[damnyou]

> Why bother with a fixed number at all?

This is obviously the sensible approach, but most people who comment on Hacker News immigration threads are nativist. They might pretend to be liberal or progressive [1], but at their core they're no different from the Jim Crow segregationists of the '50s. Changing your in-group from being based on the color of your skin to the patch of dirt you were born on doesn't change the basic immorality of your position.

[1] Though it must be said that progressivism and nativism have been very close friends historically, and continue to be so in the form of NIMBYs.