That was obvious ever since they claimed asylum seekers that had followed the legal asylum process were “illegal immigrants” and society and the media just went along with that phrasing despite it being factually incorrect.
Well, when they claim that X million illegal immigrants entered the country despite them supposedly not being in the system and thus not countable, and the numbers line up with asylum seeker numbers, and they do things like cancel asylum seekers status[1] or releases criminals to go after asylum seekers[2] its hard not to come to that inference.
The Republican party is frequently in a contradictory state with immigration, where they speak loudly against it, but then yield in to business demands for immigrant labor.
It's possible Trump is uniquely different there, but he's talked about being sympathetic to farm and hospitality businesses. It's hard to tell. Everything is up to his whims now.
The comment you are replying to quite intentionally said "legal immigration". Republicans love illegal immigration. Why? because it suppresses wages of both documented and undocumented workers.
Undocumented workers can be employed below minimum wage. If they get an attitude and start demanding a fairer wage or better working conditions, their employer just calls in an ICE raid to clear them out and then they start with a fresh batch. They pay a token fine and that's that.
Several sectors are completely dependent on this arrangement, most notably agriculture and food processing (eg chicken farms)
If they actually cared about this, they would seriously punish the employers for employing undocumented workers. they do not. In fact, when that's been tried it's been a disaster (eg [1])
And because the system allows this to happen, it suppresses the wages of documented workers as well. That's the point. The entire system of restricting immigration is designed to increase profits. Nothing more.
What's the alternative? Easy. Document them. We've done this before. When there was a shortage of male workers in WW2 (because a lot of men were in the Army), we had the Bracero program [2] for temporary workers.
Historically, many such workers came to work then went back to (primarily) Mexico. They only ended up staying permanently when it became too hard to cross the border.
As for these latest bans, well we had 3 Muslim bans in Trump 1. The 19 then 39 (and now apparently 75) countries are pretty much jus tprimarily Muslim and "shithole" [3] countries.
All of this stems from the desire to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy but only for white people.
You've essentially agreed, despite your opening sentence, by suggesting they are speaking out against illegal immigration, but want it to support businesses (the people who want low wages). That's exactly the contradiction I suggested.
The contradiction he's pointing out is that they often speak out against so-called "illegals", but as you've documented they enjoy it when business reap the benefits of undocumented labor (i.e. wage suppression).
I saw that many welcomed this, since it will help stop the visa mills, and push towards importing higher talent, rather than local-offshoring. What's your opinion on these two?
Is this sarcasm? Not that Trump's word means anything, but Trump has been against it since his first term. Having cancelled it temporarily in that first term, has said that he'll end H1B if he gets reelected, and that US shouldn't have the H1B program.
It's only since 2025 when Elon was in his good books and told Republicans to not vote for a bill that Trump woke up that day and decided he'd be pro-H1B.
All you had to do was a 10 second google search to find that:
The racial and ethnic makeup of legal immigrants who have obtained Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) status or arrived as new immigrants in the past four years (2022–2025) has been primarily driven by arrivals from Latin America and Asia.
Asian: Approximately 27% to 28% of all immigrants.
Hispanic/Latino (Ethnicity): Roughly 45% of the total immigrant population identify with Hispanic or Latino ethnic origins.
White: About 20% to 21%.
Black/African American: Approximately 9%.
Multi-racial: About 22% identify as having two or more races.
It just amazes me people continue to push these racist narratives that doesn't hold up once you look at the actual data. Its staggering to think we have the unlimited power of the internet and still can't seem to take 10 seconds to confirm or deny something as simple as this? How depressing.
The patent comment is mentioning on the recent changes by the current administration where reports from last year indicated that there will be a huge reduction in the number of accepted refugees of which the majority will be white south Africans. What does numbers from 2022 to 2024 have to do with that assertion?
I think they are just generalizing the narrative around the current administrations stance on immigration by using those numbers to show it’s a completely mixed bag.
I find that level of detail succinct enough to allude that the current administration is just being extremely racist and bigoted by singling out colored minorities without lifting a finger for other racial demographics. In which case, relevant.
It's such a small country and an even smaller amount are coming to the U.S. that this would have no material impact. Strange to see them there, but not Argentina (in much worse financial situation).
Apparently Uruguay is LGBT friendly, and a destination for some Americans fleeing the Trump/Republican regime (LGBT and straight). I'd imagine either of those things would annoy Dear Leader.
> A U.S. official confirmed the full list of countries will include Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Grenada is here because the US asked to install radars here for their Venezuelan operation("drug boat interception") and Grenada declined. They also raised the The Level 2 advisory for US citizen.
Russia I presume is on the list because of geopolitical tensions.
I am not familiar with every country in that list but in my experience, what looks like an anomaly is Morocco, which produces a fairly large elite compared to the size of the country (worked with lots of highly educated / highly paid (and therefore net tax contributing) moroccan nationals). I have hardly worked with any other nationality in that list in my professional life (Bangladesh and Tunisia maybe).
I think this move could harm US in two ways: It will reduce the immigrant diversity which might make the population skew towards the biggest immigrant population such as from India and Mexico which are not in this list. Second it will remove USA as top destination for talent, which will help stop brain drain from these countries causing their local industry to benefit and thereby reducing the edge of US companies.
The State Department said[1]:
"The State Department will pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates."
Whether or not that's a good/true reason is another discussion.
Trump and his whole administration is extremely pro-Israel, even by the standards of US administrations. Jordan is 95% Muslim and around a quarter of the population are Palestinian refugees, so I suspect that has something to do with it
And the second Arab country to recognise Israel [1]. (After Egypt. Also on the list.)
In June, Amman was probably "intercepting some of the missiles and drones en route to Israel, with debris from those interceptions causing damage in some instances" [2].
The Israel hypothesis does not hold for this list.
The Jordanian government is reluctantly pro-Israel by necessity, but the vast majority of the population (and especially the 25% that are Palestinian refugees, for very obvious reasons) are not
No matter if one is pro-israel or not, there are reasons to not want your country to become an islamist country ruled by sharia (Jordan is partially ruled by sharia law).
I think it's strictly for financial reasons. A different profile of people from Serbia comes to the US.
I'm from Montenegro, but also lived in Serbia for a sizeable portion of my life and have family there.
Many people from said countries work in the US illegaly. I can speak for Montenegro, but the exact same pattern plays out in Bosnia and Albania.
Sure, there are some people who go to the US to study for a bit, and there are short-term seasonal work arrangements for students like "Work and Travel", but those are short.
I know 20+ people from Montenegro who went to work in the US in the last decade, illegaly or semi-legally. Two things come to mind first: driving trucks and picking marijuana. Usually they go there for a seasonal job or simply as tourists and overstay their visa.
My schoolmate even has a company that facilitates such schemes and sends people to the US as seasonal workers, who then overstay their visas and do shitty jobs. He's a millionare now, not that you'd know. Of course, it's also the diaspora in the US who actually facilitate this scheme and exploit the workers. I've heard the same thing from Albanians.
Every person I know who went to work in the US from Serbia (10+ people) is either a (good) dev, or an expert of some other kind, engineer, maybe a doctor (even though that's a tough path), PhD or something similar. All the best serbian devs and PhDs are overwhelmingly in the US.
There are several reasons for that, main ones being that it seems to be somewhat harder for people from Serbia to go to US to work illegaly, so the US mostly gets the best ones who are a net benefit to the society and pay a surplus of taxes.
Because it's harder to get to the US from Serbia, fo less qualified workers it's much easier to go to Israel and Saudi Arabia (both hugely popular nowadays) and the Emirates. Western Europe used to be popular, but it barely pays off nowadays, you can go there to live an average life, not to make big bucks and come back to flex on your neighbors.
Serbia is also quite a desperate place, but still has enough people to produce a sizeable chunk of professionals and academics, who don't want to put up with the kleptocracy and leave.
Braco! I come from Macedonia too and yeah I am quite familiar with the schemes and reasons people go and stay, I know a few folks who've immigrated that way as well. But I thought people in Serbia do that too, didnt know that its harder for them. In fact I've also met a few folks from Montenegro inside the US that clearly overstayed, but they were doing quite well, opened up a restaurant etc.
P.S. I go to Montenegro every summer I have a place there its amazing!
Yeah, a lot of people who went to the US illegaly now own businesses. A highschool buddy went to drive trucks in like 2014, now has his own trucking company, several trucks, bunch of employees (Montenegrin and otherwise).
When I say semi-legally, there are people who do kind of get the green card through marriage, but it's fake marriages. A lot of truckers do it and it seems to be tolerated.
BTW apparently (I searched online) now people from Serbia also go to the US to work illegaly, but it's a recent trend, in Montenegro it was commonplace since at least 2010 and in Albania since the 90s.
Yep, I also know of some stories where they became truckers in the US and after a while opened a few business from Macedonia into the US trucking industry (insurance, dispatchers, etc), and theyre raking in millions every year. One of the companies here declared 20 mil in profits last year. Imagine the undeclared profits :D
Not only Azerbaijan, but the whole Caucasia is included (Armenia and Georgia too). Given Trump's recent peace middlemanship between Azerbaijan and Armenia, this is actually somewhat surprising.
I pulled the latest overstay data from the CBP website (2024) and compared it to the list of countries. Some of the countries have high overstay rates (Haiti and Laos >24%), but others don't. Barbados (0.44%) has a lower overstay rate than France (0.48%). Libya (1.59%) has a lower rate than Portugal (1.68%). Some countries with high rates aren't on the list entirely, like Malawi (22.05%). Also, the hypothesis fails a chi square test. It's not that.
Their justification is interesting too, because if the threshold is "citizenship must require personal attendance", then Canadian citizenship is almost certainly invalid too if you obtained yours over Zoom, which is how most new Canadians obtain it.
I'm surprised that you can get non-attendant citizenship in Canada. They don't even give automatic citizenship to children of Canadian parents born outside of Canada (maybe if both parents are Canadian they do, but my experience is with one Canadian and one American). US citizenship for a child born outside of the US to US parents is as simple as bringing their birth certificate to the consulate. And if you marry a Canadian, they won't give you residency unless you physically reside in Canada.
My guess is they view India as producing an elite immigration (i.e. net tax paying) in large numbers. It is stunning how many successful tech or non-tech executives are Indian born. I haven't seen the full list but I doubt any country on that list gets close, even as a % of population.
1st gen immigrants from India are almost always well-educated, and oftentimes even entrepreneurial. They are among the lowest-risk (with Chinese) immigrants. That is to say, they typically will not contribute to crime, gangs, or public welfare burden. So it's a pretty big difference between those two countries and all the others on the list.
Companies have been trying that since the 90s, yet the quality of work done by offshore teams is consistently crap. Better to import the entire team to the US, pay them below average wages, make them work 80 hour weeks under the watchful eye of a manager and threaten to fire them (which means deportation) if they dare to complain.
Top engineering grads are excellent and are being paid high wages. Work culture is cut-throat, but talent is comparable to the US.
India's target universities (IITs, IIITs & NITs) produce ~40k new software-engineers every year. Historically, average graduates of these universities end up in FANG jobs after their masters. If not immediately, then within a few years.
We're not talking about the 1 million sub-par engineering grads produced by India every year, most of whom will end up at infosys, TCS or sadly, BPOs. Big-tech only cares about the top 50k.
This the primary group that American new-grads are competing with. Around 20k new Indians get an H1b every-year as part of an OPT (Masters) to H1b transition. For every 1 of them in the US, there is at least 1 back home of the same caliber.
> the quality of work done by offshore teams is consistently crap
This isn't nearly true anymore, and hasn't been for a long time. Especially since everyone is using the same AI tooling as everyone else now.
What is true (in my experience) is that they do tend to lack a sense of ownership and craft. But I think companies care less and less about that all the time.
If you are a good software developer in India then you move abroad. It's not that India doesn't make great software developers, it's just they don't tend to stick around.
This is stupid and weakens the U.S. We have benefited so much from the visa program over the history of this country. If the smartest people of Russia and various other countries want to flee and join the U.S., we would be at an advantage.
It’s bound to generate some heated discussion. A lot of people on that discussion asks the same question. There’s a lack of transparency on why some posts get flagged.
A pause in processing of immigration visas affects the tech industry and is relevant to most of the audience who lives in the US.
My biggest issue with work visas is they're treated as an under-class that literally competes at upwards of half the pay or less and used to suppress wages. Especially in the past 5 years.
I'd like to see a 100% tax on Visa workers combined with salary floors per work classification. A tech worker that needs to be imported from another country shouldn't be paid less than 6 figures IMO, and depending on the position upwards of twice that. The tax itself should specifically be used to fund grants for STEM undergrads and graduates.
Just my own take on this, and I do have a personal stake and took a 40% pay cut last year just to be able to keep working.
> A pause in processing of immigration visas affects the tech industry
Is an immigration visa the same as a work visa? I don't know much about the different types of immigration. The stated reason for the pause in immigration visas is to keep out those who would end up being a "public charge." I interpret this as people who want to come to the US but have no demonstrated means of support once they get here.
Student visas, I presume, are unaffected? What about work visas? If you're coming to work, you would also be paying taxes and not need public support.
Because like most political threads, it will largely consist of people with a crayon-and-coloring-book understanding of geopolitics posting low-effort snipes and trading insults while contributing basically zero to productive discussion.
The most disgusting example of this in recent memory was the Scott Adams death thread, where complimentary comments were being aggressively flagged, and toxic vitriol was being upvoted. It made me finally realize how many joyless, seriously broken people lurk here.
Hey, I'm just joyless, not broken. Also that thread was full of people complimenting his political views, not just his work on Dilbert.
Don't try to sneak in political commentary under the guise of "complimentary comments" and you shouldn't have to deal with as much pushback from people with opposing viewpoints.
That or keep doing so and complaining about others free speech. I'm an anonymous poster on the internet, not a cop.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think it's fair. AI has hit skilled labor/professionals pretty hard and it buys time to give jobs to the locals who were affected by layoffs.
Loving the downvotes on a valid, reasonable question.
I'm asking for specifics, isn't that what goes into a good comment here?
Or maybe the downvotes are political.
My sweetie,
Here you'll find some data about the context:
War Tensions: It humiliated Japan by completely banning Asian immigrants, which fueled anti-American sentiment and helped pave the way for WWII.
Blocking Refugees: The quotas were so strict that, during the 1930s, the U.S. denied entry to thousands of Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
Inspiration for Hitler: The law was based on eugenics (racial superiority). Hitler himself praised the act in his book, using it as a model for future Nazi racial laws.
Family Separation: Because quotas for Southern and Eastern Europe were so low, immigrants already in the U.S. were often unable to bring their wives and children, tearing families apart for decades.
The Birth of "Illegal Immigration": By making legal entry nearly impossible for many, it created the modern concept of the "undocumented immigrant" and led to the creation of the Border Patrol to manage those bypassed by the system.
My sweetie,
I'm from another country and I'm following this story from the outside. Believe me, the whole world thinks what the president of the United States is doing is wrong. >>>>Good Luck<<<<
Too vague, or did you just not like that I mentioned your orange idol?
Trump is the worst president I've seen in recent years. You should feel ashamed if you support someone who has inhumane attitudes.
I think HN discussion should stand alone and not require research to find what someone is vaguely referring to, especially in an emotionally charged comment.
> I think HN discussion should stand alone and not require research
I don't know what random reader knows and I will assume someone can look up context in good faith. It's not productive to conduct conversations any other way. If someone understands my comments, we can exchange ideas. If not, that's ok too.
The one that I'm at a complete loss for is Uruguay - it is one of the wealthiest countries per capita in South America as well as the least corrupt and most egalitarian... not exactly a huge source of desperate immigrants. Did their government scold ours too harshly for the recent Venezuela shenanigans or something?
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