US, for first time in 50 years, experienced negative net migration in 2025

> would you be open to changing your mind on either the absurd sounding statistics of the rate of Somalians using welfare

I'm never completely closed to changing my mind on anything. I don't have any confidence that anything that I know is set in stone. I only have a reasonable confidence in anything I say. You can see that in my original comment too. Those weren't my judgments, those were my assessments based on available evidence that I quoted.

However, this debate started with the quoting of a source with extreme conflicts of interest and bias that wasn't declared. That's academic dishonesty, if you know how reaserch is evaluated. The proper way to debate this was to either quote a reputable source or at least give a heads up about the data and the source. Once that trust is breached, the readers have every justification to be very skeptical and prejudiced about any further claims. That's how debates work. Resorting to these tiring meta debates about the source instead is just shifting the goal posts and inverting the responsibility again.

And as for the counter evidence, I hope you see what others have been saying. Statistics can be used to lie about reality. I don't know who said this, but 'there are lies, damned lies and statistics'. It takes extra context to interpret it properly - a fact that's persistently used by some to spread lies. Because of this, these claims are now going to need a lengthy scrutiny.

> or the reputation of CIS in general?

CIS was started by a eugenicist and they still are a hate group connected to a hate movement. Their motive isn't even in question here. The simplest trick in the book they can use is to cherry pick data that supports their claims from a valid research and neglect everything else. So even if their data turns out to be true in however narrow sense, I don't see how that should give them any more legitimacy.

Dumping an information capsule and demanding that it be debunked upon challenge is an age old misdirection tactic, that takes advantage of the fact that debunking statistics-based narratives take a lot of additional context. That's why the lack of credibility of the source is considered a valid reason to reject an accusation. If you didn't have a motivated agenda in this, you would have avoided this kind of singular source of such reputational dearth, instead of resorting to the tactic of inverting the burden of proof.

I never expected a meaningful response to a criticism of your comment. But I find it disturbing that you slipped in such an obscure and malicious source here without disclosing their conflict of interests. That's a genuine misdirection. The real intent of my reply was to point out this problem to the other readers. Having done that, your rhetoric and weak insults are a misguided effort that I don't find any value in addressing.

Famously statistics cannot be used to misrepresent reality. Incredible stuff, we should get this to Nick Shirley!

Labor protectionism is an idea that has been tested many, many times.

It's funny you should bring up the Olympics. Did you know some countries offer financial incentives and a pathway to citizenship for immigrant athletes who are able to compete at an elite level?

I was talking about founders, who are in direct competition with one another for VC funding.

But if you want to talk about employees, what you're saying isn't really true.

Sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and relocating immigrant workers is very expensive. For an immigrant to outcompete a citizen on cost they have to be significantly cheaper than the citizen - but if they're on an H1B you have to pay them the prevailing wage for their position! So there's a floor on just how much immigrant workers can undercut citizen workers. Immigration certainly puts downward pressure on wages across a whole industry, but looking at software in particular we see wages having risen consistently for decades now. You can look at what companies are paying their H1B software workers and see that it's typically a very generous wage by US standards.

But, weirdly, a majority of US CS graduates don't work in software. It doesn't make sense that they would be holding out for more money than immigrant workers to the point that they end up exiting the industry altogether and taking a less lucrative job. Not to me, at least.

I think what you're saying, if it's happening at all, is likely only happening at the bottom end of the market. Which kind of proves my point.

You are actually correct, I believe. But this is exactly the principle of capitalism isn't it? Market forces, invisible hand, the theories changed over the years but it boils down to the same thing: letting everybody compete. But you cannot have your cake (only locals employed) and eat it too (big wages) in this free competition - some will be underbidding the others.

You don’t end up with communities that lack those things entirely, because they’re within America. Instead, what happens is that higher organizational units compensate by imposing the organization that’s lacking internally. These communities become dependent on others to provide law, organization, and civic institutions. That distorts the structure of society, making it a top-down structure rather than a bottom-up structure. The lack of social cohesion between different cultural groups further increases the need for top-down control and administration to manage that conflict. But I don’t think that’s sustainable over generations. Because over time those immigrants will start changing the culture of the host population.

> A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test

Well we created a lot of national myths in the mid 20th century to reconcile our historic immigration trajectory. But we have a lot of data from which we should be able to draw conclusions. If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey? The answer to that question should guide our immigration policy.

Its not intended as praise, but a reality-check on the status quo.

Our leadership in science and tech has always been linked inextricably with sourcing talent from everywhere. You can look at immigrant Nobels, patents, enrollment in doctoral programs, representation in executive teams in tech companies, % of American unicorns founded by immigrants -- it will point to the same conclusion.

Whether or not we should be self-sufficient is another matter, but we aren't even close, not in the highest echelons of STEM.

I'm curious though, what country would serve as evidence that sourcing talent domestically alone can propel a nation to global leadership in these fields?

Thank you. I’m very familiar with the guidelines. I’ve think I can play my OG card on this one.

I added substantial commentary that makes it more than a “why the down votes?” type of comment.

‘rayiner gets beat on here a bit due to what appears to be his conservative stances on some issues.

While I don’t agree with many of the things ‘rayiner says, we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water if we’re going to have meaningful discussions here — especially ones that are intellectually stimulating.

IMHO, one of the reasons we (in the US) are where we are politically is precisely because we ignore, or downvote, or denigrate views from the opposing side (whichever side that is). It’s not really prudent to blithely downvote a considered and articulate comment without commentary just because you disagree with it or dislike the implications. In the case of hacker news, this type of behavior is antithetical to the goals of the site — intellectually stimulating content.

So, while I appreciate your citation of the rules (which may itself be a middlebrow dismissal), I stick by my original comment, and I look forward to anyone who could reply to it.

Lol I am for completely open borders, which probably puts me in the most extreme 1% of pro-immigration policy.

This doesn't make me blind. The benefits liability is massive, mostly to my own citizens, whom are even harder to escape than immigrants except by emigration. My country is being run by a proto-fascist, and the only remaining benefit I get of that is that he kind of reflects my demographic, although that is rapidly being 'replaced.' So in 30 years, going down the road it is now, it could be someone just as authoritarian but sees me as the enemy instead of brown people.

I am not particularly excited to wait around for that, while paying out massive benefits to the non-productive, plus the national debt, plus the taxation rates that exceed other monarchy-like countries with even freer economic systems.

If I was anti-immigrant I wouldn't even consider immigration. I only consider it because I don't have a dogmatic allegiance to the constitution nor 'America' as a political entity; if living under a dystopic theocracy provides more liberty it shouldn't be excluded from consideration.

The main reason why I haven't left, is I'm trying real hard to not be a coward and just leave rather than try to fix things, unlike many cowardly immigrants that have arrived at the USA because they can't be bothered to fix their own country.

The United States of America was created by British settlers who displaced the American Indians and created a new nation built on English language, law, and culture, and out of ideas that had been floating around during the English Civil War. In the 20th century we came up with these feel-good narratives about immigrants to help assimilate the massive number of immigrants that we had taken in during the late 19th and early 20th century. But we did that at the same time as we severely restricted immigration under the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.

And even though British Americans long ago became a minority--the single largest ethnic group is Germans--there is shockingly little influence from any other group in America's core political, legal, and civic institutions. Our constitution and laws have more ideas from ancient Rome and Greece than from all contemporary foreign cultures combined. The Ivy League schools that still dominate our bureaucratic and professional class were founded by British Americans as copies of Oxford/Cambridge. Silicon Valley arose around Stanford University (Stanford being an English surname) and a U.S. military that at the time was still dominated by British Americans. Wall Street is a direct descendant of London's financial sector, though it has some influence from New York's history as a Dutch city.

That's the reason the United States is economically, politically, and culturally more similar to Australia than to Mexico, despite being on the opposite side of the planet from Australia and diverging politically 250 years ago. To the extent the U.S. is an "immigrant nation," that is only in the sense that many immigrants and their descendants happen to live here. But those immigrants are governed and organized by the (now nearly dead) hand of the Anglo-Protestants, through their law, norms, principles, and institutions.

A good bit from the late Justice Scalia on this: https://www.facebook.com/TrueTexasProject/videos/antonin-sca...

I believe he's referring to the fact that social security, despite being billed as essentially a "retirement account" type program where e.g. silent gen paid in and got out roughly the same amount, it functions more like a ponzi scheme.

This is a consequence of the fact that, when the program was instituted, Roosevelt wanted to immediately start paying out to some people. So, boomers (very large generation) paid for their parents (relatively much smaller generation, meaning small per-person bill).

Now millennials and zoomers (relatively smaller generations) are expected to pay for boomers (much larger per-person bill). Between that, the incredible spending of medicare, and the federal propping-up of the housing market, a huge proportion of the economy has been dedicated to wealth transfer to the olds, an unproductive class who will be gone soon anyhow.

... thhat is not what I'm saying. Im describing the system by which social security bizarrely says a different person owes you because you paid someone else, most of which will be dead by the time you 'draw' it 'back'.