Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 615 posts

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

#571

Post by dragonwriter »

ericdschmidt wrote: post #528
dragonwriter wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another frequently-cited benefit of opened borders is that -- for the most part -- current citizens own everything in this country This is not true. Very many things in this country are owned by entities that are not citizens -- foreign corporations and/or foreign individuals. > and stand to make a bit of cash if there's an influx of new faces looking to buy houses, used cars, rent rooms, etc etc etc. Sure, some pe…

Productivity is the root of all prosperity. First read this excellent article: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/always_keep_you.... . Workers become on average ~20x more productive when they migrate to the first world. Because we are capital rich and we have sane government and law and order. Imagine if you were moved to Haiti and you got stuck there. How much could you contribute to society in Haiti? You…

You make the all too common mistake of confusing aggregate output growth with everyone getting richer. That's not a valid equivalence, as the 2001-2009 economic expansion in the US showed fairly dramatically, with the bottom three quintiles doing worse over the period of expansion, the fourth quintile mostly flat, and most of the gains in the to quintile (and, within that quintile, mostly in the top few percentiles.)

Aggregate growth doesn't mean everyone gets more; we have a system in which the major holders of capital are very good at capturing output growth.

Policies favoring aggregate growth aren't good for most people without policy reform that alters the way gains from such growth end up being distributed.

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

#572

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hudibras wrote: post #442
yellowapple wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should give at least some semblance of a reason why "productivity growth" prevents pensions from being pyramid schemes instead of implicitly dismissing the parent commenter's remark as irrational discussion.

There are a lot of lazy scare tactics that pension opponents use. The parent commenter's use of "pyramid scheme" means that he or she is trotting out some variation of the argument that current benefits for retirees are paid by current employees, that in 1940 there were 30 workers for every one retiree but it'll someday be 2:1, etc. etc. "Productivity growth" is my admittedly lazy shorthand for "You cannot ignore the…

OK, so productivity increases and in 100 years 1 worker's production can support 100 retirees. How? They create stuff using natural resources. That stuff gets sold, who is buying it now that 99/100 people are out of work? How are those 99/100 going to pay in to a pension?

Oh right of course, new areas of industry develop so now all 100 people are still employed and they're producing enough stuff for 10,000 people. But that means they have to also be consuming 100 times what they did. Where is the energy coming from, where are the resources coming from to make this stuff?

Isn't it really the case that improved productivity gets to benefit the wealthy disproportionately - suppose in 60 years a worker can produce 2.4 times more output and thus support 2.4 times more retirees. That's not how it works financially, the worker gets paid maybe enough to support 1.5 times more [through taxation] and the other output increase goes to benefit the wealthy capitalist. Regardless population has tripled in the last 60 years [Wikipedia figures].

In practice state pensions in my country [UK] are reduced year on year and recently pension ages have been increased.

It sounds like you're banking on a sudden reversal of global population growth (the best case scenario of UN statistics shows continued growth for at least a couple more decades; their "best guess" is continued growth until at least 2100).

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

#573

Post by tripzilch »

yellowapple wrote: post #413
yetanotheracc wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I have your apartment when you leave?

Sure, if you don't mind living in a place where cost of living is inflated to Bay Area levels.

That's mainly a problem for people that can't look further than Amsterdam. Which is not by far the nicest place to live (or visit) in the Netherlands, anyway. It's not the worst place (that's Emmeloord), but randomly picking another spot won't hurt.

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

#574

Post by eli_gottlieb »

murbard2 wrote: post #112
geebee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance you'd be willing to write a bit more about your support for open borders? In particular, I'm interested in knowing whether you think this is a situation where it would be both moral and beneficial, or if you feel that it is simply wrong to limit where people can live and work based on where they were born (or even where their grandparents were born) even if the overall effect on current citizens of some re…

It's a very tough question to answer because it's very hard to predict. I have some model of the general effects of allowing greater immigration, but the predictive value of the model breaks down the more radical the change. - I see letting in anyone with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree (or say anyone that anyone is willing to hire for more $40k a year) as basically having no downsides at all. Empirical data on…

And what if we don't consider having policies created and selected by a wealthy elite to be a good thing, and actually want the will of the masses to make policy? Or, in other words, what if we actually prefer democracy over plutocracy?

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

#575

Post by dagw »

tripzilch wrote: post #573
yellowapple wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you don't mind living in a place where cost of living is inflated to Bay Area levels.

That's mainly a problem for people that can't look further than Amsterdam. Which is not by far the nicest place to live (or visit) in the Netherlands, anyway. It's not the worst place (that's Emmeloord), but randomly picking another spot won't hurt.

Any recommendations? Based on the little I've seen of the country I'd say Rotterdam is my favorite place to visit, but if I was moving there I'd probably settle on Utrecht

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

#576

Post by tripzilch »

dagw wrote: post #575
tripzilch wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mainly a problem for people that can't look further than Amsterdam. Which is not by far the nicest place to live (or visit) in the Netherlands, anyway. It's not the worst place (that's Emmeloord), but randomly picking another spot won't hurt.

Any recommendations? Based on the little I've seen of the country I'd say Rotterdam is my favorite place to visit, but if I was moving there I'd probably settle on Utrecht

Utrecht is indeed great and really pretty. It's where I usually take people visiting NL, cause I always feel like a tourist myself when in Amsterdam, plus it's only 15-20 minutes by train.

Rotterdam is so huge that it really depends where you look :) I've heard an equal amount of love and hate stories :)

And other recommendations ... as I try to think of some, I realize it's pretty much a list of the rest of medium-large cities in the Netherlands. Unless you don't like cities, in which case maybe check out a tourist or bicycle guide. Try the province of Friesland for some real pretty non-city places? But there's so many others, just pick a spot, any spot, then Google it. The Netherlands isn't that big ;-)

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

#577

Post by eli_gottlieb »

ericdschmidt wrote: post #506
sigzero wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A problem being, if you open the door, you don't control who comes through. I am totally against an open borders policy.

Uh, you can get smuggled into the US via the Mexican borders for like a couple thousand bucks. There's a whole industry around this. The people who do the smuggling are called 'coyotes". Any serious terrorist is already here, via that border. Also, so what if anyone can come and go. You live in a town or city, right? So the adjacent towns, they let you just waltz in and out of them right? They "don't control who come…

So under open-borders policies, how do you control the spread of epidemic diseases? How are quarantines imposed?

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

#578

Post by Spoom »

bradleyjg wrote: post #221
Spoom wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/obligations-affidavit-su... - This details at least one court case of USCIS enforcing an Affidavit of Support, and was literally the first Google result on which I clicked. They do mention that it's rare, but it happens.

No, that's an immigrant enforcing the affidavit of support as a third party beneficiary against the sponsor, I've heard of cases like that, though they are relatively rare. What I was talking about was where a government agency sues to recoup funds when a beneficiary uses in a means tested program. That I've never seen and google doesn't seem to come up with any examples.

Fair enough.

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

#579

Post by winter_blue »

protomyth wrote: post #566
winter_blue wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just like to address your last point: > I cannot imagine why we don't have a system for taking students who come to this country to be educated in college and give them a work visa not tied to a company. This exists already. It's called "F-1 OPT". It allows students to work in the field of their major for 12 months normally, but if they had a STEM major, for 29 months. > I wonder why we don't allow a pool of skil…

> This exists already. It's called "F-1 OPT". By all accounts, it doesn't work worth a crud in its current form. > That's what the H1B is. My friends on H1B's couldn't switch jobs freely. H1B transfers are just trading indentured servants and not a good thing for freedom of the person. > Also your pining for work visas to be "abolished" without offering a meaningful alternative is equivalent to pining for no skilled…

> By all accounts, it doesn't work worth a crud in its current form.

You insist that F-1 OPT "doesn't work", but you the fail to give the slightest explanation as to why.

OPT allows students to work a certain amount of time after they graduate, and most students cherish being allowed to do so. After OPT expires, they have to go through the H1B lottery. You can start a startup (i.e. be self-employed) on OPT, so it's actually less restrictive than the H1B.

I'm not saying that any of the work visas / work authorizations in the U.S. are perfect and without flaw. Far from it. Ideally, it would be good if students were allowed to transition to permanent residency after their graduation. But OPT helps a lot of international students, and it isn't fair of you criticize it without explanation. It is arrogant and asshole-like of you to do so.

> My friends on H1B's couldn't switch jobs freely.

Ask them why.

Nothing prevents a person on H1B holder from moving to another employer that sponsors H1Bs. Practically every company in tech is willing to do a transfer, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to switch. A transfer costs a company at most $4000 in total (application fees, attorney fees) which is not much if you're paying the individual $100k+/year.

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

#580

Post by scott_s »

ojbyrne wrote: post #418
scott_s wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that some employers treat green card sponsorship similar to a bonus: if you leave before z years after getting the green card, you owe them $x0,000.

Pretty sure that's illegal.

I sincerely doubt it, since the companies I've heard of that do it are large multinationals. As I point out below, it's much the same as a signing bonus or moving expenses.
Post reply on HN