Globalization is super nice when you're secure in your job, "hey everything is getting cheaper!" but when your job is the one in the crosshairs what you're feeling is a pressure that is pushing the living standard of the third world and yours together. That's why I find it so annoying that this board is usually against abundant H1B's but for factory outsourcing. It's completely hypocritical.
And before I get jumped on, no I'm not against all trade. What I'm for however is noting that people don't live in the long-term, economically we are firmly short-term creatures. Good policy won't give everything up for the long-term, it will also protect people in the short-term, we don't need an end to trade, we need a curtailing of some trade.
I am for immigration, it's just the pseudo indentured servitude that is H1B that I have a problem with.
As to factory outsourcing, I think it's overall a net gain for humanity. Long term there is a finite number of countries and barring societal collapse eventually they will all end up 'developed'. It simply exposes other problems in the US like our horrible social safety net and endemic corruption. So, a small ~2-5% import tax is probably a net gain for US society.
I am for free travel and work across "national" boundaries. That means I think the U.S. should be welcoming to others, and we should try to work out deals where our citizens can work abroad.
I believe that the best way to avoid war is to invite everyone to the table, help everyone get richer, do better, be more invested in a peaceful world. In the modern world, war is a nightmare solution.
Without immigration the US population would be shrinking. So, we need an endless supply of new immigrants to avoid a host of problems now facing Japan.
Second we directly befit from a mix of immigrants from all nations.
> At what point do you feel the USA will have enough immigrants?
When net migration into and out of the US approaches zero. Until that point it's about how fast we can acculturate newcomers, which judging from history is "pretty damn fast".
> That's why I find it so annoying that this board is usually against abundant H1B's but for factory outsourcing. It's completely hypocritical.
This forum is not composed of US users only. For example I live in one of those countries who benefited from opening up to foreign trade (I live in Eastern Europe) so it would be pretty hypocritical of me to complain about open markets.
This is one of the things I like about HN however. There are plenty of smart people all over the world (Eastern Europe included!). It is great to be capable of having civilized discussions with different viewpoints. If you open yourself to it, it is easy to learn something new from someone with an entirely different worldview and life context than you.
Why should Bubba live a better life then Liu Chu just because he was born in one country and Liu Chu another? Globalization has reduced extreme poverty worldwide, to the point where it will not exist in a few years.
Globalization has very little to do with the plights of blacks in the Mississippi Delta. Old fashioned racism and a lack of jobs in sectors which aren't agriculture have a lot more to do with it.
Well Bubba has no more right to a good life than Liu Chu but if you live next door to Bubba and 7000 miles from Liu Chu I think you have a higher duty to him than her.
Second, you could consider that Bubba has the ability to vote in US elections and Liu Chu doesn't. Making Liu Chu better off is a nice moral deed, making Bubba better off is not just a nice moral deed but also a political obligation.
Help given to Liu Chu will by necessity pass through many hands and you have no control over the ethical structure of Liu Chu's society.
Helping Bubba is something you can verify, and it will also help Liu Chu when Bubba has more income and can afford to help others.
We want all people to do well. But globalization didn't just help Liu Chu -- it helped many people in the U.S. Maybe we should redirect some of that gain back to Bubba.
> Why should Bubba live a better life then Liu Chu just because he was born in one country and Liu Chu another? Globalization has reduced extreme poverty worldwide, to the point where it will not exist in a few years.
Because Bubba is a member of a lucky sperm club. It is neither good nor is it bad. It just is.
Completely open borders and completely open immigration policy result in everyone sinking to the lowest, not lowest getting to the highest.
The writing has been in the wall for anyone to see for decades in most of these industries. An American factory shuttering is a disappointment, but I doubt it's a surprise to anyone, including it's workers. We can make some long term sacrifices to slow the process, but to what end?
There is no endgame. Nobody is thinking that far off into the future.
This is actually a problem in free countries. You do not have a cabal of elite on the throne who see themselves as the rulers forever. Consequently, long term planning is not as much of a concern. In this particular case the shareholders who pressured the CEO to move the labour overseas were only concerned with their short term gain. The politicians who might have endorsed it, were also thinking about their short term gain.
Nobody is thinking about the future until there is clear trouble on the horizon.
When it gets down to it - talking trade balances here - once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here - once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel - once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity - y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
What I don’t understand are the people who simultaneously complain about poverty in America and see absolutely no reason to apply any kind of standards for the people emigrating to this country (like, “must have an advanced degree”), or even any kind of limits on immigration at all. We are undoubtedly importing more people destined to live in poverty. Save me the rhetoric about every immigrant being a future doctor or engineer, yes there are many success stories but there are also plenty that end up being net drains on society due to, well, not being skilled workers.
Why should Americans hold new immigrants to such a strict standard, when they themselves can probably trace their own lineage back to someone who stepped off a boat on Ellis Island with barely a grasp on English or a penny to their (soon to be Anglicized) name? Why are low-skilled immigrants a net drain on society, but not the low-skilled children or grandchildren of immigrants? There are many, many more of the latter than the former.
The problem of poverty is systemic - trying to link it to immigration confuses correlation with cause.
There was no welfare state for Ellis Island immigrants to fall back on. Indeed, about a third actually returned home[1]. And a large number were actually turned away after they had arrived here. Today, the situation is very different: if you can’t hack it here, why go back? The state will provide for you, probably much better than you could do if working at home (depending on where you came from). How many of today’s immigrants do you think actually go back?
> Why are low-skilled immigrants a net drain on society, but not the low-skilled children or grandchildren of immigrants?
Because those children are a sunk cost: they’re already here. Why compound the problem? The demand to come to the US is far too high to simply accept anyone who can make it here. And the fact that a greater percentage of immigrants are accepting welfare vs “natives”[2] indicates that we really are compounding the problem. We should be going almost exclusively for skilled immigration, like Australia does.
For me, this is a no-brainer. Free-market is an extremely powerful tool, but Free-market itself does not have heart or any respect for Human Rights whatsoever.
If we want to create societies where Human Rights are respected, Free-market need to be operated under constraints. Yes, those constraints will slow growth and, maybe, some rich people will be less rich, but the other option is Neo-Feudalism and Barbarie.
So, the question is: how much injustice are we willing to tolerate for the sake of growth? Every society has a different answer, but you can easily see different models in Japan, US and Europe.
The problem is that every country can curtail trade. The world is far more interlocked now and any country trying to extract itself from that reality will undoubtedly go into an economic recession.
> Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising
Yet in 2018, most diversity initiatives still focus on race regardless of socio-economic background.
Race correlates strongly with socioeconomic background. Insofar as diversity initiatives are actually attempting to improve the lives of disadvantaged people in this country, arguments like yours amount to relative privation.
Heart disease kills more people than lung cancer, but there's nothing wrong with raising money to research lung cancer.
> Race correlates strongly with socioeconomic background.
Yeah all he's saying is that socioeconomic background correlates even more strongly with socioeconomic background. And keeping it in economic terms has the additional plus of keeping the correlation consistent as times change.
> Yeah all he's saying is that socioeconomic background correlates even more strongly with socioeconomic background.
This is a reasonable observation, but the ought that's implicit in it is not. Heart disease correlates more strongly with death than lung cancer; does that mean it's wrong in some sense to donate to lung cancer research over heart disease?
To make my opinion more material: individuals have the right to make independent decisions within a broad moral framework. It's not wrong for individuals to personalize the good they do (in this case, in the form of racial justice) so long as what they're doing really is good.
I'm going to post this as a reply with the poster elided, since they deleted it and I think it's important:
>> Heart disease kills more people than lung cancer, but there's nothing wrong with raising money to research lung cancer.
> The difference is that face of diversity initiatives are zero sum.
No, they are not. Hiring someone from a disadvantaged group does not mean that you have to fire someone from a privileged group. That is what a zero-sum scenario would require.
Diversity initiatives level the playing field by increasing opportunities for one group relative to another. That doesn't necessarily mean that the disadvantaged group has more opportunities than the privileged group -- it only means that they have more than they did before.
> No, they are not. Hiring someone from a disadvantaged group does not mean that you have to fire someone from a privileged group. That is what a zero-sum scenario would require.
No it requires not hiring the privileged group.
If you are hiring 1000 employees, and 10000 applied, and you've ranked them in some way, adding "diversity" to the equation means the ranking comes out different. Ranked potential employee 1307 using the pre-diversity standard, becomes employee 904 under the post-diversity standard.
But to move up that ranking, by definition, other people had to be moved out of the way. Maybe potential employee 1000, who only barely squeaked by, is now potential employee 1012, and so doesn't make the cut.
I just don’t buy that. Not every company has infinite head count.
Universities for example only have so many spots they can offer. So if a university keeps 10% of the spots for diversity candidates, then only 90% of the capacity is for diversity candidates.
Compounded with non diversity candidates applying in a disproportionately high number to diversity. And the population of non diverse having a better education. You end up making it harder for non diverse candidates and raising their bar.
>You end up making it harder for non diverse candidates and raising their bar.
You're right but that's fine. The argument though is that society has already imposed a 'higher bar' on "diverse candidates" (let's just be honest and call them minorities and the poor.) Think of it like this. A poor black girl named Keycia lives at home with her single mother and three siblings. She's studious but attends a bad public school, she works after school to help out at home, she takes care of her little brothers and sisters. Now compare to Chad, a white boy from an upper middle class family. He's also studious and also attends a public school but a good one with AP/IB classes, dual credit and so on. He doesn't work but he does play on one of the best lacrosse teams in the state and also swims.
All of which is to say it's two kids both working hard. Now, even with diversity initiatives, who's got a better chance of getting into Stanford? Hell who's got a better chance of getting into Iowa State? Or even being able to attend? Diversity initiatives exist to put these two kids on even ground. That's what equality of opportunity means.
In an alternative universe, Chad is a poor white boy who lives at home with his single mother and three siblings. He's studious but attends a bad public school, he works after school to help out at home, he takes care of his little brothers and sisters. In this universe Keycia is a black girl from an upper middle class family. She's also studious and also attends a public school but a good one with AP/IB classes, dual credit and so on. She doesn't work but she does play on one of the best lacrosse teams in the state and also swims.
Now, with diversity initiatives that are geared against Chad and in Keycia's favour, who's got a better chance of getting into Stanford?
> Diversity initiatives level the playing field by increasing opportunities for one group relative to another. That doesn't necessarily mean that the disadvantaged group has more opportunities than the privileged group -- it only means that they have more than they did before.
Most diversity initiatives aren't about equal opportunities but rather equal outcomes.
I think this misses the point that we are using our dollars inefficiently.
Between race and socio-economic status, the later has a stronger correlation to health and so it should be used as the main indicator directing where/how to spend those healthcare dollars.
When it comes to people's health, these dollars need to be blind, or we are needlessly throwing some number of lives away each year.
Diversity is a completely different subject from poverty. They're both subjects worth addressing.
Poor black people in the deep south and poor white people in the deep south still live different experiences even if they're both having a hard time. Rich african americans get treated differently from rich white people. This isn't a contest. We need to fix everything.
Isn't it though? I mean to a certain extent policy and even corporate 'diversity initiatives' are a matter of priority - first we even the ground for women, then minorities, then maybe gender id is next? I don't see the Ivy League rushing to ensure that their campus maintains wealth-diversity in the same way they ensure racial diversity. Maybe we really do need an Oppression Olympics, then we can sort out which group is most in need of help and prioritize them (I'm biased, I think it's going to be the poor.)
I think the point is to get rid of the hierarchy altogether. If you don't have a system of oppression, you don't need to argue over who to point it at.
You can't get rid of hierarchy. It's a natural part of human relationships and how humans organize themselves into societies. To think otherwise is absurd.
You can certainly avoid building your whole society to perpetuate and amplify inequalities between people. The U.S. constitution was a good step forward but let's not stop challenging inequality where we see it.
I agree partly. Some inequality is certainly immoral, particularly when it's based on a person's race or gender. (And that definitely occurs in the US). But sometimes it comes down to other factors, like intelligence, work ethic, assertiveness, etc. if that's the cause of the inequality and I don't think it's desirable to eliminate it.
Why would those things change who gets paid more for the same work, or who has access to healthcare, or who is going to be hassled on the way to the voting booth, or who gets taken seriously when trying to buy a house, etc.
I never made any of those claims, nor do I endorse any of them. I will say that the concept of "same work" is very hard to define, and I don't think you can do so outside of very specific industries that are mostly low skill.
If your diversity initiative isn't providing all the different types of diversity you're looking for, you either expand it or start new initiatives.
It's worthwhile to push your company (or university)'s race balance closer into alignment with the overall population's, and it's also worthwhile to try and strike a reasonable gender balance, in hopes that you're not locking people out of opportunities based on race or gender. It's also worthwhile to make sure there are opportunities for people from lower-income backgrounds.
The fact that some people are "losers" in this society (by modern capitalism's nature as a contest to see who can accumulate the most wealth at the expense of others) doesn't mean that diversity initiatives have to be a contest. You can run diversity initiatives with the goal of helping people who are otherwise excluded, and one of those can absolutely be aimed at helping people from low-income backgrounds.
Likewise, once someone is in the workplace, they might still need help. Maybe your standard pay scale isn't enough for a single parent with 4 kids, because he doesn't have affordable access to childcare services for his kids. Maybe one of your employees is wheelchair-bound and you could make it a lot easier for her to stay at your company if you adjusted the office floor-plan so it's easier for her to navigate.
Laws and regulations are (at least sometimes) built with this in mind, but the results will be way better if you tackle these issues directly instead of getting forced to do it by government decree.
The gist is that being a college educated, affluent son of a doctor wasn’t enough to avoid being seen as a dangerous criminal. That simply doesn’t happen to rich white men at anything like the same rates – the average mass shooter is arrested with more care than that!
Sometimes this is national news (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_contr...) but other times it’s just constant low-level stuff. As a white guy, I’ve never had a cab driver avoid picking me up; that’s very much not true for many black men even if they’re much better dressed.
When I see these things I'm always skeptical. I doubt LeBron did that himself, but there are TONS of hoax "hate crimes". Especially the ones that seem to be picked up by the news seem to end up being hoaxes.
We saw it recently in Canada with the girl who supposedly had her hijab cut, but it ended up being a lie. Who knows why she lied, perhaps for attention, maybe her mother put her up to it.
This video from Anaheim (California) is reminiscent of travelling around Dehli (from 39' in - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF7hWzqdPDk). The level/amount of poverty in this video is shocking.
It certainly looks bad to our eyes. But, beggars in Dehli would probably love to live in that sort of tent city, and have access to all the benefits available to the poor in the US.
This sort of comparison is terrible because it trivializes the miserable existence of our impoverished and implies they should be thankful they aren't "beggars in Dehli."
It doesn't imply anything, it flat out says it, being poor in America is vastly more comfortable and healthy than Dehli. Notice he didn't say "So don't worry about our poor at all.", just put it into perspective. The facts are, if you want to help the most unfortunate human beings, they're more likely to be in Dehli.
The comparison serves no purpose other than to suggest that the impoverished American should be grateful he's not a "beggar in Dehli." It's not some clinical fact devoid of context.
No, it also discusses how a moral calculus might not prioritize locality, but instead impact or efficacy on lives.
While I don't think it's an adequate idea, as it undersells the value of clannism, it's pretty easy to think of other interesting purposes for this comparison other than moral shaming. Perhaps this might've been a starting point for discussing the harms to the moral thinking which doesn't erect and police boundaries to "we".
A lot of moral discussion, in real life, on Reddit, or on HN, more or less of the same quality (as opposed to other discussions on HN) go nowhere. There is utility to discussing an objective moral calculus that multitudes can observe and negotiate.
Santa Monica seems to have successfully exported their problem to neighboring cities since then. In general, things seem to be substantially worse now.
Berkeley has a tent community dead in the middle of downtown on some government property. Berkeley's homeless problem is really front-and-center. The otherwise nice parks in the area are pretty unusable.
I'm sorry, I have zero sympathy to people from Berkeley complaining. Considering the amount of money that Berkeley citizens collectively have and the progressive positions that they hold I am baffled why they do not add an addition $X thousand per year tax to everyone who makes more than a federal poverty level there to make sure that all out of luck homeless people have a real roof over their head, warm meals and medical care.
Unless of course the so called progressive population does not actually care that the middle of downtown Berkeley looks like a third world country.
20% of berkeley population lives below powerty level. So lets say it is 100k that are left.
36M/100k is what? $360 per person? There, I just solved Berkeley homeless problem at a price of less than 5 bottles of Napa Valley Cab per person who screamed at the sky in the city of Berkeley the day Trump became President Elect.
To wahsd (dead comment): I get your point, but you should ask if the people are poor because they vote Democrat, or they vote Democrat because they're poor (and see themselves better represented by the Democrat platform)?
Maybe not even/just poor, but excluded from local economy/politics due to race, gender, ethnicity, not being a member of the old boys' club, etc.
We've all seen the articles about Republican controlled cities putting homeless people on buses for Berkeley and other destinations in CA. wahsd is clueless.
This raises an interesting question: Do US democrats think inter-state immigration is bad? For example some liberal friends when talking about immigration last year kept posting that poem on the statue of liberty:
> "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", etc.
The Republican controlled cities are giving huddled masses to the people who accept that immigration logic.
> Do US democrats think inter-state immigration is bad?
Not at all. The US has a big problem with homelessness, and for a long time we've been sticking our head in the sand.
Cities like SF have been trying to do something about it for a while, but I don't believe any city can solve the problem. This issue is greater than one city or one state. It's a national problem that requires national solutions.
Agreed. It's made worse by the fact that homeless people are often transient. When a city does a good job of providing services to homeless people, homeless people travel there. Rinse, repeat until the services are overwhelmed, and everyone goes back to "why are we failing to deal with our homelessness problem?"
It worked for SLC because SLC is isolated and expensive to travel to. In the tightly packed, interconnected megalopolises of the Bay Area, LA, and the Northeast, good luck getting anything to work long-term at just the municipal level.
Utah simply housed their homeless and it was cheaper because homeless people were no longer using emergency services for basic healthcare among other things[1]/
It's only a fraction of the people that are homeless in CA, but a great result none the less. Here is an article of just LA. Seems quite out of control compared with Utah. :(
Also what's shocking is that you see plenty of young able people in those tents that could get a job yet decide to stay there. That baffles me. If you have arms, and legs, and you're doing ok in the membrane, then you can find a job in this country.
According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).
which does show 1% for the US. In the notes it says " Data for high-income economies are from the Luxembourg Income Study database." My next stop was there. From http://www.lisdatacenter.org/frontend#/home I found that the source of their data was Current Population Survey (CPS) - Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) (United States). The Current Population survey has a table creator here: https://www.census.gov/cps/data/cpstablecreator.html
Although there is nothing that quite matches the 3.2 million figure cited, the LIS did some harmonization so the most likely ultimate source is the 3.446 million people living in households that were categorized as having "no income" in 2013. This is separate from the 2.775 million people that were categorized as living in households that have "$1 to $2,499 or loss" in income.
I'm very skeptical that this is an appropriate use of this data. The world bank poverty number is supposed to be about consumption--it has to do with people consuming very little in the way of goods and services. But no one at all can live on no goods and services. They'd die of hunger and thirst in far less than a year. It could in theory be the case that millions of Americans were living on less than $1.90/day in consumption but it cannot possibly be the case that millions of Americans are living on $0/day.
To the extent that the figure cited for "no income" means anything (and isn't just noise in the data), it doesn't mean what the world bank means when it says living on $1.90/day.
If the consumption comes from a market, then sure. But during the Depression, millions of rural Americans lived on $0 for years. Kitchen garden, a cow, a pig, some chickens and there you are.
So point is, maybe dollars aren't tracking what we think they're tracking?
The world bank attempts to measure consumption from all sources, not just those that result from market transactions. Which is a very good reason why it is inappropriate to source a number for the US from a survey that doesn't attempt to measure consumption that way.
I understand that the US isn't the primary focus of the project, nor should it be, but in the absence of good data it would be better to put N/A as it did for several other countries, rather than a misleading statistic.
Americans are slowly becoming more radical as a reaction to economic pressures. With each side's policies alien to the other, compromise becomes impossible. Eventually one side will have to win out and then things will get very interesting.
> Eventually one side will have to win out and then things will get very interesting.
Well things are pretty violent already, with the deadly class war the police is fighting against the population (~1k in 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...) plus the countless arrests, macing, tasering and other violent actions of police against peaceful demonstrators, plus all the violence committed by Nazis (e.g. the Heather Heyer murder and the other actions counted as right-wing domestic terrorism). Add in the huge number of weapons circulating in the US... when the poor people (or the armed rednecks) finally feel desperate enough that will be quite a bloodbath.
Police fighting a class war? The vast majority of those 1000 deaths are unambiguously from the justified use of force, in self-defense and the defense of others. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of violent and bad people out there.
There are countless youtube videos of police arresting violent individuals in Europe where they would just be gunned down in the US.
If you want another comparaison, look up dog shooting in the US and in Europe, unless you really believe dogs are somewhat more dangerous in the US, the inescapable conclusion is that American cops enjoy the power trip of gunning down living creatures...
And why shouldn't they, it's almost risk free for them, which is the root of the issue.
Or taking Hanlon's razor, Americian cops have been institutionalised to use force, almost as if they're operating in a country with more guns than citizens (unlike anywhere in Europe, or the world for that matter).
>>The vast majority of those 1000 deaths are unambiguously from the justified use of force
There's two problems with this.
1) if you define "justified use of force" like Americans do, then yeah, of course it's justified, a guy pulling up his pants while being dragged on the ground is now "reaching for a weapon" so an officer is fully justified to shoot him dead. He was practically asking for it, and it shows up as such in all official statistics.
2) It doesn't explain how is it that other countries can get through the entire year without police murdering a single person, despite having the same or worse crime rates as US.
They are not likely armed. Fewer than half of all households have even a single gun. Most of those aren't households where the gun owners carry in public: they're the kind of household where the "responsible gun owner" leaves his kit where the two year old can get it and accidentally shoot his 6 month old sister to death.
It's a problem, agreed. It's not "the" problem. Police in other countries don't have the same problem with individuals they apprehend that are armed. So I'd argue the prevalence of firearms is problematic, but the militarization of our police forces is much more so.
Could we not exaggerate? It doesn't help the discussion.
plus all the violence committed by Nazis (e.g. the Heather Heyer murder and the other actions counted as right-wing domestic terrorism)
"all of the violence", you listed one death. One death is a tragedy, but it's not a massively systematic problem unless we act like it is and turn it into one. You also act like there isn't such a thing as left-wing domestic terrorism. That terrorism killed more people in a single event, 7/7/16, than that nutjob running someone over did. What about the mob of nazis and anti-facists getting into fights in Berkeley? If you're not committed to one of those groups, it's just as bad. It's mob violence either way.
Nazis suck, but please try to be objective. When you frame the argument as you are, you are setting up flamebait. Some nazi will use your exaggerations against you.
> That's evidence of exaggerated rhetoric, which distorts the discussion.
Simply apply this old quote whenever you hear an "alt-righter", a "white nationalist" or a "teabagger" talking, and replace "duck" with "nazi": "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."
It's not exaggerated rhetoric when you call out that the core ideals of these groups equate those of Nazism (or fascism, but the distinction is really nitpicking). It's simply new words for old hate. These groups and their friends and supporters are as dangerous as Hitler was before rising to power!
You're still exaggerating and conflating here. The majority of those deaths (168/250) came from a single incident--the OKC bombing--where neither perpetrator was a Nazi/racial extremist.
Hell, even trying to call the OKC bombing "right wing" might be a stretch. They were anti govt separatists!
It is a problem, but not the way you are exaggerating it to be. You act as if there is a nazi army ready to march on the nation, but that's not happening. We do have pockets of bigots and racists and god knows what else, but they don't have huge bases of support unless we act like they do. Nazis want to feel important, they want people to get riled up and fight them. That's what the actual nazis did.
ordinary Nazi running around and slapping PoC
There are a lot of bigots and racists doing thaT, but unless we're being really loose with the term nazi, we don't actually have that many nazis running around.
Their worst acts were in the mid 1990s (OKC). Hell, in 1999 in Jasper, some racists lynched a man. 1999! Those people have always been around, they always will be around. There's always going to be some number of incidents. That does not mean they have real power nor should people act like they do.
Basically, from what I can tell, nazi is anyone with an opposing viewpoint.
I would also posit the majority of recent political violence is from the Antifa folks who believe they can shutdown their opponents through pure and simple violence.
In fact there was one act of violence attributed to all the "tea party" protests during the Obama era and that was instigated by an anti-tea party person.
For two generations political protests were virtually 100% violence-free until the current crop of kids took to the streets with their anti- trump activities.
The second was definitely political, as he was one of the main organizers of the black panther party. The third occurred less than 60 years ago, or less than two generations.
Well, my mom was in high school in '68 and I'm old enough to be the father of the kids rioting in the streets so we can call that two generations methinks.
There is a sort of folly that makes one overestimate the value they place on something. Imagine a knight who wants to be brave and courageous, whose pursuit of valor takes him to a place where he heard many evil creatures are gathered. So he goes into a starving mongrel's den and attempts to slay the wild beasts. He kills one, strikes another, and the rest get away. He drags the dead one back to the city square where his minstrels sing his praises. He killed one wild animal, that may or may not have hurt anyone, and achieves a great deal of valor, all at very little risk to himself in his shiny armor.
Meanwhile the next town over is being raped and pillaged by bears, lions, pirates and wildfires.
Interesting isn't the word I'd use, but I understand what you mean. I really hope that a third party will start to grow. Whilst it may have benefits, I think the two-party-system feeds a lot into the "with me or against me" concept.
> I really hope that a third party will start to grow.
Third parties don’t thrive in countries with first-past-the-post voting and without a tradition of coalition-making. In order for the USA to reach a point where it could have more than a two-party system, it would have to completely remake its governmental structure, and “very interesting” is an appropriate euphemism for what things would be like if it ever came to that.
This is just an symptom of economic inequality. If you do not belong to the same economic class anymore, then what might make the country better for you, might make the country worst for the other person. There is no way to avoid this.
I don’t understand how this is possible. We have a lot of programs to help people - food assistance, housing and health care assistance, disability... Are these benefits being counted when we say they live on $4/day?
I'm in the East Bay (near SF). I befriended a guy living on the street more than a year ago. He was a machinist in the midwest and was laid off. Because the winters are too brutal there, he came to CA.
He didn't have valid ID and without an address it was difficult for him to get ID, without which the places he could possibly live were inaccessible.
Last fall he finally found a group home, but it was temporary, and he's back on the street again.
The system, as it's designed, is complex and requires mental resources that people living on the street just don't have.
Turns out, I did some research and found he could use the local Post Office as his mailing address for the ID. He went into the PO and the people there didn't want to deal with him. The basically threw him out (this PO has a guard, which is a little odd to me). I offered to go with him to the PO and sort it out, but he was unwilling, even after I made the offer multiple times.
But, the good news is that he ended up walking to the DMV (3+ miles from where I would see him) and he did get his ID. That's why he was able to get into that temporary home last year. It was a huge hurdle for him to get that ID. I can only imagine that anything that requires a lot more effort than that would be beyond his abilities.
I will say, too, that what drew me to him was that he seemed to never ask for money from anyone, but he was often present on the same block when I would walk to/from work. I started up a conversation with him and over time we became friendly, and I would buy him food when he said he needed it. It was clear there were other people helping him (much more than I was), so he often didn't have immediate needs for food. Shelter, though, that's the big issue and when I did Google searches for local shelters it was really hard to find anything I could take to him.
These benefits are inaccessible without a long trip through some really Byzantine application processes where nobody is actually incentivized to help you. These processes ostensibly exist to block freeloaders but they also serve to prevent the needy from accessing the resource too.
I readily critize our grotesque engorged bureaucracy, but getting food stamps isn't difficult, as exibited by the 40+ million people who take advantage of them, and by personal anecdotal evidence.
I think it depends on where you are and how used to using bureaucracy you are. I know people who really struggled to wend their way through the bureaucracy that protects food stamps in order to get them.
It also exists to give indolent, illiterate, innumerate people 'do-good' jobs to get entrenched in, and suck up all the resources, with no accountability.
It's one of the things that has befallen SF, where an industry funded by the city to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars a year, fails to keep a few thousand people off the street.
Those benefits are all pretty severely restricted. They are difficult to apply for (it takes knowledge, time, and work), often they are time limited, or require some sort of proof of your situation that would be difficult to produce. In many states they are now making it so that you have to prove you either have or are actively seeking work of some kind.
Work is difficult to find or even to seek if you're homeless. It's a bit of a catch-22.
Most of these programs require you to be able to clear the bureaucratic hurdles to be eligible for them; welfare reform in the '90s made many welfare programs temporary or added work requirements to them (like TANF, which is "temporary assistance for needy families). This continues today, with the Trump administration allowing states to add a work requirement for Medicaid, which in many cases would then make people ineligible for Medicaid as they would earn too much to qualify, but too little to get Obamacare subsidies for private insurance.
If you don't have a permanent address, up to date ID, and a bank account, and a job, many of these programs may not be available to you.
But I believe these counts do not include welfare programs other than those that give you cash (like Social Security benefits including disability). Other programs offer services or restricted forms of payment, which cannot be used for saving, for purchasing other things you might need like gas or transportation, and so on.
That makes no sense; you can't make "too little" to be subsidized. People making just over the MediCal threshold pay as little as $5/mo in CA, with the other $350-580 being subsidized (they aren't even limited to Bronze policies!).
This happened because the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn't be compelled to expand Medicaid to cover the gap, which the original legislation had depended on to make the plan work. So states which did not expand Medicaid have an income range in which you can't get Medicaid or Obamacare subsidies.
Another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231191 tried to even find the source of the number, more or less unsuccessfully. The purported origin of the statistic is the Current Population Survey, which has the following comments on "Income": "Data on consumer income collected in the CPS by the Census Bureau cover money income received (exclusive of certain money receipts such as capital gains) before payments for personal income taxes, Social Security, union dues, Medicare deductions, etc. Also, money income does not reflect the fact that some households receive part of their income in the form of non-money transfers such as food stamps, health benefits, subsidized housing, and energy assistance; that many farm households receive non-money income in the form of rent free housing and goods produced and consumed on the farm; or that non-money income is received by some nonfarm residents that often takes the form of the use of business transportation and facilities, or full or partial contributions for retirement programs, medical and educational expenses, etc. These elements should be considered when com-paring income levels. Moreover, readers should be aware that for many different reasons there is a tendency in household surveys for respondents to under report their income. From an analysis of independently derived income estimates, it has been determined that wages and salaries tend to be much better reported than such income types as public assistance, Social Security, and net income from interest, dividends, rents, etc."
There are time limits on how long certain benefits can be taken advantage of (and work requirements in certain cases). Housing assistance has long wait lists and federal health care assistance (medicaid/medicare) has a ton of age/health restrictions.
I welcome an absolute definition of poverty. We talk about the richest and poorest quintiles much more often, which is worse than a moving target. There will always be a lowest quintile. The cynic in me thinks this is a job protection program for those working in poverty reduction.
I wish we had more science here. The linked research points to the 1995 welfare reforms as causing a change. The way to prove effectiveness is with a well run trial - one that changes in federal policy make impossible.
Economic growth (or stagnation) is also crucial here to lower poverty rates. But all of macroeconomics suffers from the same basic measurement problem. Restated: what anti poverty program did hundreds of millions of Indian and Chinese families since 1995 participate in?
It's not a poverty problem it's a cost of living problem. Those are two very different things (and becomes more and more severe the poorer you are)
You can't outsource your home to China.
Globalization does not make every day cheaper it just provides more choices and will in aggregate always increase the cost of living.
So as long as your job/income is on the right side of the rise of the cost of living you are fine but if you are on the other side with either no job or poorly paid job or as a freelancer (with no healthcare) then you are in trouble no matter how cheap flatscreen TV become.
There is a big difference between just saying deep poverty and then qualifying what leads to this deep poverty.
Just saying poverty is the cop out here trying to qualify what drives this problem offers at least a way to look at the problem that doesn't end in tax the rich as that will not solve the deep poverty problem.
Meanwhile, in the real world, it is the demand of Capital to grow at %6 a year regardless of the health of the overall economy that is fueling the attacks on the social safety net.
That demand is by design and is the price of a stable economy and is followed by more or less every country in the developed world.
Even in countries like Denmark (which is where I am originally from) and who have high taxes and a high degree of redistribution of wealth, you will find people who are poor and homeless.
Add to that the discussion about relative poverty and you will have a problem that can never be solved unless you give everyone one exactly the same.
I don't see a reason why the U.S. can't in this article. Or did I miss something?
It worked pretty good even when they've been in the open. Recently we had a topic here where people were reporting about homeless people being carried out of the cities.
It seems to me that the U.S. got quite comfortable with their poor. Probably even working as an negative incentive for the (still) employed. Don't forget the American Dream too. I mean according to that: it's just their fault...they COULD have been rich!
I think the end of the article is where the author(s) make the case for looking to help at home as much or more than abroad.
"The U.S." in this case is not the government or institutions, but rather the people who are willing and able to help others, and how the traditional "help poor countries" wisdom should be revisited and perhaps changed to "help poor people".
Germany and Switzerland do also have homeless people. Normalized to the population they're fewer though (about 39'000/80mio population for Germany compared to 550'000/300mio in the US, or 335'000/80mio for germany if you count people who are wohnungslos [=homeless, but sometimes can sleep on a friends couch, a trailer or something])
Additionally low-skill people are hurting here as well and the government makes the issue worse by allowing mass immigration of low skill labor: in 2017 alone 88'000 immigrants from EU-17 countries (a record low figure) arrived, 80% of them are low skill workers. There are many more frontier commuters. Switzerland has 8mio inhabitants out of which 25% are immigrants that have not yet been naturalized. So yeah, for low skill citizens the real wages have not kept up with cost of living (obviously rent prices go up with mass immigration since government doesn't make it easy to build upwards or outwards) and in quite a few places taxes had to be increased to pay welfare for jobless migrants which has lead to quite a bit of discontent among low skill citizens. Saddest thing about this whole thing is probably the mainstream left-wing reaction to the whole issue: they want to increase or keep the current levels of low-skill immigration and at the same time tell low-skill citizens that they're voting against their own interests by voting for a right-wing anti-low-skill immigration party.
What a bogus , Switzerland has 40% foreigners which have immigrated , 30% of those have nowadays a citizenship and passport , read Swiss history before posting such crap!!!
The raw numbers aren't the issue. Switzerland hasn't had decades of sustained mass-immigration of low-skilled workers. The flow of immigrants to Switzerland is nothing like that into the United State.
I know, not all immigrants are low skill. But nearly 25% of Swiss residents do not have a Swiss passport. (Even if you account for the difficulty of the naturalization process, that is a lot)
Mmmh, they say they adjust the poverty threshold based on actual needs, yet they use a single $4 threshold for the whole of the US, and the whole of Europe...
And then they're not critical about their methodology when it consistently shows that warmer countries have a larger chunk of the population that is very poor.
Perhaps it's easier to live on $4 in Spain than it is in Denmark. And perhaps it's easier to live on $4 in California than it is in Michigan...
When it comes to extreme poverty anyway, we're looking at the very tail of the bell curves, so the stats are somewhat shady there. It's not very clean to compare tail stats between countries.
The thing that can be compared is the evolution of these numbers over time. If in the US more and more people are living with less than $4 a day, that is concerning.
It seems it can, from behind it's gated content community
In all honesty, though, I'd love to hear some stories from any social workers here as to their beliefs are regarding the extreme lows of poverty and maybe fix it.
I think we've all heard that we should change drug policy, expand government service for mental health and treatment, but does anyone have any other we don't normally hear about?
Poverty is not a problem. It is the default state. Instead of asking what causes poverty, we need to ask what causes wealth. We also need to realize that being poor is not a good/bad thing. Again, it's the default state.
This is a silly line of reasoning. As more people grow wealthy, we find more ways to systematically mistreat those who have not. It's not just that the poor started poor and stayed that way, it's that the rest of us find ways to make things even harder for them as our comparative wealth grows. Being poor is most definitely a bad thing.
While I agree that all other things being equal, it's certainly better to not be poor, the reasoning seems pretty clever. It changes to focus, stopping us from looking for events or circumstances that cause a person to be poor and instead tries to identify what it is we as a society can do or provide a person with allowing that person start building wealth.
The fact remains that everyone starts with nothing. The parent questions why some are able to flourish, while others continue with nothing indefinitely.
People start with extremely unequal circumstances. Social mobility is low and those born with wealth will keep it and those born without are unlikely to ever attain it. This platonic ideal where everyone starts on equal footing and some people are just better than others at accumulating wealth is absurd.
It would be interesting to see a real life Trading Places and see how well the unwealthy do given a wealthy lifestyle. Or can we just look at lottery winners?
I think the point is being missed here. In an inherent sense, humans start with nothing.
We (as a society) have hospitals available which greatly decrease infant mortality. We have widely available nutrition that keeps people from starving. These are steps that we, as a society, have taken to improve upon the default state (having nothing) of humans--including fetal health. Perhaps rather than focusing on how to make people in poverty more comfortable, we should focus on how to get them out of poverty.
That's not the same as claiming all people start on a level playing field.
In no sense do people start off with nothing. People start off with the abilities or lack thereof possessed at birth. Compare a child with fetal alcohol syndrome with one without it. Do both start off with nothing? No. Clearly one has something the other does not.
Of course individuals have different abilities. You're missing the point.
The claim is societal. We (as humans) started out with nothing. Over thousands of years, we built religions, governments, businesses, laws, science, and everything else, which ultimately resulted in a lot of us having a lot better quality of life. But our default state (as humans) is to have nothing. That some people are still in poverty shouldn't be seen like a disease to be treated--it should be seen as a condition all humans effectively default to. They just haven't benefited from all the systems and processes we've built that the rest of us have, and we should figure out how to get them to (or modify our systems so they do).
Again: This is in no way claiming each person starts on a level playing field.
Yeah, no. How can you claim we started off with nothing yet say over thousands of years we built things? Clearly we started off with something. You should be more precise in your language.
If you change "nothing", with "no possessions, talents, abilities, or skills", which is the same thing, then you'll see why what you're saying is illogical.
> Yeah, no. How can you claim we started off with nothing yet say over thousands of years we built things?
I'm not sure how to respond to this. Have you read a history book? At one point humans were in caves, with effectively no possessions and terrible lives. That was poverty, and it affected everyone. Whether or not one cave man was born smarter than the other is irrelevant.
Over time, we developed all of these systems that made life better for the vast majority of us, yet some of us still live in poverty, because the default human state is to have nothing. That in no way implies a level playing field among two different people born today.
> If you change "nothing", with "no possessions, talents, abilities, or skills", which is the same thing, then you'll see why what you're saying is illogical.
You're still missing the point. I don't know how I can rephrase this in a way that won't be intentionally misinterpreted.
This discussion is specially about wealth. Fetal alcohol syndrome is not usually added as a liability on a balance sheet, even if it is liability to everyday living. Everyone starts with a balance of $0.
> Why do people insist on believing nonsense?
Why are people trying to twist this discussion into things it never was?
Nothing is being twisted. If what you mean is that two babies have the same amount of money in their bank accounts, then that's what you should say. Of course, if one said that they would be ignored as that much is obvious.
What you should not say is that "they both start off with nothing". Wealth is more than money. In fact, wealth literally just means an abundance of possessions; prosperity. What dictionary are you using that says wealth is only measured by dollars in a bank account?
By the way, the article specifically mentions health, so...
> If what you mean is that two babies have the same amount of money in their bank accounts, then that's what you should say.
But wealth isn't an amount in a bank account? Given the earlier context of this thread, I felt my comment should have been clear enough, but granted textual communication can be difficult (especially for emotional topics where many have their response composed well in advance) and clearly I failed. I tried to clarify it on several other occasions before you commented, so any errors in conveying my original message should have been resolved before you posted yours, no?
> Wealth is more than money
Money being only a tool of measurement, I think that is a given. But that is like saying that the weather is more than temperature. Sure, but what are we supposed to take from that?
Given that we're talking about wealth – something that you measure on a balance sheet – is fetal health something that should be included? My experience with accounting says no, but I'm not a professional accountant. Perhaps you have misunderstood this discussion?
While I understand how the health of the fetus relates to poverty, I fail to see how that has anything to do with this particular discussion? We are talking about how everyone starts with nothing. The balance sheet of all brand new people to world always starts empty.
You're missing the point. Saying everyone starts off with a blank slate is like saying everyone born starts off alive. It's a useless statement. The point is that the quality of life upon birth is different. Said qualities result in the discrepancies you see today.
EDIT:
Furthermore, originally you stated:
> The fact remains that everyone starts with nothing
It's already been illustrated this is false. If you believe quality of life at birth is different, then by definition, everyone does not start off with nothing, or zero. People start off with the qualities possessed at birth.
Technically, I made the point. I'm not sure how I can miss my own point? Granted, I may have poorly phrased it leading to others missing the point, which is my bad, but if you're not going to try and let me clarify, I'm not sure what we're doing here?
> The point is that the quality of life upon birth is different.
Sure. I cannot disagree with that, but it's miles away from this conversation.
> It's already been illustrated this is false.
I'm afraid I still don't see it. That point was made in reference to earlier discussion specifically about wealth (again, something you measure on a balance sheet, not factors like fetal health). Their parents might have wealth that can be transferred to the child, but that is not the same as starting with wealth.
I struggle to see what is inherently bestowed upon a new born child beyond life itself? The child may eventually be given things, but that's not the same thing as what we are talking about. Some examples of how it is clearly wrong would be useful, because there is nothing clear about it to me.
If the question is "why some are able to flourish, while others continue with nothing indefinitely", then the fact that some children are given $millions in liquid assets where others are lucky to be given food and clothing would certainly seen germane.
But that is outside what someone starts with. When a child is born, those millions will be originally held in the same of someone else (perhaps the parents, grandparents, whoever). It may be transferred to the child, but it remains that the child started with nothing.
On the question of why some flourish and others do not, I think you're just echoing the point that has persisted through this entire thread.
>The fact remains that everyone starts with nothing. The parent questions why some are able to flourish, while others continue with nothing indefinitely.
This is your entire statement. If you're wondering why some are able to flourish while others aren't, getting hung up on the technicalities of a pointless statement is a poor start. We know that people are born under various circumstances ranging from remarkably poor to exceptionally rich, and we know that's the best indicator of future wealth. Yes, they have to inherit the money at some point, but they grow up experiencing the benefits (and drawbacks) of that wealth - whether or not it's in their names.
Health of mother - Advantage.
Mother being able to take care of child in the early years - Advantage.
Dad present - Advantage.
Encouraging, safe home environment - Advantage.
Parents that expect and encourage excellence (sports, academic) - Advantage.
Never going hungry - Advantage.
Going to schools with resources and good teachers - Advantage.
Going to good college - Advantage.
Parents connections (business and academic) - Advantage.
These advantages compound.
There will be outliers with none or only some of this who still happen to make it. They are not common, and not proof that the system works as intended.
Unless you are asserting that estate taxes are 100% for everyone and no one is allowed any hint of nepotism or gifting, you are wrong. How do the 1% stay the 1% across generations?
The transfer of wealth through generations is wealth that is still held in family name until the time that it is given to the child. The child still starts with none. Ownership is not automatic in our society. It has to be transferred.
Ok, fine. They still have to inherit that money. But as they grow up, the rich baby will have access to better nutrition, better education, a less stressful environment, etc compared to the poor baby. That's without considering fetal health/nutrition. There are many known factors that can affect a child's health, growth, and intelligence, and therefore success.
I don't think the distinction of "babies have $0" is relevant when considering all the other potential advantages. What are you getting at with that claim? I don't think it's particularly clear, judging by the other replies.
He suffers from the affliction, that, having mastered programming, all other domains of human endeavour must be as reducible to simple logical constructs, and the world just needs him, to come and show how simple it really is.
It’s crazy how many think they have a monopoly on intelligence by virtue of being able to tell the machine what to do.
A logical statement in isolation is seen as sufficient to win arguments (like “babies have no money at birth”).
Wow, thanks Socrates, now I see the light. The scales have fallen from my eyes.
> Infants starving is not a problem. It is the default state. Instead of asking why infants starve when they aren't fed, we need to ask why adults eat. We also need to realize that infants starving is not a good/bad thing. Again, it's the default state.
The default state is that of a subsistence farmer being regularly preyed on by bandits. Without society, without the apparatus and knowledge bequeathed to us by those who came before us, that would be the fate of everybody, including Bill Gates.
We get our wealth by standing on the shoulders of giants. The poor deserve the fruits of the labors of those giants just as much as the rest of us do.
I am not sure what we should take from your statement.
Let's go one step further and declare that being dead is the default state. The time when we live is so short compared to the time we are not born yet or dead that it is insignificant.
Poverty is definitely a problem. Having to choose between eating and running the heater on a cold night is not a “default state” in the US, nor should it be anywhere else. I’ve personally had enough of those nights and experienced the gaumut of unpleasantries when living on $40 per day in a temperate (albeit more expensive) city, both when growing up and again during the downturn as a freshly minted adult.
I can’t imagine how much worse the people in the articles have it at 1/10th the income in a harsher climate.
Being the default doesn't make it not a problem. In fact, poverty being the default is a problem in itself. I'd prefer it if the default were not having to worry about the future, and I think most poor people would agree.
I think being not poor and not worrying about the future is a bit contradictory for everyone except the very small part of top 1% who are independently wealthy. Probably under 0.1%.
Poverty is a stable, default state, everything else requires constant effort and standing the competition.
I'm not sure what you meant by standing, but while competition may be a requirement for generating and amassing greater wealth, it's not a requirement to keep people from poverty.
If you mean that we should do away with wealth, then yes I agree we should "figure out what causes wealth" even though I'm sure we already have a small idea, at least!
I think a lot of Star Trek fans share this fantasy... but what makes it impossible?
There is no 'default' state, poverty or not and being poor is definitely bad. Think like this: if we could make everyone not poor tomorrow, would that be a good thing? Of course (holding all else the same.)
The most bizarre aspect of it is that the very same people that lament that fact, are also the ones who support all its causes and throw the most violent tantrums to scuttle improving the situation. We have tried it their way for decade after decade after decade, and the astronomical cost has only led to barely measurable improvements at wild cost/benefit ratios, while being unsustainable on their own essentially everywhere those measures are not artificially scaffolded and have heavy layers of spin and blatant propaganda lies applied to it.
Maybe the worst part of it is that those very people don't even understand that they are doing any of that because they have been manipulated and lied to about both the causes and solutions as they have ever increasingly been drawn into a cult in which up is down, left is right, and only the con job leaders benefit from it. When you have fixed, preconceived notions about outcomes, don't be surprised that you cannot achieve them with the existing variables. You end up having to bend and manipulate and rig and patch things ever increasingly and more bizarrely in order to maintain the desired end state or outcome that the system becomes ever more unstable and fragile. See the mid aughts housing fraud, aka, housing bubble for reference. The conclusion was that house prices can only go up, so everything was subsequently rigged through self-perpetuating incentives to support that fixed assumed outcome. Precisely what keeps us repeatedly doing the things that have no effect on the desired outcome. But at least it supports a huge non-profit industry complex that perpetuates itself under the guise of "helping" .... itself to your money.
It's quite frustrating that in spite of the truth and solution being right before our eyes, because truth and reality is too inconvenient and difficult and uncomfortable because it does not fit with preconceived conclusions and assumptions, we simply want to ignore reality and substituted our own. And so goes the perpetual poverty "problem" that we are seeking "solutions" for. Organizations can't even move away from Microsoft products simply because they get money from the Gates foundation ... and we want to solve poverty? It's a bad joke.
As someone has said, our "help" and development money is taking money from poor American children, in order to give it to rich Africans ... who then scurry it away into offshore bank accounts.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the U.S. immigration policy (or lack thereof) bears a signification part of the blame here.
Why in the face of globalization (and now increased automation) the U.S. continues to have an effectively open-door policy to low-skill workers makes no sense at all.
As a U.S. citizen, I'd like to see a return to the temporary moratorium that existed until the mid 1960s (say 10 to 15 years) on most immigration beyond high-skill (however that is defined) and an end to "chain migration" in which entire families are allowed to immigrate regardless of most other factors.
I think it would be hypocritical at best, given America's history and current position to take such a stance. Surely the right thing to do is not to be scared of the immigration bogeyman and take some concrete steps towards the future, rather than closing the door and pretending things will get better by itself. It won't.
If you want to comfort yourself in a nice blanket of blame, go ahead and blame the immigrants rather than the people in power who have actually caused this.
That's from a poem tacked onto the Statue of Liberty in 1903, not U.S. law or policy. People quote that as if it's from the preamble to the constitution or something...
Mass immigration made sense when the U.S. was a manufacturing colossus, no longer. Immigration should be targeted and far lower than it is now.
Well it was also written specifically for the statue of liberty, and was 'tacked on' to it, not even 20 years after it was dedicated for a reason. Because that's literally what the statue represents.
It's kind of sad to see a nation built by, from and for poor immigrants completely forget their origins.
People haven't forgotten their origins at all; in fact most people are probably too overly proud of them.
But times also change. What may have made sense in 1903 may be detrimental to the descendants of those immigrants today. I believe we should have a sharp but temporary reduction in most immigration today to see if it benefits the lowest wage earners in the U.S. It's an easy policy to reverse if it doesn't.
It's funny. Years ago I wanted to move to the US, but I hadn't a chance. I have a degree and masters and years work but beyond getting an American company to sponsor me, no joy. I've moved on now. But I have a friend (again degree and masters) who enters for the Green Card lottery every year, he has no chance. I keep hearing yanks saying that immigration is a problem and I'm wondering why it's so hard for us!
Globalization is super nice when you're secure in your job, "hey everything is getting cheaper!" but when your job is the one in the crosshairs what you're feeling is a pressure that is pushing the living standard of the third world and yours together. That's why I find it so annoying that this board is usually against abundant H1B's but for factory outsourcing. It's completely hypocritical.
And before I get jumped on, no I'm not against all trade. What I'm for however is noting that people don't live in the long-term, economically we are firmly short-term creatures. Good policy won't give everything up for the long-term, it will also protect people in the short-term, we don't need an end to trade, we need a curtailing of some trade.