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[da_nang]

Visa overstayers are probably easier and faster to deal with as their info is already recorded. I imagine the government already knows who they are, when they got here, and what their country of origin is.

Illegal border crossers, not so much.

So a new visa overstayer can take a few minutes to process, whereas a new illegal border crosser can take months (assuming you can get country of origin out of them).

[hector13]

Except you have to find the visa overstayer first.

[Trekkin]

Course though, the illegal immigration problem is increasingly being those that overstay their visas, not cross the border illegally. I guess it's just harder to freak out about immigrants overstaying their visas than it is for 'invaders' since border crossers are more visible than those overstaying visas.

That's absolutely true numerically, but I'd argue that's probably not the metric we'd want to use in prioritizing how we deal with the problem. Illegal crossings of the border are disproportionately over-represented in human trafficking and so forth -- and certainly in the number of people dying in the desert before we can reach them.

Weird as it sounds to say, some form of increased border security is probably part of the solution for the worst parts of illegal immigration  in the sense of the suffering involved, although better transportation infrastructure and surveillance is a far more integral part of that than any sort of physical barrier.

[redwallzyl]

Course though, the illegal immigration problem is increasingly being those that overstay their visas, not cross the border illegally. I guess it's just harder to freak out about immigrants overstaying their visas than it is for 'invaders' since border crossers are more visible than those overstaying visas.

That's absolutely true numerically, but I'd argue that's probably not the metric we'd want to use in prioritizing how we deal with the problem. Illegal crossings of the border are disproportionately over-represented in human trafficking and so forth -- and certainly in the number of people dying in the desert before we can reach them.

Weird as it sounds to say, some form of increased border security is probably part of the solution for the worst parts of illegal immigration  in the sense of the suffering involved, although better transportation infrastructure and surveillance is a far more integral part of that than any sort of physical barrier.

The thousands of people dying in the desert is the border security strategy. They call it "prevention through deterrence" and it's really just murder disguised as natural processes.

[Trolldefender99]

Well, its not the current discussion in this thread.

But has anyone else seen a sudden great increase in racism toward Chinese gamers? Not sure if it goes beyond gaming, but I would imagine its the same in other areas. I know there are online communities that are racist toward Brazilian gamers, but against Chinese gamers seems to be a relatively new thing.

I've noticed a great increase in racist remarks against Chinese gamers on both Reddit (for example, the Atlas sub-reddit which you can see when searching "Chinese" as a search option). But then I've also seen racist remarks against Chinese on the WoW official blizzard forums (but the thread has since been deleted luckily). People complaining about playing with Chinese, labeling them ALL as cheaters and terrible people (which to me is racist 101. For one thing, any place can have cheaters and terrible people are everywhere).

Has anyone else noticed this at all? Maybe I'm just noticing more with current politics going on and a certain brickhead of a leader...but I don't recall seeing Chinese specifically being so targeted by racists. There was of course the gamers that "hate" brazilians, which is just as bad. But now the new thing seems to be Chinese gamers.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this in the gaming groups you are a part of? I know bay12 is open and accepting, which is great. But I've noticed other places an increase in racism has gone up a lot.

[sluissa]

Have you actually played any games with large chinese populations? Thewy can make a game intolerable. Anything with publicbvoice chat gets spammed with "China #1". The vast majority of gold farms in mmos are Chinese. Cheating is rampant, especially in any game with a real money trading system where you can buy items off other players. I've quit games before because they suddenly got popular in China.

That's not to say all chinese are like that, but a certain number of them make abusiness of games and wreck any sort of balanced economy. A certain number of them decide to take any communications path as a valid stste propaganda path.
Then you have the sketchy corporate influences like Tencent which are going around and buying chunks or wholesale well loved and successful game companies and making changes often, and occasionally outright ruining them.

I don't think anyone complains if a chinese gamer comes in and plays by the rules. Or only the true racists will. But it's not racism if you're observing bad behavior and it happens to mostly come out of one country.

[da_nang]

One I can remember is Chinese players on PlanetSide 2. Though that is more about the difficulty in playing with them, due to language barrier and latency issues.

I see it more as the Chinese equivalent to the Russian Counter-Strike "cyka blyat" player stereotype.

[Trolldefender99]

Have you actually played any games with large chinese populations? Thewy can make a game intolerable. Anything with publicbvoice chat gets spammed with "China #1". The vast majority of gold farms in mmos are Chinese. Cheating is rampant, especially in any game with a real money trading system where you can buy items off other players. I've quit games before because they suddenly got popular in China.

That's not to say all chinese are like that, but a certain number of them make abusiness of games and wreck any sort of balanced economy. A certain number of them decide to take any communications path as a valid stste propaganda path.
Then you have the sketchy corporate influences like Tencent which are going around and buying chunks or wholesale well loved and successful game companies and making changes often, and occasionally outright ruining them.

I don't think anyone complains if a chinese gamer comes in and plays by the rules. Or only the true racists will. But it's not racism if you're observing bad behavior and it happens to mostly come out of one country.

But that is the thing. That is like saying everyone in the US are racist german nazis, because of a bad "few". When in reality the majority voted against that. I've been in games where the server was dominated by US players, and they were the worst communities I've ever been a part of (Age of Conan is the big example). Does that mean ALL US players are like that or even the majority? No. Its just those people.

I've been in games with brazilian players and I made the best friends in those games and at least in WoW, they get treated extremely badly because of where they are from. But I've also made great friends on US, european, australian servers.

I know you said they aren't ALL like that, but its the people labeling ALL of them like that is a problem or even saying its the majority. The bad few shouldn't mean the majority/all are like what you described. Otherwise anyone can say that about many gaming communities.

Another example is the countless scam and spam emails/phone calls I get with US phone numbers (so I assume they are from the US even though they can spoof numbers). Does that mean the majority in the US are scammers or/and spammers? No, even though that is the vast majority of phone calls I get is just annoying spam stuff.

China is a very large populated country, so there is going to be "more" people of not as nice qualities, because of such a large population. But from my own experience, I've met many great friends on Chinese, Brazilian, Australian and many from various European countries.

But what I was mostly referring to is the people who refuse to even play with players from other countries, just based on the country they are from. Saying terrible things about the entire/majority population because of a bad few. That to me is racist 101, labeling a majority population because of a few bad apples so to speak. That is what is going on with the anti-refugees as well and anti-migrants, but that is another discussion, but it is another example of what I mean.

[sluissa]

You can go with that attitude if you want, but at the end of the day if someone is shouting chinese in my ear and ruining my experience playing a game, I'm going to want them to leave. If this becomes a pattern, I'm going to want anyone from china to leave. It's the same way brazil got their reputation, it's the same way russians got their reputation. It's unfortunate, but at some point you simply can't pick through individual cases.

Are most people nice? Yes, more or less. Do I leave my home's door unlocked and open and allow anyone to wander through? No. I lock the door to everyone, because a few bad actors can't be trusted.

Also I get those scam phone calls from "US" numbers as well. They're rarely from the US, based on the accent they call in with.

[Jopax]

The Atlas example you mentioned is completely justified and was a reaction to bands of chinese players coming into the game and murdering any non-chinese players on sight, making entire islands off-limits. The response was pretty much in kind and they're killed on sight now by everyone else.

[WealthyRadish]

I think a broader issue here is whether statistics in general can be used to justify discrimination. A common argument against this is that a statistical representation of a large population is a poor way of judging individuals and small groups, since (particularly with regard to people) we can assume that there will be very large variance from the expected behavior, together with a more philosophical point that flawed individuals being judged by other flawed individuals deserve basic human respect (or at least "benefit of the doubt"). There's also the point that the "statistics" being used in cases of discrimination by an individual in their social interactions are usually just that one person's peculiar subjective experience that's extremely vulnerable to bias and lacks a mathematical basis.

I don't actually think these arguments are enough, though. I can't think of solid actual examples where I wouldn't apply it, but it's still a qualified statement that depends on the actual character of the populations and the sampling and so on. It's conceivable that the variance among individuals could be low and that the statistics could show that race or whatever is a strong correlating factor to something horrible, which many would be willing to interpret as meaning that people don't deserve the "benefit of the doubt" and discrimination might be justified. Really, I think there needs to be some other component to the argument to say that prejudice Is Bad, as the possible existence of cases where it Maybe Isn't So Bad lends weight to the sort of "rational discrimination" point of view.

For me, the additional point that I've found most convincing is the difficulty in imagining a case where discrimination or prejudice could actually improve the real outcome, whether the statistics appear to justify it or not. Human society is such a chaotic mess and every individual human's perceptions are so sensitive to extremely minor perturbations that it really is inconceivable to me to imagine a situation where a reasonably possible statistical argument would be enough to give a guarantee that discrimination would do more good than harm. Even if you did know for sure that a random individual from a population can be reasonably assumed to be horrible in some particular way, how could you really systemically apply that information in a way that doesn't make things so much worse for everyone, in totally chaotic and unexpected ways? That to me is what really seals the issue off. I think people too often consider only the first argument, and the result is that the modern liberal infatuation with tolerance can very easily come off as nothing more than a sacred foible inculcated in childhood (which is very easily beaten in many people's eyes by "common sense" arguments).

Edit: Something more interesting, do we actually have many Chinese baywatchers? I don't think bay12 is blocked in China. I think I only know of a few people here (at least in the lower boards) that aren't from the Americas or Europe.

[scriver]

Closing the border is going to have a much more pronounced effect on legal migration, compared to illegal. Most notable will be trade, where the loss in revenue will outpace the cost of a border fence within days, and the cost of an actual wall within weeks.

Clearly Trymp's master plan is to lower the American economy so far that the South Americans stop migrating there for work

Which will actually work, in a broken Paperclip Machine AI sort of way. If you tank the U.S. Economy, and achieve parity with Mexico, mexican immigration will eventually become mexican emigration!

You can't have drug trafficking if nobody can afford drugs *taps forehead

Even if you did know for sure that a random individual from a population can be reasonably assumed to be horrible in some particular way, how could you really systemically apply that information in a way that doesn't make things so much worse for everyone, in totally chaotic and unexpected ways?

The standards of which I bother with regarding jumping to conclusions about people regarding games that I play for my entertainment are not the same as those I hold an employer/government/similar authority. These are entirely separate issues of completely different weight.

[hector13]

While I accept that this is not what you don’t mean to say racism is acceptable in some places, I don’t think racism in any form or arena is acceptable. While it might be worse from an authority of some description, racism needs to be challenged in all its guises.

[Folly]

Closing the border is going to have a much more pronounced effect on legal migration, compared to illegal. Most notable will be trade, where the loss in revenue will outpace the cost of a border fence within days, and the cost of an actual wall within weeks.

Clearly Trymp's master plan is to lower the American economy so far that the South Americans stop migrating there for work

Which will actually work, in a broken Paperclip Machine AI sort of way. If you tank the U.S. Economy, and achieve parity with Mexico, mexican immigration will eventually become mexican emigration!

We're already there. We've actually been there for more than a decade. Illegal mexicans are leaving the US faster than they are coming in. Just one more giant gaping hole in Trump's national security crisis.

[Folly]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/29/government-furloughed-workers-ask-landlords-about-doing-chores-cover-rent/

The Office of Personnel Management, who oversee federal employees, put out a statement yesterday in which they advised unpaid workers to barter with their landlords and exchange painting or carpentry work for their rent. If they had any trouble with that plan, they were advised to consult their personal attorneys for legal advice.

After roughly 24 hours of critics tearing into them, the OPM deleted their statement and put out another saying that the first statement was a mistake.