Contrary to perception, open immigration is unfair to the weakest and poorest in a society.

I live in India. My country has 300M people living in acute poverty - less than $1/day.

These are the people who would likely benefit most from immigrating to a developed country with better healthcare and opportunities.

Yet:

1. These people would be liabilities in a developed nation since they have no transferable skills apart from manual labor. Most can't even read or write.

2. In 99% of cases, these people wouldn't even know anything about immigration, refugee status, etc.

Open immigration essentially helps people who already have the knowledge and means to immigrate. These are not the poorest and most in-need.

The Indian immigrants moving to America or Europe can have perfectly okay lives in India. I don't begrudge them for moving, but for western people to assume a philanthropic stance for taking them in is wrong. You aren't helping the poorest; you're helping the "doing okay" segment of the population.

Being able to do manual labour is still enough of a desirable skill on its own, and yes, hordes of the poor from the Indian subcontinent emigrate (albeit on a temporary contractual basis). The outflow of dirt-poor Indian farming villages to Gulf construction projects has been a phenomenon for decades now.

The people emigrating aren't the poorest of the poor. The gulf workers you talk about are mostly from India's most developed state (Kerala), are educated (or at least, literate), and have access to decent healthcare.

The people I'm talking about are from states where 40% of the population lives below poverty line and the literacy rate is still at 60%.

And interesting perspective. What do you forsee happening when tech like this replaces the labour of those currently earning less than $1/day?

The agriculture sector employs nearly 55% of India's workforce. There is already enough tech to replace 90% of this labor force - simple mechanization.

Yet, legal roadblocks make mechanization unfeasible in India (laws against owning farm land beyond a certain level, making mechanized farming effectively unfeasible).

These roadblocks are mostly because of political reasons. Politicians know that if they were to make mechanized farming possible, they'd see massive unemployment and hence, massive loss of votes.

So the same thing is going to happen to any other technological advancement that affects this massive vote bank: it will be stopped at a political level.

Silicon Valley ambitions tend to fail hard when confronted with the reality of acute poverty and the kind of political situations it engenders.

Thanks. I'm not sure if that situation is a good one or a bad one, but it's good to know about.

What, you are saying that keeping people with more opportunities than the poorest in India helps them more than letting those with means emigrate and send remittances?

Or do you just not care for those 300 millions of citizen?

It's their country and they can decide their self determination. They have no obligation to subsidize other countries' economic mismanagement.

The govt and pop at large want to keep Japan Japanese. It's not a new religion. They've been that way since before cmdr Perry. I can respect that.

I wish the West would learn from them.

In Tokyo these days, you can go to a culture festival and not have to see police stationed every block with assault rifles and flak jackets.

They're watching and learning from us, that's for sure.

Visit England some time. The UK doesn't even routinely let the police handle guns, not even pistols.

Unfortunately this is no longer true. In the wake of recent islamist attacks, it is now routine to seen armed police patrolling around cities.

Do you think that will still be the case in the coming months?

Honest question.

Guns are extremely unpopular in the UK, so unless something insane happens like UKIP winning outright, I expect most police will remain unarmed.

In fact, even if UKIP did win outright, I doubt there are enough qualified instructors to train a significant number of police with firearms in just a few months. I think there are only about 1000 officers in the UK with firearms training at the moment.

To be clear, I was talking about culture festivals (as an example of a public gathering). Not just any random day in the city.

I would still be surprised, but I'll concede that is far more likely that what I thought was meant.

The parent's answer will probably depend heavily on the results of the snap general UK election. Polls close today at 10PM GMT.

Well, japanese peasants and samurai did have a history of being disarmed regularly by ruling shogun, whereas US is quite proud of their history of possessing arms.

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

What's wrong with that? They just want to preserve their culture, don't see a problem with that. I've spent a decent amount of time there, much of which was with locals. Despite being a white dude outsider, part of my attraction to Japan is the cultural homogeneity. I hope they can keep it up.