"There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen now."
There’s no famines going on anywhere in Latin America. Yet we had more immigrants to the U.S. last year than during the entire ten year period from Ireland during the great famine.
...do you mean per capita? because all of latin america has north of 600 million people, versus (at the time of the famine) ireland's ~7 million, so "more" would in strict terms be very unsurprising. Like it would basically be a given that a whole continent contributes far more immigrants than a small country.
Google's automated result on "irish immigration to america during the potato famine" suggests ~1.5 million Irish folks resettled in America during the famine, though the first source I checked[1] claimed ~2M. No automated google result came back for "total latin american immigration to america 2015-2025", but this article[2] claims that the immigrant latin american population was ~2.73M in 2010 and ~3.91M in 2020, an increase of 1.2M people over 12 years. That feels like it could be low, so a second check over on Wikipedia[3] claims that total immigration from "the americas", including Canada, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc., totaled ~4.22 M from 2012-2022, the most recently included year. Technically that is more in absolute numbers, if you also stretch the definition of Latin America, I guess?
So, what the heck are you talking about? Can you back those claims up?
You might wonder why the state of affairs in Latin America drives people to hard lives in the US.
A certain large country to the north had a policy of destabilizing economic, covert action and direct military action in place to save these nations from the horrors of socialism.
When you build empire, there’s always a pull of your subjects to the center.
Preventing Latin American countries from forming alliances with the USSR does not constitute turning Latin American into imperial possessions: they are different levels of influence or control.
American imperialism moved past that. Our tools are economics and banking. Places like Central America and Indonesia were all about economics. Guatemala has historically been dominated by fruit companies.
Sometimes it spills over. The domination of Chile transitioned from pulling the levers of banking and capital access to a full on CIA sponsored coup, followed by the Pinochet experience. NAFTA was great for the top-line numbers for the US and Canada, but nuked the Mexican agricultural economy. (Repeating what we did within the US)
Critical thinking is a good thing. When you read about people packing up their family and meager belongings to walk through hostile Mexico, to then pay a gangster to smuggle you across the Sonora, so you can work some menial labor job in the US… the question “why?” should come to mind.
Let's not argue semantics here: The fact that latin american countries did not turn into Puerto Rico does not mean the imperialist action was not executed.
I think you might be missing a lot of history about US intervention in Latin America. A good place to start might be with the history of the United Fruit Company, particularly in Guatemala.
> Do you realize that if the USA had been run the way you advocate that you'd never have lived there in the first place?
Of course! But I’m not a child and I’m capable of conceiving of what would be “good” separate and apart from what would be “good for me.”
Indeed, as someone with a large south asian family that immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia, and who is especially well acquainted with Anglo-Protestant culture, I’m particularly well positioned to form the opinions that: (1) assimilation is slow and doesn’t happen completely; and (2) even high skill immigration, at scale, isn’t conducive to maintaining our american participatory democracy.
So, I spent some days mulling over my answer. For many years I've considered you to be one of my friends on HN and it has been a pretty sad affair to see you slide further and further down in your values and ethics. That's why I did not want to just flip you off with a snide remark but to try to explain to you why I think you are very much in the wrong here and about many things in general. You claim you are 'a smart person' but your intelligence has been hijacked to work against you.
It seems that you think that because you are a 'legal immigrant' or descendant of such that you are somehow better or more proper than an illegal immigrant. This is funny because the people you vote for only see that distinction as a temporary item on their checklist. That's how they got you to vote them into power. Now that they are in power and once they are done with the items higher on their to do list (and which they need in order to further consolidate their power) they are going to move down the list. And one of those items includes you: people of color in general, and with 'of color' I mean even slightly non-white. This includes you, your parents and your children. Especially educated people of color who could conceivably put up a solid defense. And their extended family is on that same list because they too do not pass the purity test.
Sooner or later they will make their move. And by then of course you are welcome to cling to your belief that the law will protect you. But these people don't actually care all that much about the law. So what has happened here is that you have become in part radicalized, your strong feelings about one particular subject has caused you to lose sight of the long term strategic goals that the people that you vote for have made perfectly clear. And effectively you've helped them to act against you and the group that you should stand in defense for: immigrants, legal or otherwise.
Because the fact that you went the legal way contains a massive assumption: that the legal way is the reasonable way. It isn't necessarily so and enshrined in the US values is the dream of living a happy life. That is something far more universal than the reality as drawn by lines on a map and of course people are going to seek that even if they are forbidden to do so by a technicality of law.
The USA is built on immigrants. Immigrants that pull the ladder up after they have arrived - legal or otherwise - are part of the problem, not the solution because they define themselves as the in-group and all of those who would like to follow in their footsteps as the out-group. This on account of assimilation (who cares, that's the next generation's problem) or some other bogeyman.
And finally, your 'American participation democracy' is under siege, but not from immigrants (unless we count Elon Musk as one of those). Wake up and stop your slide into the abyss before it is too late, so that there are still people left to defend you when the knock on the door comes.
> It seems that you think that because you are a 'legal immigrant' or descendant of such that you are somehow better or more proper than an illegal immigrant. This is funny because the people you vote for only see that distinction as a temporary item on their checklist. That's how they got you to vote them into power. Now that they are in power and once they are done with the items higher on their to do list (and which they need in order to further consolidate their power) they are going to move down the list. And one of those items includes you: people of color in general, and with 'of color' I mean even slightly non-white. This includes you, your parents and your children. Especially educated people of color who could conceivably put up a solid defense. And their extended family is on that same list because they too do not pass the purity test.
So if last year a person votes for JD Vance to be VP, you are saying they voted for someone who is secretly planning to harm his own wife and kids? And if next year someone votes for Vivek Ramaswamy to be Governor of Ohio, you are saying they are voting for someone who’s secretly planning to harm not just his wife and kids, but also himself?
Trump has endorsed many “even slightly non-white people”, from Ramaswamy to be Governor of Ohio, to Mehmet Oz’s unsuccessful campaign to become Senator for Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker’s (also unsuccessful) campaign to be Senator for Georgia. He’s also nominated Walker to be Ambassador to the Bahamas, installed Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor, Scott Turner as Secretary of HUD… but you’re saying that elevating them to high office is all part of Trump’s grand plan to harm them?
There has been large scale migration throughout recorded history. Just look at the endless problems the Romans had with the migration of groups such as the Goths and the Vandals, who were themselves displaced by the Huns.
