Maybe this is too off topic for HN, but I'm genuinely curious what is the best argument for why it is bad/racist to enforce immigration laws? I've heard people argue that a wall won't be effective. But some people seem to have the view that immigration laws shouldn't be enforced at all and we should allow people to use whatever loopholes (refugee status, traveling w/ children) there are to get in and then not show up for their court hearing. Im genuinely puzzled that this is so controversial.

I'll bite because I'm ambivalent about immigration laws. Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out? You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country, not everyone is interested in activism, why should this be the fight of their life instead of stuff they actually want to do? You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.

I like the idea of a fundamental human right to "mobility". In the grand scheme of things a human being should be able to move anywhere as long as they obey local laws, pay local taxes, etc.

The standard counterargument is that not allowing mobility is what enabled us to have any nice places to begin with, in an "ant and grasshopper" way. Building a "nice" and affluent country is generally a multigenerational project involving plenty of individual sacrifice for the sake of a future that the sacrificing individuals will rarely themselves experience. If Norwegians knew that they all could move to any country they choose at their pleasure at all times, why would they save their oil money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of quitting work, blowing it all on blackjack and hookers right now, then taking out the greatest national credit line their country can secure to buy some more blackjack and hookers, and relocate a few 100km into Sweden once it's all used up? Knowing that the Norwegians would be thinking along those lines, what would stop the Swedes from racing to beat them onto the blackjack-and-hookers train?

Now, in reality, Norwegians and Swedes are sufficiently similar and familiar with each other that they probably would be able to predict the other's actions and jointly avoid racing to the bottom, but could you say this about, say, Germans and Egyptians, for more complex downward spirals than "burn through our assets faster than the others get to"? Add to it that the short-sighted policies that actually make the difference between successful and failed countries rarely are so straightforwardly bad as buying blackjack and hookers: more commonly, we'll be talking about economic experiments, corruption and kickbacks for interest groups, and really a handful of policies where we still can't confidently say if they were actually good for a given polity in the long run (space programmes, social programmes , infrastructure megaprojects...), but have to rely on history to naturally select for political processes that crystallise better instincts for their selection.

In less abstract terms, I think that especially many right-leaning Americans feel that Latin-American socialism gets close to being an instance of "blackjack and hookers" in the sense of the above metaphor, and in the same vein Germans feel that Levantine... sectarianism?... does. (As in, sitting down and negotiating a sustainable peace with people from other ethnic groups who might be heretics and devil-worshippers is the hardship-and-sacrifice option, whereas using any momentary advantage to enrich your friends and blow up infidels is short-term fun.)

This counterargument conveniently ignores the history of 'European colonization of America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the colonies into the United States of America [0]'.

I'm not the most well-versed on these topic (colonization / mobility) but it would seem that that mobility is what helped shape America into what it is today rather than "not allowing mobility".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United...

I think you two both agree, actually. How did colonization work out for the indians?

Well, the original autochthonous inhabitants of Americas would almost certainly preferred to be left alone than getting the Germs, Gold, and Guns "gifts" from the explorers and colonists...

Come on Norway, cheer up. You're wonderful people. I don't believe you'd all go on blackjack-and-hooker downward spirals if your government gave you freedom. Throw off the yoke of state tyranny. Your countries are nice places due to the virtues of your people, not your governments. I had a Norwegian roommate for about a year, here in California. I have to admit I found it a little creepy how her government would do things like keep calling her on the phone every few weeks, to find out what she was doing, how much money she was making, etc. I also got the impression that some of the ideas she was exposed to, in her childhood environment, were going to make it much harder for her to thrive in an economic environment like California, versus an oil rich country like Norway. Very sad, almost like a limiting of potential.

Why should a homeless person be forced to sleep on the street when you have a perfectly good couch in your living room. Yet you keep your door locked.

Because a country is not a house. The analogy is fundamentally flawed. Our government can provide for immigrants in ways that individuals simply cannot.

Governments provide nothing. They make someone else provide.

If the government needs a couch, they don’t poof a couch into existence and everyone’s happy. They either take your couch or have someone sit down and make one.

It’s bizarre though how many people think governments can simply “provide”. America now can’t even provide for all the struggling people who already live there. You could argue that they could redefine their priorities and focus on immigrants, but that comes at a cost of something else, and people affected by those cuts would not be happy.

This is basically saying: I won't help, but I support the government forcing other people to help (and hopefully it won't affect me).

The state is product of citizens time and resources. We all contribute. So it's a perfectly apt analogy.

> sheer luck

Not really. Your ancestors worked hard to improve the environment you were born in. It wasn't luck that created western civilization, it was the hard work and ingenuity of the generations that came before us.

Sure, but none of that has anything to do with you or your accomplishments which is where luck enters the equation as to your starting place.

For the record I think borders should be secure, but also allow pathways to citizenship.

> Sure, but none of that has anything to do with you or your accomplishments which is where luck enters the equation as to your starting place.

We didn't earn it, but we were given it by our ancestors. While it does behoove us to be generous, it is still ours by right. We also have an obligation to our descendants to preserve it for them.

What good is it working to improve the fate of our descendants, if it is only going to be taken away from them because they didn't "earn" it?

Yes you were given it, which means you were lucky in what you received. By all means try to do the same for your descendants I didn't say anything to the contrary, just that they would be lucky in the same way

> Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out

What about someone born in a Mississippi housing project where everyone around them is illiterate? Or in some rust belt slum with drug-addicted parents? What about someone simply unable to get the mental health they need so they end up living on Skid Row?

Lots of people are born into very shitty circumstances, and if we have problems taking care of American citizens I don't see how you can make the argument we need to open our borders for everyone in the world born in tough circumstances.

>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.

Yes, thats life? Of course where there is abundance we ought to use it to fix the unfairness. But life is unfair.

I think it comes down to where do we actually draw the line of abundance. Some feel we're well past it, enough that we shouldn't even have borders, others feel we aren't even close and ought to be quite selective of who gets to stay.

>>>You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country,

Uh, yes I can. The US exists because the population staged a rebellion. I don't find it unconscionable to expect others to undertake the same effort our forebears did to improve their situation.

>>>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.

Some of us are also taller than average as well, which is directly correlated with total career earnings. Sheer luck and unfair. Outcomes will ALWAYS vary due to the inherent genetic variations and capabilities in the human population.

There's a tragedy of the commons problem. While I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to move your family from a poorer country to the US, if in theory every person who wanted to do this did do this - from every country (Latin America or otherwise) - it'd eventually become unsustainable. At least not without a huge government program to try to manage it all, which may or may not succeed. Another issue is that criminal organizations can try to exploit this for their own gain, to the detriment of all, and it can become harder and harder to detect or prevent this as the rate increases.

Perhaps we'll eventually be in a future where surplus and government and security improvements makes this much easier to manage, and then maybe more countries will start moving to a more open-borders / global union model, but that future is probably at least a century away (probably several centuries). I think we should strive for that future, but that we should also accept pragmatic reality until it happens.

And I do think we should probably increase the amount of families we currently accept every year. Especially war refugees. Totally eliminating national boundaries is very different from that, though.

> it'd eventually become unsustainable.

If a sizable fraction of a country started to leave or plan on leaving, it could also force these countries to get their shit together to become more attractive and retain them. Similar to what we have now with counter-measures to brain drains.

If anything, I think they'd just be relieved that dissenters are leaving while true believers / "patriotic citizens" are staying put. Makes politics a lot easier. But I'm sure the reaction would vary a lot by country.

If you can move anywhere then you would have many more economic migrants looking for the best benefits.

I was wondering about this topic not long ago as well and came across this article: http://dieoff.com/page99.htm (not sure if that's the original link I saw but it is the same paper).

Basically it's about there being a curve for population size vs standard of living. We can't control the size of the population for the entire world, but a country can for themselves.

I don't really have much of an opinion on it, and can't say whether the article is bunk, but I did find it an interesting read.

Yeah, and I wasn't born to billionaires. So, we should take all the money from rich people and redistribute and become communist?

If our immigration laws were sane and humane I’d feel better about enforcing them, but sometimes laws are so unjust that the right thing to do is violate them.

It’s funny that you’ll see people on one hand talk about the laws Uber breaks or laws on piracy as bullshit inconveniences that need to be disrupted and on the other hand talk about immigration law as if it was holy writ.

Your question is quite loaded and rests upon false premises - for example, your assertion that people don't show up for court hearings rehashes an anti-immigrant trope that has little basis in fact. Attendance rates are actually quite high, close to 100% for those who have attorneys and still high even for those who don't: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/

It's a deep complex subject that can't be summed up in a short (or even a long) comment. If your understanding of it is based on misleading tropes that you've heard from pundits or political figures, it might be worth taking up the issue as a research project or taking some classes so that you are not taken in by slanderous misinformation.

I think you've been misinformed. The trac study is looking at people who have been here for years who have been going through the system. They show up to court at very high rates.

The "don't show up for court" people were part of a program by the EOIR (which is part of the DOJ) to expedite the cases of newly arrived family units in 10 cities. They very largely did not show up. You can read about it here:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Asher%20Testi...

So it seems like there's something very different about these two different groups of asylum seekers.

Anyway no need for the high dudgeon about 'slanderous misinformation.'

I'll bite.

It's not bad or racist to enforce immigration laws. Very few people in America support legitimately open borders and I do not either; the only ones that do are purist libertarians. Faux concern for these issues however is a hammer used by bad and, yes, racist people in order to batter people who are overwhelmingly poorer and non-white.

There is no evidence that a physical wall is a necessary investment and there are zero lives improved by separating children from their families as a "deterrent" during a massive humanitarian crisis.

A decade ago, I used to think that the Republican concern over illegal immigration (which is absolutely a legitimate concern), was truly out of concern for those exploited by the system and out of concern for the American worker. I thought that those calling this concern as "anti immigrant" were being disingenuous. Of course, that was before I realized people like Stephen Miller are really saying the quiet part loud these days.

As I understand it, separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children. This is because of court decisions which say children can't be detained more than 20 days. The alternative is to just release the parents and children and tell them to show up for their court date, which they usually don't do. So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders.

The humanitarian crisis at the border is caused by lots of people showing up at the border, right? It seems like the only way to stop the crisis then is to get people to stop showing up at the border, and the only way to do that is to enforce immigration laws. Is there another answer?

> separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children.

We've spent 230+ years having borders without separating children at gunpoint to give up for adoption [0]. It was explicitly called a deterrent by Jeff Sessions [1]. The cruelty is the point.

[0]. https://theintercept.com/2018/07/01/separated-children-adopt...

[1]. https://www.axios.com/sessions-says-he-hopes-child-separatio...

> So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders.

No, not at all.

the argument is mostly that it gives people white guilt to enforce immigration because most of the immigrants are non-white. and the people supporting the unlimited migration don’t have to deal with the consequences themselves

it also wins millions of future and current hispanic votes by pandering

Why super-villain? This is a responsible alternative vs. building a monstrous, ugly wall that is a travesty to nature and could potentially save taxpayers billions. We still need to protect our borders but we need to do it in the most non-invasive way with technology.

Why do we need to protect our borders? Why not just let people live wherever they can afford?

People illegally present in the US cannot work legally. That means they work under the table and are subject to all sorts of abuse, and their presence promotes gray market/black market economies.

While I think it is unfair to deport people who have been here for decades and giving them amnesty (again, like we did in the 1980s) is a reasonable solution especially for those who were kids when they came here, I don’t have any problem with stopping new people from crossing illegally.

If we want to increase immigration we should do it the right way by raising legal quotas and allowing people to come via the visa process.

So let people have work permits as long as they don't commit serious crimes and the illegal work problem goes away. There is no necessity for the control freakery that has driven much immigration policy in recent years.

Two of the big problems right now are:

1. People entering the country outside of defined points of entry. We can't issue a work permit to people we don't know are here. Anduril's products are meant to address these gaps in the border, which should lead to all traffic being forced to official points of entry.

2. Illegals who commit crimes get released.[1] Sometimes released domestically, sometimes deported. Some of the deported ones return. Which brings us back to #1.

[1]https://www.foxnews.com/us/kate-steinle-jose-inez-garcia-zar...

1. people don't have an incentive to avoid ports of entry if we don't make the admissions process so draconian.

2. 'illegal' isn't a noun. These are people we're talking about. This is not a place for you to peddle your propaganda.

Agreed on your first point. The process absolutely needs reform.

To your second. It's a truncation of the term "illegal alien": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(law)

That's not propaganda, it's a legal term. Casting commonly accepted terms of the relevant lexicon in a political light only reveals your own political bias.

Recasting legal terminology into dehumanizing nouns is a propaganda technique. It's very obvious that you're here to grind an axe and your axe is a style I'm very familiar with.

That’s open borders and it isn’t a popular policy with the country, which is why it hasn’t happened. (I don’t think any first world country has such a policy, the USA is hardly alone here)

People are worried that a dramatic rise in immigrants willing to work for less (since it’s still better off than their home countries) would undercut their jobs by affecting the supply/demand relationship of the labor market.

I’m not sure unrestricted immigration could work but I think we could increase the numbers of visas we do give out by some number less than unlimited.

Name one country with better-than-average standard of living that has opened its borders and thrived. There will always be a wall around something nice — either around your house, or your neighborhood, or your country.

The United States itself had "open borders" for a long period of time. There was mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and many other places and it worked out quite well for us.

Even today, we have "open borders" within the US. People are free to move from from poor (or poorly run) communities to places with more opportunities and it's a win-win.

Similarly Europe has 26 countries in the Shengen area. Some of the countries have a "better-than-average standard of living" and they're doing just fine.

> The United States itself had "open borders" for a long period of time. There was mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and many other places and it worked out quite well for us.

There was no welfare state back then, and the economic situation was vastly different. Also saying it went "quite well" looks over all of the ethnic tension that took decades to fix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans#Discrimination

> Similarly Europe has 26 countries in the Shengen area. Some of the countries have a "better-than-average standard of living" and they're doing just fine.

Heard about Brexit? The Romanians are coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb1AkaKJL08

> Heard about Brexit?

The UK was never in the Schengen Area to begin with.

Do you live in Europe? Schengen is only about passport control at the border, but any EU citizen had the right to work in the UK, no visa required. Eastern European workers lowering wages and quality of work for most British tradesmen and low skilled workers is probably the main reason for Brexit.

At a time when there was infinite demand for unskilled labor and when relative standard of living was much lower.

Canada takes in a large number of immigrants and thrives for it. Based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra..., we take in double what the US does.

This is completely unresponsive to the comment you’re replying to. Canada is extremely far from having open borders, controls temporary and permanent immigration vigorously and doesn’t border any poor countries anywhere with substance populations.

LOL! Canada does not have even close to open borders. They have refugees and they have merit immigration which has been decried as racist in the US. Merit immigration needs a better ambassador than Trump. Perhaps Bernie Sanders.

Because they impose externalities on the people around them.

And yet immigrants have lower levels of criminality than native-born Americans, so you're actually better off with more of them.

Social safety nets, open borders, future ongoing existence of an orderly nation. Pick two.

This. Things are not good everywhere in the world right now, we have to make trade offs. Humanity will progress and eventually things will be much much fairer, where we could have all of these things simultaneously, but we've got a long way to go as a species.

To add further, it would be horrible if inequality were perpetuated forever. But we have made a lot of progress by instituting liberal order and Western values in our own demarcated nations. This order is uplifting the world and other nations are able to copy it at their own pace. To eliminate the demarcations threatens a race to the bottom wherein the system has to accept people who do not know how to participate in our way of life, in greater numbers than it can accept.

If you think open borders and ongoing orderly nationare an option you're wrong.

Whoever walks into your nation will shape it. Your children's voices don't matter. There are far more children outside the country than in it and democracy can't work with open borders.

I think for most any given policy you could find some constellation of trade-offs and counterbalances that would make it work. Maybe for a certain value of "work" because in many cases those trade-offs would have to violate values or principles that we consider more important.

I think that a nation could in theory have open borders and prosper, but the trade-offs would have to be such that only like-minded people who can fit in and succeed would have an incentive to immigrate. This means that their children's voices would be saying the same thing as your children's, but there would be e.g. no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.

So I agree with you that borders are preferable, but I don't think getting rid of them is totally impossible, but I do think that doing so would be even worse for the compassion that makes people want to in the first place.

>I think that a nation could in theory have open borders and prosper, but the trade-offs would have to be such that only like-minded people who can fit in and succeed would have an incentive to immigrate.

You have no control over who comes in when you build a system that requires like minded people.

It makes it just as easy for people completely against those like minds to come in, in any number, and vote with equal voice.

If you have a successful nation/economy, people will want to come whether like minded or not.

>This means that their children's voices would be saying the same thing as your children's, but there would be e.g. no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.

The Cartels would take over the the southern united states in a hurry. It would turn the "border" into a series of criminal empires even beyond what exists now. Asian and other gangs would experience massive surges as they import members from overseas.

Insane policies that have no connection to reality and assume there are no bad people.

>no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.

while I agree that you cannot incentivize "free riders", I don't think your system is viable with open borders either way.

You will be conquered and you will have no national unity because everyone will bring with them their own ideals and concepts, regardless of your belief that only people who agree with you will come.

And it will be a massive betrayal of your citizens to give away their future to anyone who walks in, all in a massive self sabotaging effort of malignant empathy.

seems a bit offtopic flamewar

I read a research finding somewhere that there are about 500million ppl who would move to US in very near future if they are allowed to move to USA.

No, it's just: if you can't provide a solution, there is a lot of money to be made in prolonging the problem. The climate in the U.S. is xenophobic, so there will be dollars to be spent (wasted) on companies who sell technobabble.

By technobabble do you mean all the tech companies that claim they are "changing the world" by whatever it is they are doing? I've seen so many "content platforms" that claim to be "revolutionizing" or "democratizing" or whatever other buzzword you like, access to data, when in reality, they're doing no such thing.

What is your point? That other people are doing it too? This is whataboutism 101.

No. I met Thiel a decade ago and he struck me as very reactionary then. While I admire his intellect and he had valid critiques of how government operates at this point in history I felt many of his arguments were facile and self-serving. I've moved quite a bit to the left since then, but that was my contemporaneous impression rather than my current opinion of him.

From an even wider angle, silicon valley is fuelling this dystopia under the veil of "solving difficult problems".