I don't think exceptions or confined bad side effects make for very good arguments against general policy. You wouldn't ban planes, because sometimes they crash. This isn't math. We're not proving that a rule holds for every element of the domain.

The US and the UK have the unique situation of backing themselves into national ID requirements without ever actually issuing national ID, which makes for stupid outcomes.

Was just reading that headline the other day. Economic darling Japan emerges from the Lost Decades with perfect banking policy.

It seems predictable that people on a mostly English-speaking forum will be most concerned with stuff that the US and UK are doing.

And most HN users bashing the practice will defend the practice when another country does it.

Not just Japan. Stats are pretty miserable across the developed world.

The main reason for demographic decline and low fertility is liberal consumerism. Liberal consumerism is the religion of the developed world, and like all religions, it is a worldview that shapes one's understanding of what life is about. Consumerism's implicit anthropology is hostile to fertility, because fertility is at odds with the consumerist imperative. It also shapes how people view relationships and society. Consumerism is totalizing and produces a culture that smothers everything in the logic of consumerism.

Immigration is just an extractive and parasitic bandage over a gangrenous limb. The solution is to destroy consumerism and replaced with something better and more human. This will happen sooner or later, as consumerist societies will be eradicated through selective pressure (they'll go extinct), but it is better to voluntarily wage a religious, cultural, and political war against consumerism to save these societies.

Japan continues to have an HDI comparable to similarly sized France [0] despite having almost double it's GDP and a median age comparable to both Germany and Italy, and a TFR comparable to other European states [1].

It is also able to field a navy and armed forces that is independently able to hold off against China. Meanwhile, look at Europe and how it's managed the Ukraine Crisis.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...

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> Any policy that suddenly pulls the rug on them is notable precisely because we created the problem

Are you saying that it is wrong to ever solve a problem quickly, if you are the one who created it?

More accurately, half the country wants a deliberately lax approach to visa overstays and illegal border crossings, and the other half doesn't. Right now radicalized anti-immigrationists are in poltical power and they are going hard in the direction of anti-immigrant policies, under the expectation that the pro-immigration party might win the next election and attempt to reverse those policies.

Neither of the two countries I’ve opened bank accounts in, the UK and Finland, have a free form of ID available for their citizens (and absolutely not for immigrants!), and yet the banks have certainly wanted to be sure of my citizenship and status.