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.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...
[2]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program
[3]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-...
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
Comparing to US immigration support following the Vietnam war this is shameful.
It has Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh too - some of them makes sense.
But overall this list feels too much.
Whether or not that's a good/true reason is another discussion.
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.
How many immigrants from an island with less than 50k inhabitants are there?
Also, Cuba surprises me, doesn't the USA usually love to make a big deal about people fleeing big bad evil communists?
Norway for example, appears to have de-facto banned 5 countries (all on the list) that have such programs: https://www.imidaily.com/europe/confirmed-norway-quietly-den...
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.
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.
A pause in processing of immigration visas affects the tech industry and is relevant to most of the audience who lives in the US.
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.
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.
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.
It is off-topic.
>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.
And what will the luck be needed for?
A very vague comment.
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 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.
We used to be great shape in regards to the age depopulation bomb.