Pretty much every country has limits on immigration. It is hardly unique to the US. There are different cultures and traditions in the world. It takes for people to adjust to a new country and the country to adjust to them.

Actually white Americans don't seem to mind immigration from fellow white-majority countries, especially if it's from the developed ones. But that's an understandable phenomenon.

They don't now only because there isn't a lot of it, so it's not a political issue. How many recent German or French immigrants are there in the US? Not enough for anyone to notice. Back when there was large-scale immigration from Europe though, a lot of people minded, and formed parties specifically to agitate against the Irish/Poles/etc.

You see that now in Europe. UKIP isn't complaining only about muslim immigrants (though they complain about them loudest), but also about continental-European immigrants, especially eastern Europeans. I suspect something similar would happen in the U.S. if there were a large influx of European immigrants.

The internet is a good example of a culture than can exist if you do away with artificial barriers between groups of people. Modern immigration policy is not inherently correct and it wasn't devised during an age of hyper connectivity.

If the Internet had to ensure housing, food, and transportation would be available for every participant, we would be a lot more selective about granting access. Open borders made sense in the age of unsettled land, and they make sense when the marginal cost of delivering everything (i.e., only information) is nearly zero.

I live in the US and I'm not ensured any of those things. Allowing more people into the country could only improve our economy.

We would be more "selective"? How would we select?

Whom should you select to let into your country? The same people you select as employees, only more so.

We use "skilled migration" as a proxy for what we really want, which is people with good genes. If you have skills and good genes then you'll enrich the country not only in this generation but in all future generations to come.

So an ideal immigration policy would involve some combination of testing for intelligence, physical fitness and (dare I say it) good looks.

Good genes?! This is the most racist thing I've read on HN. I see why you have a throwaway account.

Uhhhhh, nobody mentioned race until you did.

If you think "good genes" is correlated with race, then I'd suggest that you are the one who is racist.

If he had just said "talented", I suspect it would not have been controversial (at least that part). But "talent" often hints at heritage.

There are plenty of untalented natives in any country. I do not think the government is particularly good at spotting talent. We should just let everyone in IMO.

Besides, "talent" can mean many things. Is the Mexican mother who can't speak English and doesn't have a college degree (maybe not even high school), but can make BAD ASS food and is capable of raising a family of 5 talented?

Pfffft

>If the Internet had to ensure housing, food, and transportation would be available for every participant, we would be a lot more selective about granting access.

Unfortunately, the US doesn't ensure anything at all for its own citizens, other than their God-given right to accumulate capital in unlimited amounts.

Strawman. Vivek Wadhwa scolded Democrats for not taking a deal proposed by the Republicans whereby 55K diversity visas in exchange for startup visas. [1]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/10/dear-congressman-gutierrez-...

Startup visas have nothing to do with diversity. It has to do with enriching the US economy. Nothing wrong with that. I support the startup visa moment, but not at the expense of other visas. We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.

>We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.

True, but you should also be doing more to exclude the people who don't have visas, which is the main reason the US immigration system is currently broken.

I lived in the US for a few years, did everything legally, queued up at embassies, paid endless fees, and saw that everywhere I went I was surrounded by people who had entered the country illegally and the US government wasn't doing a fucking thing about it.

Eventually I decided "Fuck it", because if the US government is more interested in letting in a gazillion unskilled, non-English-speaking manual labourers who have already shown a complete disregard for its laws than it is in letting in me, then the US isn't a country that deserves me.

What harm were those people actually causing you?

While it would of course lower afasd's blood pressure to relax and let it go, his question needs to be considered. Anyone telling law-abiding would-be American immigrants to wait their turn comes off as either oblivious or downright malicious if they tacitly condone, um, "extralegal" immigration. As an American, frankly, it's embarrassing.

I agree that would be hypocritical. I didn't tell him to wait his turn though, I told him I support open borders.

If he wanted to come into this country illegally, I personally would have no problem with it. Maybe then though, he'd see that those people don't have it easy since they obviously won't be getting high-end engineering jobs like that and will realize they are no threat to anyone whatsoever.

It's also comparable to GPL compliance too. The companies that do open source their code and comply are leaning on the FSF to make sure their competitors are also held to the same standard. If the FSF let them off, then why should anyone spend any effort complying?

It was more the moral outrage that happens when you do the right thing and see other people getting away with doing the wrong thing.

It's like if you went to a supermarket and paid for your groceries and saw that you were the only person paying. Everyone else was just walking in, shoplifting, and walking straight out, and the managers weren't doing anything to stop it. That's not a supermarket I'd choose to keep going to.

I support open borders for the reasons I listed.

Claiming not wanting open borders == xenophobia is, well, good luck with that, champ.

Why don't you want open borders? You haven't said why it's bad.

Immigration is very important for all countries, but assimilation takes time. (If you believe in the country enough to want to immigrate there, then the existing culture must have some value.)

Ask Syria, Iraq or South Sudan, how they are enjoying their open borders. Meanwhile, Iceland, Japan and other countries are doing fine. Arguably, they could be richer if they allowed in more immigrants, but I'll take the rule of law over the chaos of uncontrolled borders.

Meh, as a visible minority I'd rather the open borders than the opposite. The Nordic countries, Japan, and others with historically xenophobic and anti-immigration attitudes have a "stronger" rule of law, and the illusion of fewer social ills, because they don't have to deal with the discomfort of a heterogeneous population.

And now that immigration is increasing in these places the amount of racism being exposed is shocking, even when compared to the USA where racism has been front-and-center for decades. Hell, just look at HN threads whenever Muslim immigration to Sweden/Norway comes up, it's like Stormfront on steroids.

Your argument has been levied against just about every immigrant population that's made its way into the US. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, all of whom were subject to enormous racist and xenophobic backlash, much of it under the guise of some vague notion of cultural integrity.

All of the above populations have integrated into American society and in fact the US would be markedly poorer - economically and culturally - without them now.

There's a small amount of schadenfruede I feel when I look at the struggles going on right now in previously-closed countries as they experience large-scale immigration for the first time. For years they tsk'ed tsk'ed at the US (and Canada) for their social upheaval, as people came to grips with living in a heterogeneous society, and criticized us for the many examples of blatant racism and xenophobia. Now that they're going through the same thing it makes me sad to see people from these very countries spouting the same justifications and views as Jim Crow-era America, as if they've learned literally nothing for themselves while observing us in judgment this whole time.

Uh, Japan is definitely not doing fine. They have massive demographic problems that would be helped a lot by a more liberal immigration policy.

Was it a love for Native American culture that caused the original European settlers to come to the US? No, it was raw opportunity. Unless you're talking about Native American culture, then ALL culture in the US was constructed by immigrants.

Even Native Americans were immigrants as they crossed the Bering land bridge ;)

Actually, American Indian culture had developed a way of life that preserved a beautiful land in a sustainable manner, while much of the world was embroiled in war, feudalism and disease. True, there were inter-tribe rivalries as well, but the land was relatively peaceful and undeveloped compared to what Europe was experiencing with the Seven Years War, Protestant-Catholic Wars and massive civil wars at the time. I don't think the early Europeans necessarily understood Amerindian culture, but they were definitely the beneficiaries of it. If American Indians had executed a more cogent immigration policy, the transition to a modern economy would probably have been easier for the natives.

Of course, much has changed since then -- with finite resources like fresh water and land in good climates being consumed in many attractive countries.