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by shankr 279 days ago
American immigration has functioned this way for years. Where do you think Little Italy or the Greek sections of town originated? This is how immigrants have behaved for centuries, it's not exclusively a phenomenon among people of color. European immigrants did the same thing and continue to do so. If you mention a street name in NYC to some longtime New Yorkers, they can tell you which community or immigrant group is known to live in that area.

What ultimately matters is whether immigrants are law-abiding and contribute to the local economy. Indians rarely appear in crime statistics and generally comprise part of the highest-earning immigrant demographics.
1 comments
pfannkuchen 279 days ago
You are essentially saying “this has been a problem for other people in the past also, so we cannot consider it a problem when it happens today”. That does not seem like a strong argument to me…
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shankr 278 days ago
No I am basically saying it's human nature - sticking to their own group, having biases, being racist. You were trying to make it some kind of Indian trait. We can always try to fight against all the creeping racism and biases, legally and lawfully, without targeting certain group.

Suddenly every immigrant has to be this pristine model minority which has never been the case. That's why I gave those examples. People will find ways to target immigrants no matter what. This kind of narrative I see popping up everywhere where people don't like immigrants. This isn't even US specific.

The goalpost keeps shifting from legal, law-abiding immigrants to they better assimilate, say nothing bad or we are going to create policies which actively target some group based on how a particular government feels about them.

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pfannkuchen 278 days ago
How was I trying to make it some kind of Indian thing? The topic is H1Bs, and this instance of the problem, which as you point out is general, involves Indians. It’s not as if I singled out Indians artificially.

I do separately think there is a risk that what worked reasonably well when combining all Europeans may not work when combining all humans. There is no historical example to look at to go “oh yeah that does work fine in the long run”. At a completely abstract level, what we have been doing since the ‘60s is an experiment (combine all humans) that is different from the one we started with on this continent (combine all Europeans). Just because the first one worked doesn’t mean the second one will, right? Even if we ran the first one again from scratch, maybe we got lucky the first time, for all we know maybe that scenario only succeeds 10% of the time. Should we be at all cautious here, or is this just terrible evil heresy talk?

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