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And the U.S. has been doing even better since 1965. So really the question goes back to you.

Either way, your whataboutism isn’t even relevant since those were congressional changes.

This is the executive trying to undermine the law.

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There is a whole site with various trends that diverged or changed since 1971.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

It's not exactly an unbiased selection but it is interesting.

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>And the U.S. has been doing even better since 1965.

Better for whom? People are struggling to afford groceries largely because the dollar is worth 1/165th of its 1913 value and the minimum wage hasn't been raised in 17 years.

I found a job that pays in BTC and I'm super hopeful about that one because my effective salary won't go down by 3-8% every year but instead will appreciate relative to what things are priced in.

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> Better for whom?

Minorities and women, for a start.

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We were able to make progress on those fronts in the 1960s because we had a culturally homogenized population after decades of immigration restriction.

In the area of women’s rights, for example, the driving force was mainline protestants who wanted prohibition, in opposition to recent immigrants: https://www.wpbstv.org/prohibition-and-the-suffrage-movement.... If America had remained an Anglo-Protestant society, it likely would have developed on a similar trajectory as Canada, the UK, and Australia on issues like abortion. Remember, Roe v. Wade had five Nixon and Eisenhower Republicans in the majority. The party shifted positions on the issue with Reagan because it was a way to flip a large number of catholics, who had overwhelmingly voted democrat until then. Evangelical protestants plus religious Catholics was a big enough coalition to offset mainline protestants on the issue.

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White people are a global minority at ~7%. "Minorities™" have their own countries where they are majorities. If they don't want to be Minorities™, they can stay home.
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Seriously? You don’t like non-white people?
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Personally, I'm fine with non-white people. But the idea of moving to a country where people like me are in a minority, then complaining: "Woe is me, I'm a minority, I demand special treatment", is objectionable. This isn't the type of immigrant I want.
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Do you pay your taxes in btc too?
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Who cares when I can sell BTC to USD in seconds?
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So, it really doesn’t matter that your job is paid in BTC, given that you could just convert your USD income to BTC whenever you want
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That doesn't follow. I'm pretty sure they're talking about the effect of nominal wage stickiness: you're not constantly renegotiating your rate, so when there's fluctuations in relative value, it matters what unit the original number is denominated in. Compare with the case of a US expat being paid a steady salary in USD and converting to the local currency to make purchases, if you want an example with a similar mechanic but very different intuitive feel and practicalities.

(I'm not sure they're right about the overall effect though.)

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You basically nailed it. USD crashed in the 1970s after the Nixon shock, and is basically a shambling corpse losing 3-8% of its value every single year while BTC is 600x the value of a 1913 dollar... and trending up: https://i.imgur.com/PJT01T8.png

Even if they don't give me a raise, I'll still have more purchasing power at the end of a year rather than less as the case with USD.

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"Worked fine" is a pretty vague description for the year we had a Great Depression, world war, Jim Crow, Japanese internment to name a few.
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The U.S. was at the apex of its power during those years. Those years are also why we remember earlier immigration waves as “working.” The foreign born population dropped from 15% to under 5% during that period. The Italian and Irish enclaves disappeared and so did the separate ethnic identity of those groups (to a large degree).
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“I’m okay with racial prison camps if it makes us powerful” is the exact sort of moral bankruptcy to be expected from the people who defend this administration.
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False equivalence. The claim was:

"the current admin are working hard to destroy the U.S as if they're foreign agents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49453997

We should modularize our discussion to distinguish between the various effects of immigration and the most humane/optimal way to enforce immigration law.

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The rest of the world was bombed to pieces while the USA had an untouched industrial output.
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That’s a common misconception. The U.S. actually became the world’s largest industrial power before World War I. Germany had 60% of the US’s GDP per capita in 1910. It dipped during the war itself, but by 1960 it was closer to 70%. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/us-gdp-per-cap....
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Whether or not what you say is correct, it does not at all contradict GP’s two claims.
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It contradicts the conclusion he’s drawing from those two facts, which is that U.S. economic dominance results from European economies having been destroyed after WWII. The U.S. became a world power during its isolationist phase prior to WWI.
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I think the last 20 years of that 45 year period were substantially due to exactly what they described.

If you give any debit for the decade-long Great Depression, or wartime malaise due to loss of life, emotional toll, and rationing, it’s fair to conclude that half of the period of good times was during exactly that post-war rebuilding (largely powered by US industrial capacity) and concomitant baby boom.

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There was not any particular discontinuity in GDP per capita growth during the post WWII period compared to previous periods: https://conversableeconomist.com/2023/09/14/the-remarkable-s....
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Bombed to pieces by the USA, ironically enough.
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Would you have preferred that the US military stay at home during WW2 to avoid bombing anyone? You know that Japan was killing something like a Hiroshima and Nagasaki worth of civilians every month?
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I would have preferred the banks be told not to expect a bailout in 1914. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. It's been a problem for a long time and the body count stretches into the millions.
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We also had strong unions and income tax rates as high as 95% on the highest income brackets.
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Yeah we should also have very high income tax rates.
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I believe that human flourishing is a better goal than state power relative to its rivals.
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Mmmmhmmm. Ah yes 1921, the year both the Klu Klux Klan (and European Fascism) metastasized in society. All immigration controls come from a rather interesting, dark place; shifting of the Overton Window, and all that.
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Oh god I hope this lie is part of an attempt to get right-wingers on board with a “let’s roll immigration policy back to what we had in 1950!” push.

I hope this because it’d be hilarious if they got what they wanted and realized that meant actual open borders with most or all of the Americas.

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Before Hart-Cellar we had national origin quotas, it wasn't a free-for-all.
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For those outside the Americas, yes. Western hemisphere immigration had no meaningful restrictions until 1965.
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We had little meaningful immigration pressure from the america at the time. The foreign born population dropped from 15% in 1921 to under 5% by 1970.
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We’re backing away from:

> The U.S. had a draconian restrictive immigration policy from 1921-1965.

to “well ok not really but it didn’t matter”?

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It did matter. It was restrictive in actual effect, in that it blocked immigration from the places it was mainly coming from, and dropped the foreign born population under 5% by 1970.
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How can you with a straight face equate “fine for 1921-1965” with “best for 2026”?

Even odder: what makes you find it plausible that an understanding of the policies of this period and their effect on the economy were part of the decision-making process of this administration - especially when they have actively voiced opinions that fully explain this action? At some point bending backwards to provide some benefit of the doubt is saying more about the speaker than the topic - I am certainly of the opinion that we are well beyond that rubicon. I cannot fathom the reasoning at this point.

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> How can you with a straight face equate “fine for 1921-1965” with “best for 2026”

It’s strong evidence that immigration restriction isn’t economically destructive. If you think economic circumstances have changed and the result would be different this time, then I think you have the burden to prove it.

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