Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

One thing that really pisses me off about the whole populist anti-immigration stance is how thankless, hypocritical and selfish the whole thing is:

People want to avoid negative effects from immigration (cultural/language/crimerate)- fine.

But are those people acknowledging how much economical growth was driven by migrant labor over the last half century? Hell no. Would the average alt-righter be willing to sacrifice any fraction of all those compounded gains? Absolutely not- every dollar of tax is too much, even to pay a fraction of the damage that is and will be caused by them (=> energy price/co2 taxation).

As a self-identifying moderate patriot, selfish complainers of that ilk seem a worse plague on their nation than the immigrants they keep whining about.

This is an oversimplification and a pretty extreme case of over-categorizing people into groups. People who have problems with immigration aren't automatically alt-right. People who have problems with immigration understand that immigration has also historically provided economic growth - those aren't mutually exclusive things.

If you're worried that people might be mixing you up with the virulent xenophobes, perhaps its time to do something about those virulent xenophobes because there are a lot of them and they exert a disproportionate amount of political power while relying on arguments that are frequently specious or outright dishonest.

Now, you likely feel 'but I'm not like that, so why is it my problem?' and the answer is twofold. One, unless you actively push back on those people they're going to drag you down with them into a moral and legal pit, and two, because (unlike immigrants) you can vote and donate and lobby. There's a lot of weird stuff going on in the country right now, as I'm sure you're aware. It'd be nice to just look at policy in the abstract and deal with things compartmentaly, but there are times you have to step back and look at the bigger picture.

> if you're worried...

> you likely feel...

Thank you for the advice, but I don't worry about that, and I do not have that feeling at all. I don't experience any conflation with xenophobes in my real life. I find them repugnant, and vote against them and speak against them, except where we incidentally align. I am 90% liberal leaning (US liberal).

The fact of experiencing negative things that happen to be related to immigration (or employment/contracting) policy does not make you a xenophobe, generally speaking. Cultures can sometimes clash and economics have concrete effects on the American Dream - it's an unfortunate reality, but it is reality.