Immigration System May Have Reached a Breaking Point

[Lurker1]

The wall is never happening atleast hes dream wall you can't force them to pay for it thats silly.

[Skroe]

That involved conquest and genocide as a point of fact.

More counterfactual nonsense.

My grandfather on one side arrived here just after World War II. My ancestors on another side arrived here in the 1880s. This is typical of Americans of non-English, non-Colonial descent. This includes the hundreds of millions of German Americans, Italian Americans, Irish Americans and Americans of Eastern European and Asian descent.

The Genocide you speak of, which culminated with the American Indian Wars, largely concluded by the 1850s. But "the American-British Colonial stage of it, which includes atrocities like the trail of tears was the tail end. Most of the Genocide was committed by the Spanish two centuries earlier, when the population of the Americas fell by 95% by 1690, mostly due to infectious disease.

So to hold American immigrants who arrived here decades or centuries later, responsible for something that other people did, is outrageous. Modern international legal norms hold that individuals are not responsible for the crimes of their family, their fore-bearers, their tribe, their race or their nation. Collective responsibility of criminal behavior is generally shunned too, with the major modern exception being holding the populations of Germany and Japan broadly responsible for World War II.

My forbearers, like most Americans for-bearers, arrived here seeking a better life, on a boat, from Europe. And they did it long, long after other people, other countries comitted atrocities.

This is a far more serious response than your point deserved. But you're mostly just looking for a reaction, which is why you said it. Another day of bad faith posting and provocateuring to find purpose in your so-called life. You should really be able to change your title from "The Insane" (hah) to "Known Quantity".

[Spectral]

People are immigrating here for the promise of riches, the same as the conquistadors who came seeking El Dorado. Has anyone ever proved people come here for "the values" or "the society"? People come here largely out of pure avarice.

My impression (although I haven't engaged in a deep or careful review of literature) is that immigrants tend to import their culture and values to some significant extent. Garrett Jones summarizes here:

So, how do migrants change the governments in countries they move to? For a partial answer, we can look at the Attitude Migration literature. The simplest approach is to see if the descendants of, say, Italian migrants to America tend to have the same attitudes toward government as Italians living back in Italy. If they do have similar attitudes, then there really is such a thing as “Italian attitudes toward government,” portable and relatively durable around the globe.

Since public opinion surveys are common around the world, this is an easy topic to investigate. One study looks at attitudes toward income redistribution, finding that second-generation immigrants to the U.S. are more likely to favor income redistribution policies if they come from a country where the average citizen today also favors more redistribution. In this case, attitudes migrate, so heavy immigration from pro-redistribution cultures will tend to boost a nation’s number of pro-redistribution citizens decades later. More importantly, the same holds for trusting behavior: A study published in the American Economic Review, provocatively entitled “Inherited Trust and Growth,” finds that

…inherited trust of descendants of US-immigrants is significantly influenced by the country of origin…of their forbears…

More importantly (I think) is the data regarding attitudes on trust and impact on local trust.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

So to hold American immigrants who arrived here decades or centuries later, responsible for something that other people did, is outrageous. Modern international legal norms hold that individuals are not responsible for the crimes of their family, their fore-bearers, their tribe, their race or their nation. Collective responsibility of criminal behavior is generally shunned too, with the major modern exception being holding the populations of Germany and Japan broadly responsible for World War II.

My forbearers, like most Americans for-bearers, arrived here seeking a better life, on a boat, from Europe. And they did it long, long after other people, other countries comitted atrocities.

I read the comment as more of a broad statement that Americans of European descent who came here after benefited from the situation as it existed in a now (relatively) empty continent but that aspect tends to get overlooked if not denied by certain people. Most of my ancestors arrived after (excluding obviously my 1/16th Native American) but I'm not going to pretend that they didn't benefit in some way from the realities of what came before.

[Skroe]

I read the comment as more of a broad statement that Americans of European descent who came here after benefited from the situation as it existed in a now (relatively) empty continent but that aspect tends to get overlooked if not denied by certain people. Most of my ancestors arrived after (excluding obviously my 1/16th Native American) but I'm not going to pretend that they didn't benefit in some way from the realities of what came before.

So what? This land should be empty forever? When is the temporal cutoff that people shouldn't be in some way responsible or at least feel some kind of societal remorse, for what their ancestors or people who were just in the area first, happened to do? Saying "Oh it was the Americas and let's say around 1492" Is an entirely arbitrary metric.

Should citizens of the UK of Anglo-Saxon descent feel some kind of remorse for what their Germanic ancestors did to the Celtic peoples who were the original inhabitants of the British Isles? Or what about the displacements of people of Roman descent across Europe when the Germanic tripes swept down? Or hell, let's go back all the way and condemn people European descent for pushing out the original owners of the European continent, the Neanderthal. What's ranked above genocide when you actually wipe out an entire species of Homo? Why limit it to Europe. Shall we condemn the Wajin (ethnic Japanese) for their 1100 year decimation of the Ainu people, the original inhabitants of half the Japanese Archipelago?

You see? It's an intrinsically ridiculous argument. The history of the world is, in short, people taking land from one and other, settling down, then their civilization changing before the cycle repeats itself again. Hell it is happening right now in Xinjiang. The ethnic-Han Chinese Communist government are pretty hell bent on replacing out an entire civilization.

This is not confined to the Old World. Even within the Americas, prior to the arrival of Europeans, the indigenous population had spent much of the past 2000 years, and maybe even earlier, displacing, replacing and assimilating each other.

In short, everyone alive today benefited from shitty things their ancestors, or someone else who inhabited the region they live in, did at some point. Because aside from some uncontacted tribes, nobody is where their ethnic, cultural or national group originally sprang up and few made it to the 21st century free of copious bloodshed.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

So what? This land should be empty forever? When is the temporal cutoff that people shouldn't be in some way responsible or at least feel some kind of societal remorse, for what their ancestors or people who were just in the area first, happened to do? Saying "Oh it was the Americas and let's say around 1492" Is an entirely arbitrary metric.

No, that's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that it is important to be honest about historical events but there are those who actively ignore or deny this or that aspect when pushing a narrative. And yes I'm aware this is a regular thing and not just in the US, but the fact that it is commonplace doesn't make it ok.

You're saying I'm arguing "My English ancestors who arrived in the 1750s and German ancestors who arrived in the 1840s should feel guilty about the brutal Spanish conquests of the 1500s and the policies of the various colonial and national governments" but I'm not, I'm saying "It is important to acknowledge that my ancestors benefited from the situation in which the Americas found themselves when they immigrated and these simple facts shouldn't be actively denied".

[Skroe]

A country that can't help its citizens and provide them with decent job/living conditions shouldn't even bother to think about immigration, yeh.

At the same time, my end goal is and probably always will be a global mankind, because everywhere I look I see identity pride as a very significant danger. So this is where we'll probably stop agreeing, as I'm not looking to preserve any culture or race, I just want to facilitate them mixing up and destroy the barriers between them.

Incredibly ignorant comment.

The United States in 1787 was a bankrupt country... an agrarian society with a life expectancy a decade less than Europe, that had seen a hugely destructive war end several years before. It had little infrastructure compared to Europe and enormous ethnical, religious and cultural divisions owing to the European sources of the 13 colonies and those who resided within them.

The population of the Colonies in 1770? A hair over 2 million people.
The population of the United States in 1800? Over 5 million.
The population of the US in 1845? About 20 million.

Three quarters of that population growth was due to reproduction. One quarter was due to immigration. Do you understand who enormous a number of immigrants that is in just 75 years? It changed the face of the country. And it wasn't even until the next fifty years, with the industrial revolution, that the United States went from "poor, undeveloped strange backwater, irrelevant to the center of the world that is 19th century Europe", that the United States became a rich country. It grew rich and grew it's population with unprecedented immigration at the same time.



The argument you're making is an infantile one. The world doesn't work - and never will work - in a manner that A must be completed before B. On almost any policy. In the real world, A and B are invariably done together.

The variations of your argument are:
-The US should not have a space program before the problems are Earth are solved.
-The US should not invest in domestic spending before the Soviet Threat is eliminated (Cold War nation-at-arms argument).
-The US should only invest in scientific research, technologies and industries, that improves peoples lives, and not basic research that on the face of it, has no practical value to everyday people. Only once socities ills are relieved, should we do that.
-The US should not build new roads and bridges until old roads and bridges are repaired.
-The US should not expand the welfare state until it has fully paid down the outstanding liabilities (debt) of the existing one.

The argument your making could be used to accelerate - or block - almost anything. Look really hard at that last item on the list in particular.

Countries walk and chew bubblegum. It's the way things work.

[Spectral]

So what? This land should be empty forever? When is the temporal cutoff that people shouldn't be in some way responsible or at least feel some kind of societal remorse, for what their ancestors or people who were just in the area first, happened to do? Saying "Oh it was the Americas and let's say around 1492" Is an entirely arbitrary metric.

Should citizens of the UK of Anglo-Saxon descent feel some kind of remorse for what their Germanic ancestors did to the Celtic peoples who were the original inhabitants of the British Isles? Or what about the displacements of people of Roman descent across Europe when the Germanic tripes swept down? Or hell, let's go back all the way and condemn people European descent for pushing out the original owners of the European continent, the Neanderthal. What's ranked above genocide when you actually wipe out an entire species of Homo? Why limit it to Europe. Shall we condemn the Wajin (ethnic Japanese) for their 1100 year decimation of the Ainu people, the original inhabitants of half the Japanese Archipelago?

You see? It's an intrinsically ridiculous argument. The history of the world is, in short, people taking land from one and other, settling down, then their civilization changing before the cycle repeats itself again. Hell it is happening right now in Xinjiang. The ethnic-Han Chinese Communist government are pretty hell bent on replacing out an entire civilization.

This is not confined to the Old World. Even within the Americas, prior to the arrival of Europeans, the indigenous population had spent much of the past 2000 years, and maybe even earlier, displacing, replacing and assimilating each other.

In short, everyone alive today benefited from shitty things their ancestors, or someone else who inhabited the region they live in, did at some point. Because aside from some uncontacted tribes, nobody is where their ethnic, cultural or national group originally sprang up and few made it to the 21st century free of copious bloodshed.

Also noteworthy is how absurdly condescending and ahistoric it is to view indigenous Americans as having lived a basically peaceful life. Wars weren't some unheard of thing prior to the arrival of Europeans. Particularly in Mesoamerica, the consequences of losing a war was brutal with human sacrifice being commonplace.

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You're saying I'm arguing "My English ancestors who arrived in the 1750s and German ancestors who arrived in the 1840s should feel guilty about the brutal Spanish conquests of the 1500s and the policies of the various colonial and national governments" but I'm not, I'm saying "It is important to acknowledge that my ancestors benefited from the situation in which the Americas found themselves when they immigrated and these simple facts shouldn't be actively denied".

OK, then what? Everyone else that's presently alive in the United States benefitted greatly from that situation as well. People that looked kind of like me visited atrocities on people that looked kind of like some of my countrymen over a century ago. Now we all live in fabulously wealthy nation that offers substantial opportunity to people across the board, so much so that the core argument in this thread is who gets to come participate in that wealthy society.

[cparle87]

Snip

The guy I was responding to was using the age-old "everyone is an illegal immigrant in the US because they stole the land from the native americans" angle in order to claim that the modern US doesn't have the right to say other people have to follow our laws in order to settle here.

So I pointed out that because things were lawless in the past doesn't mean that we have to allow things to be lawless now.
"There were no immigration laws when your ancestors stole this land so you have no right to make immigration laws now" was his argument.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

OK, then what? Everyone else that's presently alive in the United States benefitted greatly from that situation as well. People that looked kind of like me visited atrocities on people that looked kind of like some of my countrymen over a century ago. Now we all live in fabulously wealthy nation that offers substantial opportunity to people across the board, so much so that the core argument in this thread is who gets to come participate in that wealthy society.

There is no 'then what'. This is what happened, and it influenced the way things are now, and we shouldn't ignore or deny these simple facts. That's it. There is no more to my argument here, but there are people who like to dismiss these things or pretend they somehow had nothing to do with how the history of the Americas in general and the US in particular evolved. Basically this whole thing got routed in by my trying to make the argument that "Let's not be dishonest about our past to push some narrative in the present." and I don't think that this is REALLY that controversial of a take here.

Basically my statement was simply that "Well MY ancestors came here legally!" is for most white Americans a pointless empty statement and it shouldn't be used as the foundation of an argument about current immigration controls and legislation. There are dozens of actual and better points you can use.

The guy I was responding to was using the age-old "everyone is an illegal immigrant in the US because they stole the land from the native americans" angle in order to claim that the modern US doesn't have the right to say other people have to follow our laws in order to settle here.

So I pointed out that because things were lawless in the past doesn't mean that we have to allow things to be lawless now.
"There were no immigration laws when your ancestors stole this land so you have no right to make immigration laws now" was his argument.

Well you did quote and respond directly to me as well.

[Spiffums]

No. You aren't. And the 1% you're getting through the military construction budget doesn't count. Because that's a tiny stretch in a small area and the part of the law that allows the DoD to reprogram funds is out of the next budget as a consequence.

Trump used his one inventory item on it.

The wall is dead and its never coming back.

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We can afford it.

Maybe you can but I'd rather not pay $25 for a hamburger.

[Spectral]

Reading through the @Skroe's highly informative link, I'm seeing a bunch of data that's pretty consistent with my pessimism about the sorts of immigrants that are coming in the latest flow of Central Americans. Per Table 8-12 Part 2, without policy adjustments to move closer to a balanced budget and including public goods costs, the net fiscal position for someone between 25-64 without a high school level education is a loss of $239K and each descendent is another negative $116K. Even with a high school education, the net costs are $132K for the adult parent and $83K per child. This is consistent with my impression that low-skill immigrants have no ability to pull their weight in the United States and that their children aren't really all that likely to do much better. Even excluding public goods (which I think is dubious, but whatever), the numbers still don't look good at all for those with high school or lower education.

On the flip side, educated adults are huge boon and their kids do well too. Somewhat controversially, country of origin probably does matter in addition to education, but taken alone it's just a crude proxy - I'd surely take a Honduran engineer ahead of a Korean farmer, so there's no need to discriminate by country. The effect of a skills-based system would certainly change the constitution of immigration a fair bit, but that doesn't need to be done with aforethought of preventing some specific group from coming.

@Skroe is, of course, correct in pointing out that the net fiscal position of native born American is actually terrible as well and that something's going to have to be done to pay for all of the things that native born Americans expect to have access to as they age. I don't disagree with that analysis, but I do think that the best available data indicates that low-skill migration deepens the problem rather than solving it. Put another way, I think "immigrants" is a word that does too much work and that we need to disaggregate who we're referring to.

Edit - Still reading, this makes the above actually seem a bit too rosy:

Although estimates vary across scenarios, fiscal impacts of immigrants are generally positive at the federal level and negative at the state and local levels. State and local governments bear the burden of providing education benefits, upon arrival and continuing, to young immigrants and to the children of immigrants, but their methods of taxation tend to recoup relatively fewer contributions later from the most highly educated taxpayers. Federal benefits, in contrast, are largely focused on the elderly, so the relative youthfulness of arriving immigrants means that they tend to have positive fiscal impacts on federal finances in the short term. In addition, federal taxes are more strongly progressive, drawing more contributions from the most highly educated. The investment in public education requires public funds and pays public dividends, but a key issue is that the public dividends tend to be absorbed by the federal government, while the public funds are provided by the states. The fact that states bear much of the fiscal burden of immigration may incentivize state-level policies to exclude immigrants. Equity issues between the federal government and across states should be given consideration in future iterations of immigration policy.

Maybe that still works out OK for states in the long wrong, but a short-run fiscal shock is a very real problem. This is consistent with my position that we shouldn't be making big changes in the rate of flow, but in the constitution of the quality of immigrant.

[Elegiac]

Reading through the @Skroe's highly informative link, I'm seeing a bunch of data that's pretty consistent with my pessimism about the sorts of immigrants that are coming in the latest flow of Central Americans. Per Table 8-12 Part 2, without policy adjustments to move closer to a balanced budget and including public goods costs, the net fiscal position for someone between 25-64 without a high school level education is a loss of $239K and each descendent is another negative $116K. Even with a high school education, the net costs are $132K for the adult parent and $83K per child. This is consistent with my impression that low-skill immigrants have no ability to pull their weight in the United States and that their children aren't really all that likely to do much better. Even excluding public goods (which I think is dubious, but whatever), the numbers still don't look good at all for those with high school or lower education.

On the flip side, educated adults are huge boon and their kids do well too. Somewhat controversially, country of origin probably does matter in addition to education, but taken alone it's just a crude proxy - I'd surely take a Honduran engineer ahead of a Korean farmer, so there's no need to discriminate by country. The effect of a skills-based system would certainly change the constitution of immigration a fair bit, but that doesn't need to be done with aforethought of preventing some specific group from coming.

@Skroe is, of course, correct in pointing out that the net fiscal position of native born American is actually terrible as well and that something's going to have to be done to pay for all of the things that native born Americans expect to have access to as they age. I don't disagree with that analysis, but I do think that the best available data indicates that low-skill migration deepens the problem rather than solving it. Put another way, I think "immigrants" is a word that does too much work and that we need to disaggregate who we're referring to.

Edit - Still reading, this makes the above actually seem a bit too rosy:

Maybe that still works out OK for states in the long wrong, but a short-run fiscal shock is a very real problem. This is consistent with my position that we shouldn't be making big changes in the rate of flow, but in the constitution of the quality of immigrant.

Flow changes aside, there is also room for improvement on the systems we have set up to absorb incoming immigrants in terms of helping to break down cultural and language barriers - even pro-immigration advocates do need to take a lesson from what happened in Europe with the refugee crisis.

Said improvements could be dovetailed into domestic initiatives to help people with things like job retraining and finding stable residence. It's much easier to help integrate immigrants if there is already a system in place to help funnel people to communities and job sectors needing to be revitalized or expanded - and it would also make such more appealing by dispelling the argument of why immigrants should get so much assistance.

America's own economic history demonstrates that an educated and liquid consumer class doesn't appear out of thin air; you have to invest in making conditions favorable to its emergence.

[Rasulis]

Edit - Still reading, this makes the above actually seem a bit too rosy:

Maybe that still works out OK for states in the long wrong, but a short-run fiscal shock is a very real problem. This is consistent with my position that we shouldn't be making big changes in the rate of flow, but in the constitution of the quality of immigrant.

States like CA, TX, NM, AZ and NV have been dealing with this reality for decades. In fact the economy of these states, and likely most of the states in US, is tied to illegal immigration.

People tend to think of only agriculture when they talked about illegal immigration. However, illegal immigration is not limited to only agriculture such as those found in California Central Valley and Imperial Valley.

The largest ICE workplace raid under the current administration, which netted 280 arrests, was at an electronic repair company in Allen, TX on 04/04/2019. Second largest? Over 100 arrests at a trailer manufacturing facilities in North Texas. The we have a meatpacking plant in TN; a gun manufacturing plant in Sanford, NC; farm workers in Georgia and Kansas.

Notice a pattern? Even the reddest of the red states need them.

[NED funded]

A state's duty is first and foremost towards its existing citizens. If you willingly allow them to wallow in the mud being homeless, and yet you still bring in masses of people that the state has to spend resources on, the existing poor citizens have no reasons to continue supporting the state in any way, shape or form.

If you cannot lift out of misery the half of million of homeless people, those without healthcare, those living from one pay check to another, you're a damn useless state and your citizens owe you NO ALLEGIANCE.

Helping US citizens should be a PRIORITY. Not helping poor people from Guatemala or Honduras.

Also, don't give a damn that capitalism requires these poor desperate people that are paid in what is essentially baubles to continue its existence. The sooner it collapses, the better.

Immigrants help development too. In order to get the quality of life you want, you need to have that wealth first and immigrants played a crucial role in supplying america with the labor necessay for factory work in the US. Not to mention some immigrants from places like Vietnam, India and Ghana from the list Jinro listed that arent exactly at the top are currently among top earners.

[Zython]

I noticed that claims that the system is unsustainable aren't really backed by any hard facts. Where's the proof we lack space, shelter, and food for them? Where's the proof we lack resources for them? The only claim here is that the courts are backed up, which can be easily solved by not arresting so many people. Why should we believe we don't have the resources to help them, when no one questions if we have the resources to hurt or murder them?

[Noxx79]

A state's duty is first and foremost towards its existing citizens. If you willingly allow them to wallow in the mud being homeless, and yet you still bring in masses of people that the state has to spend resources on, the existing poor citizens have no reasons to continue supporting the state in any way, shape or form.

If you cannot lift out of misery the half of million of homeless people, those without healthcare, those living from one pay check to another, you're a damn useless state and your citizens owe you NO ALLEGIANCE.

Helping US citizens should be a PRIORITY. Not helping poor people from Guatemala or Honduras.

Also, don't give a damn that capitalism requires these poor desperate people that are paid in what is essentially baubles to continue its existence. The sooner it collapses, the better.

Stop being so tribal.

[Theodarzna]

More counterfactual nonsense.

My grandfather on one side arrived here just after World War II. My ancestors on another side arrived here in the 1880s. This is typical of Americans of non-English, non-Colonial descent. This includes the hundreds of millions of German Americans, Italian Americans, Irish Americans and Americans of Eastern European and Asian descent.

The Genocide you speak of, which culminated with the American Indian Wars, largely concluded by the 1850s. But "the American-British Colonial stage of it, which includes atrocities like the trail of tears was the tail end. Most of the Genocide was committed by the Spanish two centuries earlier, when the population of the Americas fell by 95% by 1690, mostly due to infectious disease.

So to hold American immigrants who arrived here decades or centuries later, responsible for something that other people did, is outrageous. Modern international legal norms hold that individuals are not responsible for the crimes of their family, their fore-bearers, their tribe, their race or their nation. Collective responsibility of criminal behavior is generally shunned too, with the major modern exception being holding the populations of Germany and Japan broadly responsible for World War II.

My forbearers, like most Americans for-bearers, arrived here seeking a better life, on a boat, from Europe. And they did it long, long after other people, other countries committed atrocities.

This is a far more serious response than your point deserved. But you're mostly just looking for a reaction, which is why you said it. Another day of bad faith posting and provocateuring to find purpose in your so-called life. You should really be able to change your title from "The Insane" (hah) to "Known Quantity".

I hold you responsible because you attempt to whitewash history, to present a narrative of this country and its history that ignores this element, that ignores essentially the nations founding event, the event that if it did not happen this country would in no way shape or form actually be here. Your great grandfather would not have been an American nor come here without that genocide, without those events you so desperately seem eager to have never brought up again, the United States simply would not exist and your hysterical response to say "STOP TALKING ABOUT IT" does not paint you in any better light.

That is ultimately the point. America cannot present itself as this shiny radiant thing without acknowledging the horrors that lay at the foundations. You whitewash history because it is inconvenient for your moral grandstanding to admit that its built on a foundation of corpses and slaves.

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This is such cynical, counter-factual nonsense. A better life for themselves and their children, opportunity, saftey, freedom from persecution is litterally the EXACT OPPOSITE of Cortes raiding the Aztec. Even more egregiously, you are _literally_ an immigrant to this country and you say this shit.

And I must say, a compelling argument for building a wall in the middle of the Atlantic-fucking-Ocean.


@Spectral Thank you for your reply. I'll be responding as soon as I can today. I'm the process of building a bunch of furniture and am just taking a breather. I want to give your actual serious reply (compared to, well... ya know look up) the proper due it deserves.

First, about a 1/3rd of the United States was Mexico until forcibly taken in an aggressive war of conquest, so your lack of relationship to the Conquistadors is a bit suspect. Second, its an example, people came for riches, for money. It is why anyone honestly comes here because freedom can be had all over the world in many places, sometimes more of it than here. But here had vast empty land, forcibly cleared and annexed from a freshly exterminated race of people.

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A state's duty is first and foremost towards its existing citizens. If you willingly allow them to wallow in the mud being homeless, and yet you still bring in masses of people that the state has to spend resources on, the existing poor citizens have no reasons to continue supporting the state in any way, shape or form.

If you cannot lift out of misery the half of million of homeless people, those without healthcare, those living from one pay check to another, you're a damn useless state and your citizens owe you NO ALLEGIANCE.

Helping US citizens should be a PRIORITY. Not helping poor people from Guatemala or Honduras.

Also, don't give a damn that capitalism requires these poor desperate people that are paid in what is essentially baubles to continue its existence. The sooner it collapses, the better.

What loyalty should anyone have to the kind of State Skroe imagines? If it has no loyalty to you and sees you as merely a replaceable cog, a resource and nothing more, why even give a single fuck about America?

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No, that's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that it is important to be honest about historical events but there are those who actively ignore or deny this or that aspect when pushing a narrative. And yes I'm aware this is a regular thing and not just in the US, but the fact that it is commonplace doesn't make it ok.

You're saying I'm arguing "My English ancestors who arrived in the 1750s and German ancestors who arrived in the 1840s should feel guilty about the brutal Spanish conquests of the 1500s and the policies of the various colonial and national governments" but I'm not, I'm saying "It is important to acknowledge that my ancestors benefited from the situation in which the Americas found themselves when they immigrated and these simple facts shouldn't be actively denied".

It is especially unnerving when America does it, because when its done in the name of America it is done in the name of a Country that claims to be exceptional, yet the defense for lying or ignoring its corpse strewn horrific past and even the more grizzly aspects of the present is essentially "Well other countries do it". People like @Skroe want to have their cake and eat it too. Buried under his incessent fake outrage that someone would dare point out the obvious of US history is simply him demanding we all believe in that American Exceptionalism mythos, while also believing evil is okay because everyone does it.

The problem is you can't both be Exceptional, Special and Different (The rhetorical basis for America's global Imperium) and also just like everyone else and shouldn't be held to a different standard. America is to be held to a stricter standard because America alone proclaims itself to be special. If the US is merely another brutal imperial thug, like all whom precedded it, than by all means, but don't ask me to sing "Sweet Lady Liberty" and act like America was founded by the Molburo man and Jesus Christ.

[psiko74]

Im fine with them coming to claim asylum, but I don't ever want them to vote or use any government assistance. That is for Americans only.

[Theodarzna]

Stop stealing my lines. But yeah, nations will fall, in due time. If you want their demise to be a peaceful event, don't mistreat the vast masses of people inside your borders and don't laugh at their misfortune.


I can't answer that question. I'm a man of no loyalties to any nation, not even my native vampire lands, and even less so my adoptive countries. But I'm sure we'll get a few more paragraphs about incoming wars and conflicts with China, graphs about the economy, graphs about demographics and so on.

What's missing is the graph that tracks happiness and "patriotism", for lack of a better word.

The weird part in all this, is that in my ideal world that will never happen, the US and Canada would form a union of some sort and then the south/central America will also get integrated... slowly... without the gloating and the border/immigration debates, but covertly, while keeping the citizens happy. The worst thing you can do while trying to implement this is talk openly and proudly about it.

But hey. In another topic people have compared red states to the third world, even going as far as saying it's worse there, which made chuckle like mad. It showed how deeply divorced from reality some are. With so much resentment towards your fellow citizens, no wonder this is happening.

So your dream world involves manipulating people and doing things against popular will that could never pass if made a public issue. So its manipulation and coercive?