobody is perfect. But really, it's astonishing how far Australia has come. Now if only the coalition could reflect that.

> Then again, I don't think America throws kids off navy ships into the water.

When did Australia do that? The claim was that the refugeees threw the kids overboard in order to get a rescue, not that the navy threw them overboard themselves for a photo op. The scandal was about the government lying about refugee actions, not that the navy was drowning kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair

He didn't say that exactly. On the other hand, there are persistent reports about the Australian navy letting refugee ships sink.

By the way, often the only alternative to self-scuttling their ships, for the refugees, is to let their ships be turned around and maybe never reach another shore for lack of navigation skills, water or fuel.

That comment certainly was a bit hyperbolic, but not that far from the actual truth.

In fact I first left Australia (with my parents) because of the WAP, which impacted me even before I was conceived (one of my parents was neither "W" nor "A" so the "P" caused problems). I still have an (older) Aussie neighbor around the corner in Palo Alto who has told me I'm a wog.

First, I doubt that the WAP was passed through a sufficiently democratic process as we understand it now.

Second, I don't accept any non-democratic policy passed by any supposedly democratic system as democratic. No matter the majority it has been enacted by. For me, discrimination by race is by itself against the values necessary for sustained democracy, and as such, not subject to majority approval.

Since you are Australian, you are probably not aware of how biased the immigration system is, against the Indians.

And thats what the earlier comment by throw2bit was referring to, that its better to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out while reforming the legal immigration to be similar to that of Canada and Australia where the most productive humans with greatest potential are allowed in, irrespective of which country they were born in.

> Since you are Australian, you are probably not aware of how biased the immigration system is, against the Indians.

I am not aware of such a bias, and I have a half a dozen Indian relatives living in the USA (I am an Australian with one Indian parent, currently living in the USA
). I have not studied any current place-of-origin biases in particular (I know historically they were dreadful and for all I know they still are. Certainly the rhetoric is).

> ...that of Canada and Australia where the most productive humans with greatest potential are allowed in...

Ah, but it's all about who decides what is deemed "with the greatest potential". It's what is believed to be needed now of course, whether nurses, plumbers, or geneticists, but what about poets, lunatics, or those who write music I don't enjoy?

> how biased the immigration system is, against the Indians.

What specifically do you mean by that. As far as I know many Indians get Resident visa because of their skills.

There's a limit to the number of green cards that can be issued for people from a particular nationality (country of birth than country of citizenship). This creates a backlog for Indians and Chinese nationals. The backlog causes a long wait time and uncertainty for Indian nationals. There are people, like me, who have been waiting for their green card for more than 7 years. I've been in this country for 15 years now, have a Masters degree and have paid more than half a million in taxes (a couple of acquisitions helped). With equity, I make close to $400k/yr and could probably make more if I had a green card. I have substantial (north of $250k) savings in cash which I hesitate to invest here since I've no idea if I'll get my green card or be sent back. My spouse was finally allowed to work here due to Obama's H4 EAD rule but now that's going to be revoked too. It sucks, since my spouse wants to teach kids with special needs and there's significant demand for such teachers. If my green card doesn't come through in the next couple of years, I'll most likely move back to my home country or one of Canada/New Zealand.

I guess I misread your earlier comment, I thought you were talking about Australian immigration policies to the parent commenter who was an Australian.

My bad, since you are talking about US, yes I agree with you.

> I cannot forget that that wall was supposedly built to keep people out

As far as I know, the Berlin wall was always supposed to keep people in. Strict exit restrictions was common in all soviet regimes, including one in DDR.

Yes, you know correctly, but it was sold as a defence against the west. Which turned into a running joke in "Goodbye Lenin" BTW.

Nobody on planet earth believed the Berlin Wall was to keep people out. Ever.