Software engineer describes his experience with H1B.

My friend @JoshuaSteinman is dropping bombshells about H-1B visas, and I’ve got a story to add.

I spent years in India, working directly for one of the country’s wealthiest individuals. He recruited me for my computer skills to lead some of the most ambitious, technically challenging projects ever attempted.

We broke world records and unlocked trillions in wealth. My boss? He now lives in a skyscraper in Mumbai.

Toward the end of the project, he told me his best engineers were leaving for Silicon Valley, lured by unbelievable salaries. So, on his recommendation, I packed up my family and moved to California.

Here’s where it gets weird: I was (at least for short periods of rime) chief of that massive project, with ultimate responsibility. But guys several rungs below me - men way less qualified for any job - were getting H-1B visas and landing incredible salaries in tech.

1.I told the truth. The foreign visa applicants? Many claimed to work in different departments or roles to fit the narrative. I admitted I worked on oil & gas projects. That’s considered “dirty” and “irrelevant” in tech. http://2.My school wasn’t on “the list.” I graduated from @MaritimeCollege —what @stevenujifusa calls “the Harvard of Maritime.” Highest attrition rate in the country. 185 credits. Classes like spherical geometry. But it’s a state school in The Bronx.

Tech doesn’t care. They rely on lists of “approved” “Ivy Plus” schools, as @bhorowitz admits in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

•Wrong degree? Ask the school to reword your transcript or reframe it as a minor.

As an American, it’s incredibly difficult to lie. HR WILL call my references and confirms every detail of my background.

But for foreign applicants? That’s a lot harder to verify, so they get a pass.

Read any book about the industry, and you’ll find a near-religious obsession with maintaining “culture.” It’s a startup mantra: hard work, positivity, willingness to take risks.

But the dirty secret? “Tech culture” also harbors disdain for: •“Dirty” industries like oil & gas. •Christian values or Republican politics. •Anything less than an Ivy League education.

This isn’t just about H-1Bs. It’s about arrogance baked into an industry that weeds out Americans for not fitting their mold.

I’m not surprised that zero of Josh’s friends from the Trump administration got hired in tech, even at the highest levels.

If you’re a foreign conservative? They’ll hire you because it doesn’t code against “tech culture.” (E.g. I have several ultra conservative very religious Hindu friends who don’t have this problem) But if you’re an American who doesn’t fit their narrative? They’ll weed you out.

It’s time to talk about the serious cultural problem in tech—and how it’s harming American workers.

Tech has serious biases. They either need to toss them out and hire the best candidates or figure out how to properly vet foreigners who don’t fit their BS culture.

P.S. I did find a way around this BS. Start a company yourself m. I did and raised over $6M for one company.

How did I do it? I dropped any mention of my religion, politics, oil drilling experience and state school education from my capital raising meetings. Worked like a charm.

As an American it’s literally easier to get million dollar checks than a middle level job at Facebook or Apple.

H-1B’s and political discrimination by Big Tech

Time for another Civil War clarifying moment.

The objection to cheaper workers was the primary reason why Northern laborers hated slavery. It was an economic argument for the vast majority of working people in the 1850s. They didn't want slaves taking their jobs. They saw them as an economic threat.

I used to not comprehend this. All my life I had been told that people hated slavery for "moral" reasons. As with all the best lies, it contains enough truth to make it believable.

There were indeed Northerners who hated slavery because they saw it as morally wrong. We are all taught to believe these people made up the vast majority of people in the North who opposed slavery. They were not the majority. They were in fact a tiny minority of the people who hated slavery.

When I started researching the runup to the civil war, I found out very curious things. I kept finding evidence that the Northern white people *HATED* black people. They hated them to an irrational degree. They passed laws to keep them out of their states. They passed laws to punish them for not having their papers. They passed laws that allowed any white men in the state to capture and sell them into slavery in the south. Lincoln himself wanted them all out of the country.

My first thought was "Wait! This doesn't make any sense! How can you hate black people so much, and then fight a war to give them their freedom?"

Took me a long time to realize they both hated black people, and hated "free labor", meaning labor that people didn't have to pay wages.

So with this thread about Hb-1 Visas, we have a similar situation. There are two aspects to this. People don't want the cheap labor competition, and a lot of people, though they won't say so, don't want brown people coming here who are very different culturally.

It is like the lead up to the Civil War all over again, and regarding the same issues.

Unfair labor practices coupled with a general disdain for members of another race with their practices that many Americans regard as abhorrent and disgusting.

I just want to point out to those willing to listen that history doesn't exactly repeat, but it often rhymes with previous history. And here we are again.

Same sh*t, different Century.

Bans on African-Americans coming into states weren't enforced much. Some sheriffs might tell black arrivals to push off to the next town, but black populations in states with bans still continued to grow.

Attempts to bring runaways back to the slave states were often fought against by Northerners. You've even said that by the Constitution, slaveowners could send slave catchers North to recover their slaves. Now you complain that Northerners passed laws allowing them to do so. No such laws were needed. What Southern slaveowners objected to was laws that didn't allow them to reclaim their runaway slaves.

Northern laws restricting African-Americans’ movements mirrored Southern laws to the same effect. If you were black you definitely didn't want to be out and about in a strange place without your papers in a slave state. I don't now how dangerous that would be in a free state.

You also seem to be talking like there's something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to lose their jobs to foreigners imported here by wealthy corporations, or something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to see a major transformation of their culture by new arrivals brought here because they are willing to work cheap and are regarded as docile and easily controlled. Every nation has immigration laws to deal with those same concerns. You are naive and don't live in the real world.

Now you complain that Northerners passed laws allowing them to do so.

I am complaining that people who assert the Northern opposition to slavery was based on moral reasons, when the very laws they passed demonstrate that they had no such moral considerations for blacks living among them.

I am pointing out that the acts of Northern states do not agree with the lofty rhetoric Northern states used to condemn slavery. In other words, they are hypocrites.

The laws passed were not directed at Southern slave catchers. They made it legal for *ANY* white person in the state to catch them, but not to return them to their masters. They were allowed to catch blacks who didn't posses proper paperwork, and sell them for profit.

This is where the idiom "Sending them down the river" comes from. The river in question was the Mississippi, and they were sending them to new slave masters in the South.

Northern laws restricting African-Americans’ movements mirrored Southern laws to the same effect.

That has nothing to do with it. Southern states had a very different view of slavery and race, while Northern states were supposed to be moral and righteous on this point. Behaving like Southern states is evidence that they didn't believe their own rhetoric.

Your argument is "they did bad things too", which doesn't excuse anyone from doing bad things.

If you were black you definitely didn't want to be out and about in a strange place without your papers in a slave state. I don't now how dangerous that would be in a free state.

Possibly more so. I would imagine there would be penalties in the South for someone harming a slave owned by someone, while there would be no such penalties in the North. In any case, it would have been ill luck to be in such a situation either in the North or the South.

You also seem to be talking like there's something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to lose their jobs to foreigners imported here by wealthy corporations, ...

Not at all. I agree that we shouldn't be importing cheap foreigners to do the work Americans can do. I'm just pointing out it was this same fear which created most of the Northern animosity directed at slavery. It certainly wasn't any concern for the well being of the blacks!

I try to make people see that the issues of the past have similar iterations in the present. This is an example of that, though I think the fear in 1850 would be much more dire than it is now. People were often hand to mouth back then, and a threat to their ability to earn a living would be seen as a serious threat indeed!

...or something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to see a major transformation of their culture by new arrivals brought here because they are willing to work cheap and are regarded as docile and easily controlled.

Again you are mistaken. I don't support that either. I don't want people from different and especially subservient cultures coming here. I don't want them from third world violent cultures. I don't want them from cultures that are simply incompatible with American ideas and views.

And to be thoroughly honest, I don't want anyone who is non-Christian or non-Jewish. (I see Christianity as Judaism 2.0) I don't want any Muslims or other pagan religions over here.

I have long objected to the interpretation of the Constitution to pretend all religions are equal. I am convinced that was not the Framer's intent, and the original meaning has been bastardized.

So no, I don't want people from third world sh*tholes coming to America.

You are naive and don't live in the real world.

You misjudge me. I agree with the current sentiment of keeping out these H1-B Visas, and I even agree with 1850s Northerners concerned about slaves taking their jobs.

I just want people to accurately understand how what we see today is a reflection of what happened in the 1850s.

Good post.

IMHO the northern opposition to slavery had multiple reasons. Some of it was purely moral (the 2nd Great Awakening was real). Some of it was economic, very much like our current argument against illegal immigration. And some of it was faux morality (i.e. The loud talkers up north looking for excuses to point out other peoples' sins and that would be southerners having a lot more slaves than the north). I see that both from northern arguments as well as abolitionist / pro-union arguments in the south (i.e. northern Alabama). For example, as both a Christian and a descendant of abolitionists/pro-Unionists in Alabama, I'd love to tell you that my ancestors were all about loving God and loving people. But the truth is that, at least as much as for moral reasons, they hated that their small farms had to complete with large plantations further south that used somewhat free labor (slavery did have costs to the slave owners) and, therefore, could sell crops cheaper than the non-slave farms could.

Don't forget another reason: the north didn't like the southern states having slaves counted in the census (even at just 3/5ths).

On the other hand, we shouldn't go too far in the other direction and promote the lie of the Lost Cause as the reason the southern states seceded. If you read each confederate state's declaration of secession you'll see slavery listed in almost every state's declaration, often repeatedly. So just like FReeper DiogenesLamp is right that the north's abolitionist movement wasn't all angelic, it's not like the south's secession motivation was all about liberty and states' rights.

Good post.

Thanks. I can never quite seem to put my thinking into words that convey it best, but I try, and I think perceptive minds get the thrust of it.

But the truth is that, at least as much as for moral reasons, they hated that their small farms had to complete with large plantations further south that used somewhat free labor

In past discussions I have pointed out "envy" of the wealthy slave owner as another reason people hated slavery. The perception that others are getting ahead through unfair means is a universal human concern.

When I think of these things, I try to put myself into the mindset of each participant, and I often find I can empathize with the situation of people I have never seen, and who are long dead.

Yes, it's a troubling thing to see others get ahead through an unfair advantage. It is a vexing thing to have to work hard to earn a living while others hardly lift a finger and get great wealth.

It is this aspect of human nature that the communists/socialists always try to exploit.

Don't forget another reason: the north didn't like the southern states having slaves counted in the census (even at just 3/5ths).

The Northern states didn't want slaves counted at all. In their view it should have been a 0/5ths value put on slaves by the census. This would of course have given them a lot of advantages.

You see, the North, with it's 4 to 5 times greater population, was getting a lot of benefit from the slavery in the South. The North ruled Washington DC, much as it has for a long time today, and the South could barely keep laws it opposed from being made. (Same as today regarding conservatives, who barely manage to stave off the worst excesses of the Liberal North east.)

So yes, keeping Northern hands out of the DC cookie jar was a constant struggle for the South since the nation began.

If you read each confederate state's declaration of secession you'll see slavery listed in almost every state's declaration...

Well that isn't accurate. It was only 3 or 4 Southern states that listed Slavery as the major issue in their secession. Virginia, the most important of all the Southern states, said their reason for seceding is because the Federal government had become tyrannical and was waging an unjustified war against her sister states.

Most states didn't make any "statements", and columnist Paul Craig Roberts argues that these statements were put forth to make the legal argument that the Union had violated the constitution on the issue of slavery, and therefore the Southern states no longer had to hold to the compact either.

In other words, he argues "slavery" was just an excuse to get out of the Union, but the real gripe of the Southern states was the fact that 72% of the money they earned in foreign trade, ended up paid to Washington DC in the form of taxes. (65 million per year) There would have been immediate increases of wealth in the Southern states just by getting out of the Union, and Union violations of the Constitution on the issue of slavery was the excuse they were using to do it.

But their reasons for getting out have nothing at all to do with their *RIGHT* to get out if they wanted. The real issue of the war was "Do they have a right to leave?"

The evidence says "yes", and their reasons don't matter. If someone has a right, then they can exercise it for whatever reason they so please, even for bad reasons.

So just like FReeper DiogenesLamp is right that the north's abolitionist movement wasn't all angelic, it's not like the south's secession motivation was all about liberty and states' rights.

I have no doubt that their reasons were mostly two fold. They wanted the increase in wealth they saw as a consequence of getting out of the Union, and they wanted to stop being lectured by the Northern moralists over the issue of slavery, which was the dominant force driving their economy at the time.

Most people have little patience for people telling them to give up something they see as essential to their prosperity. It's like modern liberals telling us to give up oil.

Most people don't want the lecture or the abuse. They don't care if liberals see it as morally wrong, it allows them to live better, and that is all most people care about.

In prerevolutionary America the colonies had slave codes and pass laws. These persisted in the slave codes of the South and the Black codes of the North. In Georgia any white person could demand to see a black person's pass. I don't know that free states had such a provision.

As you kept saying the Constitution and federal laws demanded that state and local magistrates return runaways to their masters. Were state laws even necessary? Slave catching was a business protected by federal law, but there wasn't any credentialing organization, so people could set themselves up in the business and exercise the prerogatives that federal law gave slave catchers. My suspicion is that most of the time they were in the border areas and often lived in slave states, and weren't scattered throughout the North.

If you were a Northerner who didn't want Black people coming into your state were you really up on a moral high horse about it? Were you really hypocritical? You recognized that you were acting in your own interest, and you would be happy that Blacks were on plantations and not next door to you. You didn't care about the moral question and usually didn't vote for parties that had objections to slavery.

People who did have moral objections to slavery didn't expect a massive number of runaways or freedmen moving into their community, but they opposed slave catching and the fugitive slave laws on principle. They weren't really hypocrites either.

I wouldn't be hard on those in between. When moral concepts change it takes people a while to catch up to them. People recognized that in some sense slavery was wrong, but more than that they also didn't want it in their neighborhood. They were willing to let slaveowners have their slavery as long as they kept it away. At that time, that was a sensible and defensible position, one that gave slaveowners the benefit of much goodwill, though not the positive approval and unassailability they demanded.

Once war came, it did become a war between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces and moralism entered into the conflict. It became a conflict between freedom and slavery, and for some between Good and Evil, but Southerners were just as convinced that they were the moral ones with the just cause. There was hypocrisy on both sides.

But why you feel it necessary to make this departure from the debate over immigration and H-1B visas is beyond me. What possible purpose does it serve? I've been very grateful to Donald Trump that after this election we are talking about expanding our country (as silly as those proposals about Canada and Greenland sound), rather than tearing it apart. Do we really need another year of this stuff?

DiogenesLamp: "The objection to cheaper workers was the primary reason why Northern laborers hated slavery.
It was an economic argument for the vast majority of working people in the 1850s.
They didn't want slaves taking their jobs.
They saw them as an economic threat."

The key point to understand about Abolitionism is that it did not suddenly arrive full blown -- like Athena from the mind of Zeus -- but rather, Abolitionism grew and gestated gradually, over many decades, beginning with:

1776 -- Immaculate Conception in our Enlightenment Era Founders' philosophical devotion to natural law, as expressed in their Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."
Now DiogenesLamp claims those were merely meaningless "fancy words" which nobody then took literally or intended to apply to slavery.
That is not true, many took those words seriously, including Southerners like Jefferson, Madison, Handcock and Washington, and did what they could to eliminate or restrict slavery when possible.
1790 -- Christian Revival, the Second Great Awakening beginning in 1790, sparked numerous social reform movements, including temperance, abolition of slavery, and women's suffrage.
In the South it led to the teaching of Christianity to slaves and black freemen.
One such Sunday School teacher was Thomas J. Jackson, later to earn the sobriquet "stonewall".
1854 -- Third Party System, downstream from culture, by 1854 abolitionism helped destroy the Second Party System (Democrats & Whigs) and replace it with the Third Party System (Republicans and Democrats).
1840-1860 -- Southern Political Expansionism -- in decades before 1860, Southerners became increasingly aggressive, expanding slavery and slavery's influence on states beyond the Old South.
These included western territories like Kansas, New Mexico and California, but also key political changes such as the 1850 Compromise, which Federalized slavecatching throughout the North, and the 1857 SCOTUS Dred-Scott ruling, which increased slavers' "Right of Sojourn" in anti-slavery states.
post 1857 -- Economic Concerns, such as the actual loss of Northern jobs to Southern slaves, were not manifest (meaning, it never happened) but were feared a theoretical possibility to be avoided.
Hence the strong Northern reaction to the 1857 SCOTUS Dred Scott Decision, and the rapid growth of the Republican party between 1856 and 1860.

DiogenesLamp: " All my life I had been told that people hated slavery for "moral" reasons.
As with all the best lies, it contains enough truth to make it believable."

The fear of Southern slaves taking away Northern jobs only became theoretically possible after the 1857 SCOTUS Dred Scott ruling.
However, Dred Scott is arguably what flipped half a million northern voters and 7 northern states from pro-slavery Democrats to anti-slavery Republicans.

"We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.

"To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty, is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation.
This is what we have to do."
A. Lincoln, June 16, 1858, "House Divided Speech""

SCOTUS -- Crazy Roger Taney's -- 1857 Dred Scott ruling is what turned many Northern slavery-friendly Democrats into anti-slavery Republicans.

I agree wholeheartedly with FReeper BroJoeK's post about the SCOTUS Dred Scott decision spurring abolitionist sentiment. Don't forget the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act as well. It was like a one-two punch to the free states. Very analogous to our modern day 1973 Roe v Wade and 1992 Casey v Planned Parenthood cases entrenching baby murder among pro-life states. (A nod to FReeper DiogenesLamp's post about learning from history because it at least rhymes even if it doesn't exactly repeat.)

However, I respectfully disagree, and I do mean respectfully, with DL's statements: It was only 3 or 4 Southern states that listed Slavery as the major issue in their secession. Virginia, the most important of all the Southern states, said their reason for seceding is because the Federal government had become tyrannical and was waging an unjustified war against her sister states. (and other statements in the same post along those lines)

My take: If us FReepers revere the statements in our Declaration of Independence as our statement of why we broke away from the Brits and what our values were at the time, then the same should be said for almost a century later with the Confederacy. Want to know why they broke away from the U.S. and what their values were? Look at their declarations of independence (secession). Here's what I see.

1) South Carolina's Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union has 18 words based on "slave" like "slavery" or "slaveholding" or "non-slavery". Eighteen! Evidently it was pretty important to why the first Confederate state broke away.

2) Mississippi's mentioned it 7 times.

3) Florida's Declaration of Causes mentions slavery 14 times.

4) Alabama's states slavery 1 time ("...to meet the slaveholding states..."). Perhaps that's at least 1 state as an example of Paul Craig Roberts' assertion that sometimes slavery wasn't the main reason. But for now that's just 1 confederate state out of 4.

5) Georgia's mentions slave, slavery, non-slavery, etc. a whopping 35 times. Evidently slavery ranked high on their reasons for why they seceded.

6) Louisiana's doesn't mention slavery at all. It's a simple one-page document (not counting signatures) stating that Louisiana has the right to secede if they want and they're doing so.

7) Texas mentioned slavery just once like Alabama did (joining the "slaveholding" states).

8) Virginia's also mentioned slavery just once in regards to the "slaveholding states", but theirs uses the phrase "oppression of the slaveholding states". IMHO, I'm not counting their reason for leaving being as intertwined with slavery as South Carolina and Georgia. But I am taking note that when it comes to fussing about the federal government's overreach, it's singling out "slaveholding states" instead of coastal states, or agricultural states, etc.

9) Arkansas' mentions slavery or non-slavery 28 times. That's competing pretty hard with Georgia on slavery being a primary cause.

10) Tennessee, like Louisiana, doesn't mention slavery.

11) North Carolina like Louisiana's and Tennessee's, is a one-pager that doesn't mention slavery.

So let's sum it up. 11 confederate states and 105 mentions of slavery in their secession declarations. To DiogenesLamp's credit, 3 states didn't mention slavery at all (at least in their secession document). But 105 mentions of slavery out of 11 secession declarations is enough to say that slavery was at least a main point even if it wasn't the main point.

Now let's talk about what's never brought up in taking up for the southern history regarding secession and slavery. It's in the past. I don't believe in forever condemnation, certainly not condemnation of offspring of people who committed atrocities. And I'm not taking up for me and my own. In an earlier post I pointed out that, though I'm from Alabama, I'm a descendant of pro-Union people in north Alabama. So when today's left tries to poo poo the conservative leaning south over slavery it's a non-issue because it was over a century and a half ago (before even Joe Ancient of Days Biden was born). IMHO, us southerners try too hard to justify the past (with things like the Lost Cause theory) because we don't have enough respect for the sin cleansing blood of Jesus. Our main retort back should be to not judge us because it's in the past, and if we learn from history then don't repeat it.

How is history at risk of being repeated today?

Then the Dims said, "It's not a person. It's property." Today the Dims say, "It's not a person. It's just a clump of cells." The 67 million or so babies aborted in my lifetime completely dwarfs the total of 6 million or so slaves in over 2 centuries of what we today call the United States.

Then, the pro-slavery Dims tried multiple times to assassinate President-elect Lincoln while he toured neutral Maryland saying that he was wanting to undo the forced slavery acceptance the federal govt was doing to free states (the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision) and let the states decide on abolition vs slavery. Today the baby-killing Dims tried multiple times to assassinate candidate Trump while he's running around saying he's gotten the federal govt out of the argument of abortion and letting the states decide.

Then the 2nd Great Awakening was going on. Pastor Theodore Weld earned the nickname "the most mobbed man in America" for giving abolitionist speeches and turning to God with holy lives. Churches changed from more formal meetings to having more outdoor camp meetings. Churches began having more passionate speaking and music. Also there was a shift toward individual piety among church leaders and less formal ministry training (in other words, leaders were more expected to live it like they mean it than have a bunch of letters after their name). Now, we have scores of people leaving the "high church" Protestant churches as well as the Catholic churches and going towards the more "evangelical" churches. Now we have people rising up against leaders who betray the core teachings of Jesus (such as kicking out the Southern Baptist president, or local Methodist churches leaving the ever increasing hedonist leaning United Methodist general conference). It may be that the next Great Awakening has already started and we can't see it because we're in it.

Illinois did.

You keep trying to steer this towards "slave catchers." What I refer to are white people grabbing free blacks, and selling them into slavery. They weren't slaves, so they didn't need to be "caught", but they became slaves as a result of laws in Northern states that allowed them to be captured and sold into slavery *IF* they didn't have papers proving they were free.

The point here is that we have all been led to believe the North objected to slavery on moral grounds, and the evidence shows they objected to slavery because of a fear of slave labor and because of a hatred for blacks.

"Moral reasons" was at least number 3rd on the list of why they hated slavery, but we have all been led to believe it was the main reason.

When moral concepts change it takes people a while to catch up to them. People recognized that in some sense slavery was wrong, but more than that they also didn't want it in their neighborhood. They were willing to let slaveowners have their slavery as long as they kept it away. At that time, that was a sensible and defensible position, one that gave slaveowners the benefit of much goodwill, though not the positive approval and unassailability they demanded.

And this is accurate. They were tolerant of slavery in the South as long as they kept the blacks away from them, and as long as they didn't use them for jobs white people wanted.

Once war came, it did become a war between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces and moralism entered into the conflict.

All wars end up with the propaganda that *WE* are the good guys and the other people are the "sub-human evil people." It is an inherent part of human nature to demonize people who are fighting you.

It became a conflict between freedom and slavery, and for some between Good and Evil, but Southerners were just as convinced that they were the moral ones with the just cause. There was hypocrisy on both sides.

What was the hypocritical position on the part of the Southerners? Yes, they thought they were the moral ones, but i'm not sure what behavior from them you see as hypocritical. They believed they had a right to slavery, and they acted like that. It's ugly, but it isn't hypocritical. They also believed they had a right to leave the Union, which I think the evidence demonstrates is correct. About the only thing I can think of regarding them being hypocritical is the hatred for members of their community that wanted to remain in the Union.

But why you feel it necessary to make this departure from the debate over immigration and H-1B visas is beyond me.

I constantly try to make people see that the issues of today are the same issues of the past, albeit with slightly different flavors, but the main point is still the same.

The opposition to H1-B visas is rooted in the exact same objections that people had to slaves and slavery in the 1850s. They didn't want the labor competition, and they didn't want other races in their communities.

Same same.

I've been very grateful to Donald Trump that after this election we are talking about expanding our country (as silly as those proposals about Canada and Greenland sound), rather than tearing it apart.

I like how he thinks, but I think he is just trolling people. While acquiring Greenland might be nice, I think he just made the cost of doing that go up.

And Canada? I don't want Canada becoming part of our Union because it votes too liberal far too often. Now i'm told the western provinces aren't so bad, but I would be very hesitant about adding any Canadian voices to the USA.

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