| Trump's position paper on immigration is by and large an appeal to the worst nativist sentiments lurking across the political spectrum [1]. Read on balance it is a call to end the very idea of America as a land of opportunity for aspiring people around the world, yearning to be free. His H1B spiel has to be understood in that context .. it's fine to discuss if the program is abused. It's fine to criticize mass immigration, to maintain security, to advocate reasonable limits on the rate of immigration so as to not overburden social services etc. But what he is doing is pitting aggrieved minorities against each other, peddling the lie that "foreigners are stealing your jobs" to the worse off, and "foreigners are stealing your taxes" to the better off. Quite honestly, Trump was winning me over in many ways before this. We do have too much political correctness, it's great that someone is speaking against special interests, we should make better international deals, we were stupid to arm rebel armies in the middle east etc. In most of his speeches he had come out in support of legal immigration, but looks like he has gone full nativist now. Too bad, he just lost my vote. If his policies are implemented, we will destroy what PG eloquently describes below [2]. There is such a thing as Americanness. There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Closer, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their talk of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive." Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power. [1] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/Immigration-Refo... [2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html |