I spent the last 15 years trying to become an American and failed

Its a cute fact that you and the hiring manager were both lucky enough to have parents who lived in the U.S. when you were born, but that doesn't make you a better or more worthy person than someone born in a poorer country. (You already have access to a stronger social safety in the form of unemployment, social security, subsidized healthy insurance, etc if you find yourself unable to compete with foreign talent.)

The idea that some people should be considered more worthy than others by our society just because of where they were born or who there parents are is the definition of xenophobia and racism.

You should read up on the literature on brain drain. In addition to your comment being morally abhorrent ("people born in poor countries should be forced to stay there and fix shit so people born in rich countries don't have to deal with it") its also not well supported by the facts. Giving people the chance to get high returns from their education incentivizes a much larger group of people to invest in their education than end up leaving the country.

Given that the same worker ends up making 2-3x in a developed country what they would with their exact same skills in a poorer country and ends up sending much of that extra money back in the form of remittances, immigration is generally a positive force for those "left behind" (not to mention those who immigrate).

So you obviously deserve to come here, while the people living on $1 a day in extreme poverty and under oppressive regimes, they should be kept out? No, you didn't say all that, but I'm passionate about the cause of open borders (http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/the_efficient_e...., http://www.openborders.info), and I can tell you a lot of Americans think exactly that way - they have a poor understanding of economics and they imagine that importing relatively unskilled laborers into our country would somehow 'taint' or bring down our economy toward their levels of poverty. (See here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/always_keep_you.... if you have yet to be disabused of this fallacy.) And your suggestion that you should be allowed in because of your degrees is suggestive of that kind of broken thinking. Productivity is the root of societal prosperity. And labor, whether skilled or unskilled -- in fact, especially unskilled labor -- is able to be much more productive when allowed to move to the first world. That extra productivity benefits everyone. Economists estimate, on average, that a move from the status quo to fully liberalized migration (open borders) would result in a DOUBLING OF GLOBAL GDP. That's an INSANE silver bullet.

And most of those gains would go to the extreme poor: in fact, it would be by far the most effective step we could take to reduce extreme poverty - which a lot of people don't realize is the single worst humanitarian crisis of all time, killing ~10 million people per year, a higher rate than WWII, which was the deadliest war ever. Open border should be foremost on every smart, informed, ethical person's mind, and it's a crying shame that it isn't. Instead you see people whining about the plight of 1st-world Uber drivers and middle class Americans and not being able to stay in the US with their Ivy League degrees. Spoiler alert: all those people are crazy rich relative to the extreme poor. There are ~1 billion people, 1/7th of the world's population, living in extreme poverty, which is defined as making less than $1.25 per day. That's PER DAY, NOT PER HOUR. They are literally starving, malnourished, have no clean water, no education - they have practically nothing. So unless you can show me evidence that you've spent many hours worrying about open borders and the extreme poor, screw your first world problem.

And by the way, I'm a rich american with an Ivy League degree myself, so this is not coming from a place of ivy-envy or anything. I've just spent a lot of time reading and thinking about open borders and the state of the world and I'm disappointed in my fellow educated first worlders that they're so oblivious, apathetic, uncaring, so this gets me angry.

Please see my other comments in this thread for more of my thoughts.

Great links: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/01/sitting_on_an_o.... https://vimeo.com/15000835 http://www.bottombillionfund.org/extreme_poverty.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/debunking-the-myt... http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/if-... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/the_efficient_e.... http://www.openborders.info

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9769632