It's well known that many Chinese are financially unable to register their second+ child. The unregistered children have no official identity, can't lead normal lives, can't go to school, etc. It's to be expected that some will choose not to register their first when it's a girl. Hopefully this will soon be a thing of the past as they are loosening the policies.
There are many other documentaries and articles on unregistered children such as this:
This is only partially true, with many exceptions.
But ya, many girls in the countryside are hukou-free, unregistered, off the grid, non-persons, etc...China is trying to change this, the central gov would prefer everyone was registered, but local governments make too much money on family planning fines to give it up.
In the United States we had the opposite problem. The 1986 Tax Reform mandated that the social security numbers of children be included in order to claim them as dependents to get a tax break. Seven million children 'disappeared' the next year.
If I remember correctly, a lot of it was traced to divorced parents claiming the children on both tax refunds which this law did away with, only the person with most/solo custody can claim the children now.
The snopes.com link above quotes this towards the bottom:
”The tax agency said about 20 percent of the vanished dependents were children who had been claimed as dependents by both parents after a divorce. Under the law, only one parent may claim the child as a deduction.
Most of the others probably never existed, John Szilagyi, an I.R.S. researcher, said. And some families apparently became quite greedy in creating dependents, each worth a $1,080 deduction in 1986, and $1,900 in 1987.
About 66,000 taxpayers who claimed four or more dependents in 1986 claimed none in 1987, after the Social Security identification rule went into effect. And more than 11,000 families claimed seven or more dependents in 1986, but none in 1987.”
My younger son lives in this kind of limbo existence. As a former green card holder, I have to file US taxes, but since my son was born in Switzerland to non-US citizens and never lived in the US, he's not eligible for a SSN or ITIN, so I can't claim him as a dependent.
You need to renounce your residence with the IRS as well, and then they require you to pay an exit tax on the cash value of all your assets as if they were sold on the same day. Because of the principle of citizenship based taxation, US residence/citizenship can be quite a burden for those who don't live in the US--just take a look at FATCA and all the filing requirements and penalties.
True, but there is a difference between residence for tax purposes and residence for immigration purposes. You may live a certain number of years (7-8?) in the US, give up your greencard, and still be considered a resident for tax purposes for life or until you relinquish with the IRS and pay your exit tax.
I believe it's only if you had a US citizenship or if you were a legal permanent resident (i.e you had a greencard) for 8 or more years. You can search online for 'IRS expatriation tax' or form 8854, or better talk to a lawyer...
That's not true. There are many scenarios how one can live legally in the US for more than 6 years as a non-immigrant. E.g F-1 student visa for 4+2+4 years (Bachelors through PhD), followed by 3 years on OPT, followed by 6 years on H-1B. That's 19 years.
Ya. You can only be in a H1B for 6 years, but combined with an F1 and OPT, could be longer. I was just thinking about working visas.
You have to get a green card after your second work visa or go back home, that's the choice. Unlike other countries where you can work on a working visa indefinitely and never even qualify for permanent residency.
And in Japan, the deceased elderly remain "alive on paper" so that the family members can continue to collect their pensions and federal social security checks.
oh I see, the official policy was 1 child, but when multiple births happened or the 1st child was a girl, the local hospital type people just looked the other way and never put the birth into the system.
A lot of the people in china simply are not borned in hospital 20 ago.
Every family has at least two children from where I grown up, even the official of the village. More like the case of speeding. You are not allowed, but you can get away with it, if the police are not there or feel it is better for him to not give you a ticket.
even a lot of Chinese are surprised when I talk about this with them. So be careful about the media's report. (they report what they think it is true, but might not)
but you are allowed... one of the big myths is that there was a universal policy. in fact the policy applied to only city dwellers in big congested cities. villagers and ethnic minorities did not have the restriction. the policy applied to like only 30pc of households
I mean, you see this in any dictatorship or even at any level of power.
The same cops that would flush some weed down the toilet so you don't get thrown in jail or not give people drunk and disorderly tickets would be akin to a hospital's staff not registering a child so the family could try for a boy.
Close: if the 1st was a girl, the 2nd was permitted even officially (at least in the later years of the system). But if you had a girl and then a second girl, there would be incentive to hide the second girl so you'd be legally permitted to try again for a boy.
also note that this logic only applies to the "free" children, as in no additional fees/tax to pay for the extra birth. for families that can afford the tax, you can and always could have as many children as you can afford.
Exactly. The "Chinese as savages" fits a narrative that a lot of people want to hear so it resonates as an unquestioned assumption.
It also helps bolster the war on women narrative. Here's one think tank that propagates the sex-selective abortion in China: [1]
Here's a mainstream article which gives a weak strawman argument then concludes there must be widespread sex-selective abortion in China: [ 2 ]
And this article goes even farther out on the line, saying the Chinese women were "forced" to abort their daughters, not using evidence to verify the theory, but using a piece of artwork by a French artist to propagate the idea visually: [3]
All of these stories must be critically considered in light of the new evidence by the Kennedy-Yaojiang paper. (and obviously we must also critically consider Kenney-Yaojiang).
This is great news. I hosted a mutual friend from China for several weeks. At the time, the guest had a family relation in China who was pregnant with her second child. She choice to abort the baby because the associated financial penalties would be too high.
I hope more research is done to quantify the number of unregistered births. I personally find 25 million unregistered out of 30 to 60 million estimated to be a bit high of a ratio.
This has taken us into sociopolitical hell, and Hacker News isn't that kind of site. We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13094051 and marked it off-topic.
Toxic threads like this one are the reason why we're going to try an experiment called "Political Detox Week" on Hacker News. For one week, starting Monday, all political stories and threads will be off topic. We'll kill them when we see them and ask users to flag them.
Im pro voter id because its sensible, you need an id to drive, rent a home, buy large goods, get a bank account, and even a nation with a billion people has voter ids.
Both parties have exhibited enormous distrust in the current process, and we need solutions.
Im also pro having a paper trail, and neutral observers.
so india wanted to voter id to prevent black people from voting ? seriously the race stuff just doesnt matter if we follow the indian model.
You need to stop projecting your strawmen on me.
Also Ive had to give identity checks and credit checks before renting, so maybe your the one who needs to reevaulate why you believe people dont need id cards.
If there isn't evidence of actual voter fraud that a voter ID can prevent, what does implementing a voter ID propose to fix? It seems like a feel good measure to help a subset of people feel warm and fuzzy, with a documented reality [1] [2] [3] [4] that voter ID laws have been struck down in various states because courts have found them to selectively and maliciously discriminatory by design.
India went out of its way to ensure its populace had ID or was able to get ID. They go out of their way to place polling locations where they are accessible to remote and disenfranchised population (example: putting polling locations on sides of mountains, while we close the polls two hours after people get out of work). Polling locations were mandatory every 2km from where people lived in India.
In America, we enact voter ID laws, then close 31 DMV locations immediately [0].
The difference is that in America, much like a poll tax or test, these initiatives are implemented to prevent certain people from voting, otherwise there would be a sweeping reform to _ensure_ every eligible voter had an ID card. That isn't the case and courts agree [1] [2] [3] [4].
97% of India's population was given a voter ID (EPIC) card. Indians without an EPIC card have over 12 options for identifying documents which they can present at polls.
So we do it in good faith because all parties are trying to destroy the integrity of the democratic process, and that is not a good thing. We need to show good faith measures to restore the percieved decline of election integrity.
Also for the cost of the recounts, we could do something very close to the indian model.
Then you are basing your opinion on a feeling or your reasoning doesn't reflect reality [0] [1] [2] [3].
According to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 20th, 2016 with regards to Texas' voter ID initiative (SB 14) [1]:
> Some of the dissenting opinions argue that the majority opinion holds the Legislature “liable for racial disparities [it] did not create” by failing to show that the statistical disparity in ID possession among different races is caused by a State policy, as opposed to socioeconomic and historical conditions. In fact, as discussed above, the district court found that SB 14 creates a racial disparity by requiring the use of certain IDs to vote that minorities disproportionately lack. Certainly the passage of SB 14 did not cause fewer minorities to possess certain IDs (like driver’s licenses or concealed handgun licenses). Rather, the district court found that socioeconomic and historical conditions contributed to this disparity in ID possession, which demonstrates why historical evidence of racism is relevant to the Section 2 analysis.
> But SB 14 itself caused minorities to disproportionately lack the documentation that is required to vote by dictating that the documents and IDs required would be those that minorities disproportionately lack. We cannot ignore that in passing SB 14, the Legislature carefully selected the types of IDs that would be required to vote. In doing so, the Legislature selected IDs that minorities disproportionately do not possess and excluded IDs that minorities possess in greater numbers, without providing sufficient justification for those choices.
> The fact that this occurred on a landscape where minorities are less likely to possess certain forms of ID or be able to obtain those IDs, at least in part as a result of past instances of State-sponsored discrimination, does not absolve the Legislature of responsibility. Accordingly, the district court’s conclusion that SB 14 created racial disparities in the possession of IDs required to vote is supported by the record.
It's a little odd how, when voter ID laws are passed in certain states, 31 DMV locations are immediately closed[0]. It's almost as if those pushing for the policy don't want people to get an ID and vote, because people without ID tend to be in a certain demographic that doesn't vote for your party.
I do: there is no evidence of voter fraud and America has a long history of using measures at the polls to prevent certain demographics, particularly black people, from voting.
We made it illegal for black people to vote. Then they were given suffrage. So we had a poll test, pushed because people knew black people were less likely to be able to read. And we had a poll tax, pushed because we knew black people were less likely to be able to afford the tax. Those were made illegal. Now we have voter ID laws, pushed because a certain party knows it will prevent certain demographics from voting. Those are being made illegal in the states that they've been passed in.
We need to look at these laws in a historical context.
> So why cant we do what india did for over a billion people ?
That would defeat the purpose of voter ID laws in America. I agree, if these laws were being promoted in good faith, there would be a well-funded initiative to get every single eligible voter a voter ID like there was in India. We wouldn't be closing down 31 DMVs in a state that just passed a voter ID law.
But these laws aren't being pushed in good faith, they are being pushed for their downstream effects: less people will vote and, more importantly, less people in demographics who tend to vote for a certain party will vote.
You might want to talk to people outside your filter bubble, because fraud was and is still a hot topic of discussion all the way from the hillary bernie primary to the recent recounts.
absolutely, this election showed there is a huge gap between the common people and the elite in their beliefs and why Im still trying to understand myself.
So you're saying there's no such thing as institutional barriers and people just need to bootstrap their way out of a catch-22 style situation regarding their lack of documentation? Because that's how it works: you go to the clerk, they tell you you need a photo ID to get your birth certificate pulled (random people can't pull your birth certificate). Then you go to the Secretary of State and they tell you you need a birth certificate to prove citizenship, and to go back to the clerk and get it. At this point you then have to go try and fight it in courts and track down the doctor who birthed you to file an affadavit that you are who you say you are and were born in the country, and god help you if you have been uninsured/out of the medical system for a prolonged period of time, the doctor is dead or out of the country, etc.
I'm not sure the privileged HN crowd understands how this works for regular workers who do retail or whatever: you ask for the day off, they say "sure you can go ahead and take it off, and if you do then don't bother coming back the next day, because you'll be fired. And don't try to collect unemployment either because it'll be for-cause". We have a lot of leverage and flexibility allowed because we are skilled workers. Regular people don't have that.
Regular people can't afford to spend weeks and weeks bouncing between government offices and fighting it in courts. They just don't vote because they don't have the documentation. Which is the whole point of the voter restriction laws in the first place.
thank you, you taught me something today. instead of saying i want to require people to have an id card, i'm going to start saying i want to restrict the vote from people who can't figure out how to get an id, just so that there's no ambiguity in my position.
Maybe tho OP will appreciate the time someone took to correct their grammar. There was no malicious inclination or abuse behind the post. The corrections didn't include something like "far out your grammar is bad, learn how to write proper English". Now that would have been rude and uncalled for.
It would have come across as less rude if it had been prefaced with something to the effect of "I found your post insightful because xyz. It appears that you're not a native English speaker. In case you might find it helpful, I've made some suggestions below to improve the grammar of your post to make it more accessible to other readers."
No it's not. It looks like constructive helpful feedback to me. I, for one, appreciate people's grammar being better on HN. Granted, a private message would have been better, but HN doesn't support that.
If you're aiming to be constructive, it would help if you introduced yourself and politely said what you were doing first, as Cauterized said. Just rewriting someone else's words without further comment sounds really blunt and condescending.
Sorry for being tough about it, I can see you meant well. Some people will appreciate the feedback and some people are already doing all they can to get over the fear of engaging in a second language at all. Generally it is better to ask if feedback is wanted and even then it is not an easy thing to do well.
I think you'd find a lot more voter fraud if you did away with vote-by-mail. It is far easier, far less likely to be caught, and scales a hell of a lot better.
And if we were actually serious about voter fraud, we would of course demand that all voting machines would have real audit trails.
But curiously, for some strange reason, people who loudly display the most concern about the integrity of our voting system never have much to say about either of those issues...
In Canada there are no voting machines for federal elections. You just get a clear ballot and a pencil. The counting is done by several people from different parties simultaneously.
The drawback is that sometimes it can take hours to count the votes.
<s>Oh my god, what would the U.S. media do if it couldn't report the results of an election in minutes or hours, and it might even take days or weeks for some elections! A democracy wouldn't survive without computerized tabulation of votes, ridiculously expensive proprietary voting machines, or even electricity!</s>
The best kinds of voting machines blend a paper trail and digital counting. For example there are machines that use fill-in-the-bubble ScanTron ballots like are used for multiple-choice tests, or machines that provide a digital count and a paper trail.
It's still not 100% perfect. The ScanTron machines are really accurate but there is still a <1% error rate in ballots and in a really close election you will get some variation from doing it a second time. And then you get the idiots who filled in two bubbles, or connect the dot, and so on, and who knows what happens there. Hopefully just a rejected ballot but who knows. The usual recourse if a machine screws up during the test is an upset student coming to talk to the professor but you don't have any way of validating how your ballot was counted.
The problem is that when you start letting humans interpret a contested election it all still goes to shit real quick. You suddenly have lawyers fighting to interpret what each individual voter meant with each individual ballot and it just takes forever. We tried that with the 2000 election and it sucked pretty hard. In the end it may be the most accurate but it literally takes months to play out even with just a disputed county or two, let alone a whole state/province.
Constitutionally, we hold elections on "the first Monday after the second Tuesday of November" and the electoral college (which actually counts) votes on "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December". No I am not making this up, they are based on arcane 18th-century logic about when farmers would be done with harvest and what day they could come into town and shit like that.
Anyway, the point is there's a hard constitutional date limit and the only way you go past that is the Supreme Court pulling an equal-protection ruling about how halting the recount would invalidate people's votes. Which just comes down to a party-line ruling anyway, like it did in 2000 when they halted the recount.
Or 1876, where basically one guy needed 1 electoral college vote to win, the other needed 20, and the commission formed by Congress managed to get the guy with the 2nd most popular votes the 20 electoral votes needed to win, because of a party line vote in the commission.
Not that a party line vote means it's an invalid or unscrupulous election. It's quite expected the team stands together. It'd take something really extraordinary to get a defector.
Edit: It's much better to fallback on a parliamentary process like this, where we can only blame ourselves for having voted in X team to be in Congress, thus making the decision should there be a contested election. When it shifts to who can convince judges to do recounts is when it becomes totally nebulous like a flip of the coin, rather than an "oh well that's unsurprising".
But no doubt there would be all kinds of outcry about faithless electors should the Electoral College on Dec 19 end up picking someone other than Donald in a way that departs from the expected outcome, even though that's the actual #1 reason why Madison and Hamilton went with the Electoral College system - that voters could get it wrong. Giving less populated states effectively more than 1 vote for 1 person, was a far lesser consideration.
People have mentioned the issues with electronic voting and also want id laws. We need strong reforms after 2016 to maintain faith in the system for all parties.
The only people I know who want ID laws also don't want the poor or minorities voting against their candidate and tend to believe Trump's tweet about millions of fraudulent votes in this election.
sorry I meant they are all calling the results in doubts, and a good examples of why we need election reform on par with what has proven to work internationally. ex india has voter ids, many countries have trashed electronic voting.
Not many. The punishment for voting when you are not a citizen is banishment. Which means that they are risking a lot for essentially nothing. Americans won't vote and they have every reason to do so. Why would illegal immigrants vote when the risk is so much higher than any reward?
More like prison and then banishment. I don't get why so many people think that illegal immigrants would take a very high risk, very low reward deal as voting without citizenship. Most citizens don't even like voting, so would it even be a high risk, moderate punishment deal?
By analogy, it's as asking someone to be a drug mule, and if they're successful they get to wait in an extra line at the DMV. Would you take that deal?
The registered voter rolls might shrink a bit, but it isn't likely to have much effect on vote outcomes. Sometimes, an organization will pay people to go out and register voters, and those people then make up a bunch of fake names because it's easier than going door-to-door.
Not only that but they get paid for every signature that is turned in, regardless of whether the identity is valid or not, and regardless of whether the person votes or not. Each form is serial numbered and they have to turn everything in, period.
The intention was to keep people (read: southerners and Republicans) from using a sharpie to mark out every LaQuan and Shanice who registered to vote, but the flip side of that is that they have to let people register as Mickey Mouse too. And they get paid for every signature they turn in regardless.
Shocker right here: a lot of those registrations are bad and Mickey Mouse doesn't actually turn up to vote.
The only universe where large scale fraud is happening but being hidden by Republicans and Democrats is one where third parties are, in fact , getting much more of the vote
Considering the polls (no, the polls weren't that wrong for the election results, the analysis was).... the only way we are in this universe is if all polling organisations are also in on this.
Considering states + cities run elections, this would mean several tens of thousands of people would need to be in on this plot too.
A conspiracy which requires conplicity of tens of thousands of stakeholders seems a bit unlikely.
There's an alternative "many independent conspiracies " view, but smaller conspiracies would be more fragile to single whistleblowers. If one congressman were winning through vote fraud, one person with a bit of evidence would be enough for there to be real coverage (unless the media's in on it, but see prev. paragraph)
The guidelines ask you not to complain about downvotes, but it's possible that users voted you down because you've taken the thread off topic straight into tedious controversy.
> Yep. This has what has happened in the Arab world. Bunch of testosterone with nowhere to go, so they joined a "Holy War" / "Jihad" and blow up a bunch of people and places. This is also the reason why the refugees from the Arab countries molested women in Germany and Austria.
This counts as introducing a flamewar topic without anything new to say. Please don't do this.
This is a very overacted summary of a very interesting thought. I don't think it should be down-voted but rather explored. I might be giving you more credit than it is socially appropriate for this kind of statement, but it definitely caught my attention and triggered cognitive mini-explosion :)
It is so weird to see an ideology proved correct (rape culture, toxic masculinity et al) with concrete evidence, and then see that evidence ignored because of the cognitive dissonance with their pro-refugee stances.
The Muslim world also has a strong polygamy bent, derived from the four wives of Muhammad, and polygamy has a lot of associated negative externalities.
"Cognitive dissonance" and "value signaling" are Internet tropes meant to destroy discussion by suggesting that no disagreement with one's positions can be made in good faith. Among many problems with those tropes, there is no way to deploy them civilly: they are intrinsically uncivil, suggesting as they do that people who disagree with you are writing in bad faith.
You can't argue like that here; remaining civil in disagreement is the first and most important rule of the site.
So either the missing girls where aborted, killed, or once the family had a boy as the first child, they stopped having kids. Or people just ignored the policy altogether.
I think this article casts some doubt on whether the one-child policy was actually successful at reducing population growth. It certainly reduced the birth rate in urban areas where enforcement was stronger. But it seems like rural families had just as many kids as they would otherwise.
I'm saying out of all the possibilities, that's what could have happened. Either millions of girls weren't born because they selectively picked boys... OR as the article asserts, people ignored the policy entirely and hid the fact they had illegal children.
Either outcome is a total failure of the ability of a repressive government to control its citizenry. One option is a moral failure, the other is a policy failure.
There are many other documentaries and articles on unregistered children such as this:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/10/world/asia/china-second-child/