Former Green card holder now Citizen as of a few days ago.
Submitted an online form 4 months ago, received an interview date two months ago, had my interview last week.
Interview was at 8:30am Oath ceremony was at 9am Registered to vote at 9.15am Back at work at 10am!
Submitted passport application the day after.
Interview was straightforward and most of the time was double checking all the information I had previously submitted was accurate. Learning the answers to the civics test was fun.
I think there is a cliche of a stern interviewer who is looking for any excuse to say no, but this officer was kind and encouraging.
The oath ceremony was actually quite moving. I often see most displays of patriotism as some kind of pseudo mental illness but the patriotism shown by the officiant was actually rational, inclusive and inspiring.
All that to say, am lucky and pleased to have such a smooth journey to citizenship and am happy to be able to vote!
Wow, they really streamlined it. I wonder how they did that. I spent a decade in the US (Permanent Res), wife was American, had two kids, worked for a solid 10 years, payed an enormous amount of taxes, had two properties, no record, not even a parking ticket and it took about 12 months and that was pre 911.
I guess they must have changed the requirements since and hired 1000's of people to process everyone. Lucky you.
The answer is funding.
USCIS needs to be fully self reliant on funding, a restriction not placed on any other agency from what I know.
Congress passed a bill a couple of years ago increasing the fees of several kinds of applications allowing for more funding, after a long gap. Further, they passed funding for digitizing their processes and updating computers after about 2 decades.
An additional factor is the massive backlog created by the Trump administration whose strategy was to simply add roadblocks and delays to the simplest processes. This was further exacerbated by pandemic slowdowns, so the increased capacity, combined with the removal of ideological opposition to legal and authorized immigration and a large backlog has likely resulted in the large numbers of citizenships.
Ours was even faster. Submitted our naturalization application March 31. Had passport in hand by mid May. Interview and ceremony was between those dates.
>I often see most displays of patriotism as some kind of pseudo mental illness
Why is that? It just doesn't seem rational to me to see it that way, but if that is how you feel then that is how you feel. I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise, I already know I can't, but just some explanation would be valuable.
When there is no reason to display it, i find it weird tbh. Not aggressive, just weird and uncomfortable. I get it for sports or official ceremonies, but else it often just seems to either seek conflicts (Hooligans), or more often, seek cheap branding.
And there is ways to display it. A pub calling itself "Penny Lane" and displaying a liver bird is totally fine, but when an english pub looks excessively, in-your-face english, i just can't, and i would bet most englishmen living in the same city couldn't either. It's just so weird.
> I get it for sports
It actually makes no sense at all for sports beyond billionaire owners trying to make fans feel like we’re all one, big, happy family. What on earth does the National anthem have to do with grown men playing baseball or football? Do they sing the National anthem before you sit down and start coding every day?
I guess that’s an Americanism - no national anthem played at the start of club sports in the UK as far as aware. Country level sports where the national team is playing, sure.
I was thinking about the world Cup or the Olympics tbh, I don't really have the American context.
The belief of "I should" is one of the core part for Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD, not confused with OCD). The behaviour is largely driven by the anxiety of "fail to e.g. be citizen" and sometimes is considered a little extreme from others' view.
A patriotism that sounds like "we are the best" often coincides with spurning rational and empathetic assessment of reality in favor of using this patriotism as a prideful crutch.
The US federal government doesn't do anything for its citizens. They are more interested in initiating WWIII and terrorizing the middle east.
Congratulations!
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I remember my wife going through all stages of visas. Student visa, H1B, green card, then citizen. If you've never gone through it, it's complicated and involves a lot of waiting. Green card was the most complex out of all of them. We had less paperwork getting a mortgage and buying a house. It's very bureaucratic, and could use with some simplification. But once you're a citizen, it's smooth sailing.
> We had less paperwork getting a mortgage and buying a house.
Generally, yes, this is the way it should be. Path from visitor to citizen should involve way more checks than owning a home.
What is the check that we need to do for aspiring citizens that wouldn’t interest a lender?
Also, making sure the house is sufficient collateral for the loan is a whole bunch of additional overhead.
US Citizenship is worth a lot more than a house....
> aspiring citizens that wouldn’t interest a lender
If it was possible the lender doesn't care who you are just your ability and willingness to pay for the loan. The best signals for that is history of repayment combined with cash, salary and collateral.
All other checks are the ones because those signals weren't strong enough and gov requirements for anti AML, good person, etc but those are gov reqs.
It's a long process and people who have been vetted and through it don't deserve to be held up unless there is a good reason. I can understand if there is something amiss but to just put the entire thing on hold for "theater" is wrong.
Still from what I understand the US takes in more immigrants every year than any other country.
Worldwide, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries—Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—combined
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
> Worldwide, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries—Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—combined
That's a somewhat misleading way of presenting data.
It is true that in absolute terms, the US contains more immigrants than any other country on earth.
However, on a percentage of the population basis, the US is actually only around the OECD average in terms of numbers of immigrants: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/foreign-born-populat... – in 2019, Luxembourg was 47.30% foreign-born, Australia 29.90%, Switzerland 29.70%, Israel 21.20%, Sweden 19.50%. At 13.60%, the US was around the middle.
The fact that the US comes first in absolute terms, is not because the US is unusually welcoming to immigrants, it is because (among developed countries) it is unusually populous – at 333 million people, it is over 2.5 times more populous than the 2nd most populous OECD member (Japan).
The top five countries in the world by population are China, India, United States, Indonesia, and Pakistan. As mega-population superpower/rising-power type countries go, the United states is it for the embrace of immigration.
Our anti-immigration lobby is loud and politicized, but there are smart people doing policy behind the scenes no matter which bunch of belligerent blowhards are in office in a given year.
We should be even more welcoming of immigration than we are, and we should clean up our act on e.g. the southern border and the humanitarian crisis that's completely avoidable there. We don't have this right yet.
But when it comes down to it in realpolitik terms, populous nations are strong nations both today, and especially in 20-40 years when powers like the PRC are going to be faltering badly because of demographic collapse and we're still going strong because new blood kept the country young and vibrant.
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If there’s been a straight up or down referendum by the public on sweeping limits to immigration greater than already exist, I’m unaware of it. This could be my ignorance, in which case I’d thank you for educating me via citation.
And while it’s a rare tier-one politician these days that hasn’t merited the word “traitor” by selling their actual as opposed to ostensible policy to monied influence, I’m likewise unaware of any split there along lines of ostensible immigration policy proposal. I’ll likewise thank you for any correction of my ignorance there.
Increasing immigration has never polled higher than 25% since 1965: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i.... But because republicans want cheap labor, we have gone from 5% foreign born population to 15% over that timeframe.
Cato published a survey in 2021 finding that the overwhelming majority of Americans want a low level of immigration: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/aside_mobil.... If you poll people, the median ends up being under 500,000 people per year. Which is about 1/5th of what it’s been annually under Biden.
Your first link is to a poll indicating a year-over-year spike that has by simple procedural timing not yet been subjected to public opinion in light of an important vote of any kind. Time will tell on that.
Your second link is a liberal education in how partisan think tanks cook surveys to push their agenda. The Cato Institute is the de facto PR arm of Koch Industries and you insult the HN readership by even serving that at our table.
Your third assertion would be interesting if substantiated and contextualized: where do I get robust information about the Biden administration breaking with previous administrations on defying the public consensus by a factor of 5? Or were net inflows substantially the same under the last three administrations hailing from both major parties?
You’ve been around here a long time, and you’re clearly a very smart person, and I have a lot of respect for both.
But I’ve been around longer, and I’ll kindly but firmly remind you to leave the partisan pamphleteering on the whole rest of the Internet.
The first link is a poll that’s been taken regularly since 1965. That poll shows that support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 25% since 1965. But since 1965 we have pursued a policy of increasing immigration.
Cato is a libertarian think thank that supports open borders so the Koch brothers can have cheap labor. My point is that even their survey shows that most Americans want a low level of immigration, half that of the current levels. They spin the headlines to point to the fact that few people want to cut immigration to zero, but the data still shows that people’s ideal immigration level is under 500,000 or so annually.
US can take in easily another 20-30 million immigrants over say 5-10 years - the question is always how to assimilate when there is already a distinct lack of affordable housing / schools / medical infra. There is literally no public investments in this.
That said the IRA act is poring money into manufacturing which is having direct effects in those states, but require a hard look at easing infra development,
How about migrant diversity? I.e. i found netherland far more diverse than uk.
In the 2021/2022 census, 16% of UK population was foreign-born. The top 5 countries of origin were India, Poland, Pakistan, Romania, and Ireland. [0]
In 2022, almost 15% of the Netherlands population was foreign-born. The top 5 countries of origin were Turkey, Suriname, Morocco, Indonesia, and the Dutch Caribbean. [1]
So I'm not sure, just looking at the statistics, if it is really true that one country is more diverse in terms of migrants than the other.
And, putting statistics aside, do you really think a country which until recently had a second-generation immigrant Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak, both of whose parents were born in East Africa, of Punjabi descent–and his wife was born in India too), is less diverse than the Netherlands, which has not yet in its history had a Prime Minister who was not ethnically Dutch? And I think if you look at Sunak's cabinet, you will notice it was more ethnically diverse than Schoof's is, or any of Rutte's were – and the current Starmer cabinet is more ethnically diverse than Schoof's as well.
[0] https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/mi...
[1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/dossier/asylum-migration-and-integr...
So percentages are nearly same - I feel the immigrant tail in NL is far longer
As I said, compare the current Netherlands cabinet to the current UK cabinet:
Schoof cabinet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoof_cabinet#Cabinet_membe...
Starmer cabinet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starmer_ministry#Cabinet
The current UK cabinet contains senior ministers from ethnic minority background, such as David Lammy as Foreign Secretary and Shabana Mahmood as Lord Chancellor. Who are their equivalents in the Netherlands?
Keep in mind
1) The US economy has no choice, it needs immigrants to keep the population from declining. This is why the southern border is what it is. We've trade an economic problem for an immigration problem.
2) In some - many? - cases these immigrants are a brain drain from their home country. That is, when "the best" come here instead of staying home to improve their on country, is that a net positive? We pat ourselves on the back but no one talks about how this hurts the from countries.
> no one talks about how this hurts the from countries
It's a fairly common topic when people talk about foreign aid and assistance. The classic dilemma is that we'd like to make sure top people all over the world get as much education as they can use, but we'd also like them to stay in their home countries and do the work of development even though they might rationally view the opportunities someplace else for a highly educated person as quite attractive.
Do we do that? Or when pressed say just that? In general, those who leave are the most able; those who don't less so. We accept at least some of the former, therefore we're skimming at least some cream off the top (for ourselves). In all the discussion and debates about immigration I've witnessed, I've never heard a single leader / decision maker say, "but we have to be careful not to take too many of their best...". Instead, it's always about how great we are about immigration. It can't be both.
In other words, "did you make up that thing you just wrote?" As it turns out, no, I did not. But I'm delighted you would imply that I did! At times my faith in online discourse gets a little too high, and it's healthy to recalibrate.
One example of what I was talking about (merely the first I was able to quickly google): the requirement for Fulbright scholars, who are paid to study at the graduate level in the United States, to return to their home countries, at least for a time, before trying to come back to the US:
You and your dependents are subject to Code of Federal Regulations rule 212(e), the two-year, home-country residence requirement associated with the J-visa. As noted throughout this guide, the spirit of the Fulbright Program is to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange. When you have completed your grant, you are expected to return home to share the knowledge you have gained. This means that until you have resided and been physically present in your home country for a combined total of two years following your departure from the United States, you and your dependents are ineligible to apply for status in the United States as:
Permanent residents, Temporary workers or trainees (visa status H) Fiancé(e)s (visa status K) Intracompany transferees (visa status L) Grounds for applying for a waiver of the two-year, home country residence requirement are extremely limited, and approval of waiver requests is rare. IIE cannot assist in this process. Waivers should not be requested as a means of continuing your grant activities.
Down voted? Why? At least stand up and counter. HN ain't what it used to be. Sad really.
I don’t know the exact algorithm, but I can give you a good idea why this might have happened. I hope you feel I’m not being critical, but rather trying to help explain that this is probably not personal…
1. Sensitive Topic
2. Rhetorical Questions and Ambiguity
3. Implied Criticism
4. Complex Sentence Structure (I’m guilty of writing in the same format as my thoughts too)
5. The Typo (“own country” instead of “on country”)
This effectively describes why you were likely algorithmically downvoted.
Ok. But 0 would be: obvious (to me) facts.
Fact: The US economy needs the headcount, esp since birthrates are down.
Fact: When we "win" the best & the brightest, the country they came from loses. Imagine if instead of fighting the American Revolution, everyone picked up and moved to (e.g.) Canada. The US loves to brag about the win, but never comes clean on the countries that lose.
These key facts are too often not mentioned in the context of this topic, because they alter the myth and change the narrative. So the solution is... DV'ing?
Anywhere else, that would be funny. On HN it's sad.
There is a place for us bottom readers on HN’s too. Honor the downvote.
I do. But what bother me is how consistently these an off topic comment and then a long subdiscussion that continues the irrelevance.
I come here to avoid random smalsmall minded down voting. It doesn't help at all
According to the article they just brought it back to 2014 levels.
Original article, not the msn.com repost:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-09-26/with-an-el...
MSN version isn't paywalled, though.
Odd, I didn't get a paywall. I guess they're being sneaky with it.
As with everything in the us immigration system. It’s not fast enough!
> the uptick in new citizens is due to efforts to reduce a backlog of applications that began during the Trump administration and exploded amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
If only Green Card processing was as efficient.
It is limited right? I assume the quotas are done by October / early November I assume.
Now this is asking too much dude, the government can't get efficient in two places at the same time, that would be cheating.
As much I like the points based system, I feel the family-based approach to which US pivoted to in 60s was the correct approach - you really cannot predict where the next einstein is going to be show up, and I always tell my wife we already lost her in Iran or Afghansitan
yay
Immigration is an economic geopolitical weapon against Russia and China.
America’s secret weapon, right there with no nearby enemies and two oceans
> with no nearby enemies
What is Cuba then?
Too weak to be an enemy?
Canada will rise again!
You're never too weak to be an enemy. You may be too weak to be a threat, but that's not the same as not being an enemy.
how old are you?
I mean, Cuba has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the US (see https://www.state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism/), which is not a bad signal for "US enemy."
I'm actually surprised it's listed as January 12, 2021... I'm guessing Obama delisted it and then Trump relisted it right before leaving office?
it's brought back anytime your need think-of-the-children demographic vote. which is a very old demographic... hence why I asked the age. it was honest curiosity
A victim
IMHO just weapon. War effort. Cannon fodder.
Extending the franchise devalues the franchise.
I remember hearing that exact phrase, word for word, back in 2008 about gay marriage. Guess what happened next?
Unlike marriage, voting is a zero-sum game.
And that's why the US is such a terrible place right now; more than 150 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election, a stark decline from the days of 1776 when the entire country had about 2.5 million people in total, many of whom were ineligible to vote, as God intended.
Right, of course, extending the franchise of voting to women and non-white, non-landholding men devalued the franchise, lol.
So you would support naturalization of immigrants who agree with your views, then?
You're asking the wrong question. Conflicts arise not just from differing views on general questions about governance, but from competing groups each fighting for their own self-interest. "Agreeing with views", for one fleeting moment in time, means little for the long-term cohesion of a country, or the prosperity and sovereignty of a people.
See for example Kashmir [1] - whether the coming immigrants agree with the natives on e.g. the tax rate, term limits for politicians, or environmental laws, don't even come up as concerns. Nor did Czechoslovakia split over gay marriage, or Yugoslavia over differing views on abortion.
This focus on "views" to the exclusion of all else is a purely American phenomenon, and a recent one at that - only six decades old.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...
America has a long history of successful integration of racial groups. Once upon a time, the Irish were extremely unwelcome in Boston, simply for being Catholics. Dozens of examples like this abound in American history. America is stronger than the countries you’ve listed because of the melting pot, not in spite of it. That’s because the selfishness you alluded to is contrary to a core American value: that a person is not defined by their ancestors’ virtues or sins, but by the content of their character. All the immigrants I know are fierce defenders of this principle.
It’s a pity some people can’t think of politics as possibly more than zero sum. A good policy should actually lift all boats. Middle America simply will not survive without more people and more economic activity, period. If native born children choose to move to the coasts, and no immigrants fill in the gaps, you’re not going to have the long-term prosperity you’re imagining.
By 'America', do you mean the landmass controlled by some administrative entity that calls itself the US government, or do you mean some group of people?
> It’s a pity some people can’t think of politics as possibly more than zero sum. A good policy should actually lift all boats.
That there are such policies doesn't mean one can ignore the zero-sum ones, or the downright hostile ones, as the Uyghurs could tell you.
I mean the people and land area governed by the United States Constitution, a document that provides explicit protections against the kind of ethnostate policies you are so worried about.
No. Look at who backs Trump, who is himself of recent immigrant ancestry. His base is heavily composed of Germans in the Midwest, European Catholics, and Latinos. He reversed the trend of Vietnamese and Cuban voters away from the GOP and has been making huge inroads with recent immigrants from Latin America.
The death of the GOP and the rise of MAGA has more than a little to do with immigrants.
Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration.
However we just neglected to build anywhere for them to live...
We are in a cost-of-living crisis, a per-capita recession.
One of the reasons we are not in a full-blown recessions is the wealth that immigrants brought with them!
Building firms are going under, and we gutted the trade schools years ago. So the housing crisis isn't going to resolve anytime soon...
I think there is a lot of divisiveness towards illegal immigration in the United States and securing the border, but there is a lot of agreement that the mechanism for legal immigration here is also broken and should be fixed and that’s a totally different thing. It’s sad that the fix is about who they think these people will vote for though.
I never understood that lack of understanding by politicians on what people need - totally understandable in US where corporate lobbyists rule congress. Australia, Canada governance are mysteries to me.
On the residential homes - i assume it not a question of land/resources.
All else being equal immigration drives down wages by increasing the labor supply and drives up housing by increasing housing demand. Nevertheless sufficiently wealthy (if they actually onshore that wealth) and productive immigrants can be a net benefit for the receiving nation. Hence the point systems and such to select for them.
As it happens, the US powers that be are big fans of real estate appreciation and wage depression. They evidently don’t much care about selecting for high value immigrants either. Tech workers who pay big taxes and create bigger value get a way harder time of it than obvious public charges. It’s strange, but revealed preferences never lie.
The Australian and the USA's immigration system are substantially different in terms of underlying values. The Australian system assigns points based on skill and merit. The US has an emphasis on reuniting families, a lottery system, and difficulty through ambiguity. Anecdotally, my friend who immigrated from Silicon Valley to Australia was able to explain his process to me in about an hour. In contrast, I have had the USA system explained to me many times, and it still hasn't clicked. I can't help but to feel like this is by design.
As for our (USA's) housing crisis, the New York Times had a podcast about that just four days ago [1]. There are some notable parallels to what you have described. TL;DR: The 2008 recession pushed us from building 2.2 million houses a year to 600K, for the last 20ish years. The skilled laborers and tradesmen who used to build houses have closed shop. Now here we are years later and millions of houses short with no clear way to reboot the industry.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/podcasts/the-daily/housin...
There's substantially more immigration to Australia through university scams (fronts that don't actually educate) than genuine immigrants. The majority is not skill and merit based because of the "temporary" "students" who can work and never leave the country, as well as the chain migration loopholes.
Australia has almost the highest immigration per capita in the world, and a massive chunk of that is pure fraud. [1]
75% of "students" come in via unregulated agents, many of whom direct students to these university fronts.
In fact, Australians overwhelmingly reject mass immigration. 71% oppose it and are regularly ignored by the powers that be on both sides. The left imports immigrants for ideological reasons and the right imports them for cheap labor for their corporate buddies.
[1] https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/fake-schools-fake...
While Australia might have a lot of fraudulent immigration, they harass the normal tourists under the pretense of preventing fraudulent immigration.
This happened some years ago, so perhaps the system has been improved meanwhile, but I strongly doubt it.
At that time, I was living in an European country, but I was working for a subsidiary of an Australian company. There was a reciprocal agreement with Australia that visas must not be required for visiting the other country.
In Europe, the agreement was observed, so any of our Australian colleagues could visit the local subsidiary at any time, no questions asked.
However, there was a moment when the Australian headquarters decided that a team from the European subsidiary must come in a visit to them, for an important meeting where some future strategies had to be decided.
We expected that the travel to Australia would be as easy as the reverse travel for the Australians, but no, while Australia could not demand a visa, which would have been illegal, they had replaced the visa requirement with a requirement for some kind of "electronic" permit, whose name I do not remember, which was nothing else but a visa with another name, because without it you would have been denied entry in Australia.
To obtain the Australian permit one had to provide a really ridiculous amount of personal information about yourself and about a lot of family relatives (not only spouse, parents and siblings, but even grandparents), certainly at least as much as when applying for some security clearance of the highest level. I have traveled through many countries, and even those that require visas do not request such an amount of information. You do not need to provide such information even when going to Israel, where they have reasons to be more careful.
The most annoying was that they were not satisfied with providing a bank account where you held an amount of money greater than would be required for all your travel and stay in Australia. They also required for that bank account a detailed lists with all the transactions done with that bank account for the past three months.
Initially we have provided the list of banking transactions with only the amounts of money that had been transferred, but that was not good enough, they wanted for each transaction the complete information, like the invoice that has been paid and for whom. I could understand if they had required only the source of the money that credited the account, to determine who was paying for the travel to Australia, but a complete list of transactions, including everything that you have bought, was an abusive request.
If we had known in advance the Australian system, we would have created three months earlier a bank account with the only purpose of storing money for the Australian visit, which would have had an empty list of transactions. As it was, because this was a business trip, the account with money for the trip was the company account. Disclosing all the transactions from the company account could potentially disclose some confidential information for competitors and it would also disclose to the employees going in that trip information considered confidential by the company, i.e. the salaries of all employees.
Due to the complications created by the need to provide all the information requested by the Australian authorities, the process for completing the applications for the permit was very long. Even after providing all the required information, on-line to some immigration offices located in Tasmania, the processing of the applications took a few months. Because it was delayed so much, eventually the Australian headquarters has cancelled the visit to Australia and they have organized a meeting in Europe, where they did not fear that the Australians are illegal immigrants.
Our case was certainly not a singular one, because at the same time there was in the news a case when there had been an important meeting of some international organization, which happened to be organized in that year in Australia, and the representatives of some countries could not reach the meeting because they had received Australian visas much too late, even if they had been requested early enough and there was no doubt that they had a valid reason to come to Australia.
> Australia, on both sides of the house, also understands the importance of Immigration.
Then you proceed to list the ways things are worse. Maybe immigration is not good for you and you should not take it as an axiom?
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Be brave and expressive. Whatever do you mean?
The party bemoaning illegal immigration when in power tried to entirely kill off immigration and naturalization - which are totally unrelated to such a complaint.
Not to mention birthright citizenship.
I could spell it out more plainly if you like, but if you are at all familiar with the parties, you should know by now which which one tried these things.
I come from a country where the Anglo-American tradition of participatory self-government is a totally alien concept. They view government as a parental entity and would be perfectly happy with a well functioning autocracy like China’s. This is true of my family members who became naturalized citizens, even after decades in America.
There is one party that benefits from people with foreign mindsets participating in American elections.
Ok, so are you one of the special Bangladeshis who escaped the backwater where they came from and somehow became an enlightened, modern, westernized credit to your country, or should we be sending you back because you’re ruining the vibes here?
I don’t think I should be allowed to vote. I grew up under almost ideal circumstances for assimilation and it took maybe halfway. Like most people, I’m becoming more like my dad as I get older, and my dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh.
Maybe my kids should be allowed to vote. But they’ve got an American mom. On the other hand, studies show second generation Asians feel even less assimilated than first generation ones, and I’m seeing that in my oldest kid: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Microso...
Those feelings, which result in group conflict, are destructive to a democracy. You can’t build a well-ordered, efficient society when large numbers of people feel alienated. It’s a recipe for fighting over group conflicts instead of cooperating in an emotionally detached way on things like infrastructure.
You can see the ethnic/religious loyalty play out when the rubber hits the road. My parents have been in the country for 35 years and probably won’t vote for Harris because of what’s happening in the Middle East. They are not people who care about human rights. They think the Rohingya are probably illegal Bangladeshi immigrants to Myanmar. They’re not Arab and haven’t stepped foot in a mosque in 35 years. But ethnic and religious collectivism runs deep in a way individualistic westerners cannot hope to understand.
You know, there are women who strongly believe that they should not be enfranchised. Well, not just themselves, but that all women are incapable of making sound voting decisions. After all, women are not quite smart enough to understand the nuances of politics, and god forbid we make important decisions about war or healthcare that way.
Moral panics about suffrage are nothing new. Notably, opposition often comes from the very group that is disenfranchised: humans are nothing if not aligned, and there's always someone who is going to hold an unusual, self-effacing position. I will give you credit for at least being consistent in your position when applying it to yourself, but that doesn't give it any more weight than the idea that women should not be allowed to vote. Or the newly liberated African-American men before them, or Native Americans who got their rights after. It's historically been a losing argument and it seems awfully unlikely that the current situation is any different.
Also, while we're splitting hairs: I would consider many individualist westerners to not care about human rights. Actually I think a lot of the time most Americans are not voting for their rights, usually because they are mostly static until significant change happens to make them care (say, the civil rights movement, or the fall of Roe v. Wade). And I think some of them are actually actively against the cause of human rights, seeking to deprive and limit the extent to which they apply. I know people who won't vote for Harris because of what's happening in the Middle East. Some of them want more bombs going there and some want fewer! I think it is actually quite rude to assume that your cultural divisions are somehow special and unheard of amid the existing voting population, or that they are enough to destabilize the country. That does not seem to be supported by history.
> There is one party that benefits from people with foreign mindsets participating in American elections.
It's well on display in the article too with the multiple examples of recent immigrants bemoaning [price] inflation, but then just assuming this is the immediate fault of the current administration and going on to say they're going to vote for former party that was actually responsible for creating much of the core [monetary] inflation that is driving current price inflation. Some basic education in economics and more on separation of powers (aka bureaucracy) could do wonders.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I don’t think it’s a matter of “education.” Average people don’t vote/act according to formally reasoning things out. They act based on intuition and socialization.
And the socialization of immigrants is completely different than of the people who founded the country. I know a bunch of New England Congregationalists. These are people whose families came over on the Mayflower. And from my perspective as a Bangladeshi they’re like some alien civilization. Like, they find it vaguely unseemly to have food with too much flavor. But they have a crazy high conscientiousness and process-focus, high social trust, and a reflexive aversion to waste. When you put people like that in charge of a country, it turns out a certain way.
If those people still comprised the majority of voters, we probably wouldn’t have a $35 trillion debt today. At a G7 meeting after the global financial crisis, Angela Merkel, daughter of a Lutheran pastor, started crying because the other countries insisted Germany engage in deficit spending. Bangladeshis wouldn’t act like that.
Yeah, "education" was not the right word. My own gripe is more about something like critical analysis in the context of our larger system. Continuing with the example, the commenters in the article were likely spurred on by the reactionary media constantly taking the very real issue of inflation and then fallaciously pinning it on the current administration. But instead of defending themselves, sticking with the topic, and directing blame where it belongs (massive monetary creation hidden while monetary velocity was very low), the democratic party seemingly reacts something like "oh no, not inflation again. did we cause it this time? we can't even remember. best to stay quiet.", and then goes on talking about their own disjoint narratives, with that same setup of a core of truth but the conclusions running amok.
And sorry, but your initial point was very much partisan. You didn't name a specific party, but you certainly directed people to focus on one of them. Even if different people focused on different parties, that's still driving partisanship. Personally I see the effects we're each describing playing out for the immediate benefit of both political teams, with the loser being any sort of shared discourse.
I agree with you about the causes of the current fiscal situation. If you look at videos from 2008, Trump was criticizing the Fed’s zero interest rate policy saying it would cause a problem down the line. Then what did he do once in office? Sent everyone checks with his name on them. That’s the exact sort of thing politicians do in Bangladesh. My mom, who never even considered voting for Romney or McCain or Bush, is hoping Trump beats Harris. The GOP is doing what it needs to adapt to cultural change, just as it did with Reagan, who flipped Catholics by declaring a truce with the new deal.
What country is that? I've heard a similar sentiment from many of my transfer student acquaintances/friends from various Asian countries.
Bangladesh, but I suspect that the same could be said for most Asian countries.
The west in general, and America in particular, is the product of mindsets and modes of thinking that were centuries in the making and are different from the dominant ways of thinking elsewhere in the world. Your average westerner can’t articulate these ideas precisely, but has an intuitive understanding of them because they were raised in western society.
You can’t take an adult raised somewhere like Bangladesh and expect them to think like an American just because they’ve lived here for 7-10 years and been naturalized.
Probably because if Trump gets elected they'll crawl to a halt again.
Biden has 3.5 years to adjust the policy and only now have the numbers gone up? It's probably not strictly partisan.
Don't quote me but I swear I remember hearing somewhere the Obama actually deported more immigrants than Trump. Or maybe it wasn't Trump? The gist was that Obama wasn't as pro-immigrants as most thought he was.
True, but with some important caveats.
Trump technically deported fewer people per term than Biden’s term or either of Obama’s terms.
But the definition of “deported” is important here. From what I remember, the definition of “encounter” (when CPB catches people crossing the border or in that buffer zone within 50 miles inland of the border/port of entry) changed around 2014. With it, the definition of who is “deported” versus simply turned away as they try to enter changed.
Also important to know that Obama most likely increased deportations during a specific period strategically to give Democrats leverage to negotiate for better policy and to establish legitimacy in the negotiations. Around 2013, there was a concerted effort in the Senate to come up with a comprehensive immigration reform package — something that hadn’t happened since the late 1980s. IIRC this was called the “Gang of Eight” — 4 Dems, 4 Repubs hashing out a framework before they were going to send a bill to the floor for negotiation. The gang never delivered a bill because the 2 parties are dysfunctional and would rather have a broken immigration system to complain about than risk actually solving it and gaining some downside risk that voters won’t actually like the effects/consequences.
Anyway, Obama’s last 2 years in office had lower immigration partly because of the change in definition, partly due to changes in policy for CPB, partly due to not needing leverage against Republicans for an immigration bill that no longer had a chance of passing, and partly due to changes in geopolitics / “push factors” of the countries where the most immigrants across the southern border came from.
After the Gang of Eight failed, Obama then pushed for reasonable treatment of the most sympathetic and least culpable undocumented immigrants — the DREAMers. Honestly it totally made sense to me because Congress, not the president sets the budget for border patrol / immigration. Every president maxes out the budget every year. The DREAM Act was simply a way to deprioritize those least likely to be a legal problem to shift budget priorities towards the parts of immigration management that need it more.
> Biden has 3.5 years to adjust the policy and only now have the numbers gone up? It's probably not strictly partisan.
The Biden administration has been like that on even partisan things. Take Net Neutrality: they stuck with a FCC pick that couldn't get confirmed for years, and we only saw progress once they pulled their head out of their ass and picked someone else who could actually get confirmed.
As long as my social security checks do not bounce starting in ten years, let as many people in as you want.
Burning a bit of karma never hurts now and then.
Immigrants are generally young and seeking employment. Bringing in young workers is the best way to guarantee social security for yourself.
Social Security benefits will reduce _despite_ immigrants, not _because_ of them.
Americans voted in extremely good terms on SS (always good COLA adjustments, the age of SS retirement never adjusting for longer lifetimes or easier labor). It was never sustainable without consistent massive economic growth.
Based on the SSA’s own published findings, they will need to reduce benefits by 25% starting in 2034. Unless of course something changes to collect more taxes.
Like removing the cap on contributions?
I’ve known many people that immigrated to the US. I grew up in a neighborhood that was 98% southeast Asian immigrants. The 1990’s and 2000’s were a better time in a lot of ways. But in 2024 with the recession still on and housing costing a fortune where are they going to go??? I mean especially considering the overwhelmingly high record numbers too. I mean this in the most practical and sincere way.
As an American with Southeast Asian immigrant parents, they will live in a way that most Americans would find intolerable. Whole families in a 1 bedroom, very long commutes, taking buses, and living apart from their children (CPS, I know).
To be clear, I did not grow up like this, but I know many that did.
Some, yeah. I grew up with the 1990’s OGs. Outside my project and literally across the street was a pocket of county within city limits and all the Hmong and Laos families lived like that there. I courted a girl that lived with like 15 people in a 2 bed 1 bath house there. But the families in my project had to follow government rules with respect to the number of people living in one unit.
