Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pengaru 236 days ago
As an american, unless you're descendant from native americans, your ancestors are immigrants... I don't think it's worth pointing out. Most anti-immigration americans obviously aren't native americans.

pulling up the ladder behind you isn't a new concept

4 comments

In my ancestor's defense, they didn't get much choice on emmigrating here. It'd be truly poetic if they tried to forcefully deport me because they can no longer use me as free labor on the fields.
As Vincent Gallo put it recently re: federal debt:

> The USA can tolerate one of these two things. A system of no welfare, no social services, no socialized medicine, food or housing with open borders. OR. No open boarders and highly limited, highly controlled, assimilating immigration policy. We cannot have both. When the USA had unlimited immigration over 100 years ago, we did not have Government supporting immigrants with welfare, medical services, housing, food etc.

I don't agree with Mr. Gallo here - I'm just sharing what a popular RW response is on this.

> I'm just sharing what a popular RW response is on this.

The policy in my red state is to spend public funds to treat unliked immigrants as harshly as possible, deny social welfare to citizens in need and prioritize gov resources for admin loyalists. At least it is now that courts are sufficiently captured.

What does “no open borders” mean here? I’ve seen this term used but I don’t quite get it. Surely it can’t mean completely closing the borders? I.e. literally nobody can enter the country, ever.
No tolerance for people trying to live in the country without going through the legal process.

Public policy discussions always get boiled down to some simple wording that isn't strictly accurate.

Literally no tolerance? I always figured that like everything else, there’s a cost/benefit analysis to be done, and you try and tweak enforcement levels to the point where it gives decent results without costing the earth. No law is enforced with literally no tolerance in practice.
Legal immigration is also under heavy scrutiny with the "no open borders" folks. It is not as simple and law-abiding as you make it out to be.
Ive always been ashamed of all the genocidal massacres and forced relocations we did to the native americans but its not in any way accurate to compare establishing a colony to immigration; they came here to create a new society not to live amongst the existing civilizations. The way they did so at the expense of the civilizations already living here is abhorrent and shameful but its also in no way comparable to illegal immigration.

To the extent that it is comparable we would be absolutely justified in regulating immigration because the implication would be that the same thing that we did to the native americans is going to happen to us.

Its also not in any way reasonable to use the sins of the distant ancestor to delegitimize the nation's right to self-determination. Even if i accept your premise that my ancestors are comparable to immigrants i myself am not. If the argument is that the nation has no rights to control its own borders because that would constitute some sort of "generational hypocrisy" that would also mean we have an obligation to accommodate slavery and genocide because our ancestors committed and benefitted from both of those.

>As an american, unless you're descendant from native americans, your ancestors are immigrants.

How'd that work out for those native americans again? Maybe I'm a little reluctant to let things play out the way it did for them.