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▲ serioussecurity 4 hours ago

Always the weak blame the immigrants and then vote for the robber barons against their own interests.

▲rayiner 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is nothing "weak" about standing up for your own economic interests. The H1B program has largely been based on a fiction--using a handful of superstars as marketing cover for tens of thousands of mid-skill developers. But with AI now coming for everyone's job the pretext of a "skills shortage" is unsustainable.

▲teiferer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Mid-skill developers? It's now become common to just contract out dev work to folks in Eastern Europe, for example. There are exceptional people there. And it's now really hard to get them to the U.S. so instead of having them pay taxes in the U.S. and spend their wages in the U.S. and maybe found their own startups and thereby grow the U.S. economy, they just do all that in their home country.

All that immigrant hate is so short sighted, it's hard to believe that you think that's actually in your own interest. Both common sense and history disagree with you.

(Though I admit that xenophobia has evolved in ancient human societies for good reasons. No reason to not realize it's bad though, not just morally but economically too. Very suitable for populism though, clearly.)

▲rayiner 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Immigration implicates economic and cultural issues, trying to reframe them as being about "hate" or "fear" is misdirection. When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.

Similarly, dismissing the concerns as "short sighted" is just ignorant of history. Plato was thinking about the challenges of reconciling immigration with democracy 2,000 years ago. Alexander Hamilton presaged the destabilizing effects of immigration on democracy at the inception of the U.S. https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2016/12/21/hamiltons-actual-vie...

▲kraken_cult 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think that's what's happening here. It's pretty clear importing thousands (10s of thousands?) people into an area has an effect on the local residents that's not good.

▲sleepyguy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These aren't immigrants.

▲bravoetch 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think that's their point - the subjects of the article should be working instead of hiking. But someone with an H1B visa, yet lacking any special skills, has a job instead of them.

I don't agree with their premise, just restating it.