A tech-geek look at immigration... DDOS attacks possible

People at work were sharing the memes that "resonated" with them this morning and mostly they involved immigration. They were appropriately damning such as.

"All Lives Matter, now stay the hell out of my country."

This made me think of the issue of immigration from a tech point of view.

I responded saying "You need some kind of DDOS protection."

For those of you that may not be familiar with the term, it is probably the most common form of attack on the internet to temporarily cripple parts of the internet, or slow it to a crawl.

DDOS = Distributed Denial Of Service attack.

It works by having as many computers and devices as you can get attempt to access a site at the same time. Most internet circuits and the servers are designed to handle a certain amount of traffic. The more you want to handle, the more expensive it is.

So businesses/governments/universities will usually make a projection on what they believe the maximum they need is. They will purchase servers, and internet circuits with that in mind.

DDOS attacks are essentially far more traffic suddenly going to that circuit and server than it was designed to handle.

The server and circuit do not stop, but they are so over loaded that everything slows WAY down. If the load is high enough it can actually appear to be stopped. In some sense it will be perceived by legit users as being DOWN because their computer will see such a delay in response it will do what is called a TIMEOUT and will indicate failure to connect.

So what does this have to do with immigration?

You have a nation with a certain amount of resources, a certain amount of jobs, a certain amount of homes, a certain amount of hospitals, a certain amount of schools, etc. Making more of those things is not FREE. In the case of resources it may also not be possible. Now if you already have unemployment, and homeless populations then it is likely that is an indicator there are already more people not getting service. There are cases where that is self imposed, but that is not always the case.

The government set immigration amounts on the U.S. long ago based upon studies of what our infrastructure could handle based upon births, deaths, etc. This was not done to be mean, or a nasty person. This was done because, it is REAL. It isn't magical thinking land where we CAN welcome everyone without having a problem.

What you can end up with is something similar to a DDOS in a computer. If you have more people coming in than the infrastructure can handle then you will increase the number of legit people that cannot get service.

In computers we block IPs, contact upstream carriers to route traffic around, hire DDOS mitigation services, etc. These things are not perfect.

In the real world we deport people when they come in illegally beyond that quota that our infrastructure can handle. To do anything less is utter stupidity. Because, you feel bad about sending someone who came here illegally does not suddenly magically make more resources, jobs, homes, hospitals, etc appear out of thin air.

At some point you realistically realize that we can only do so much. The other alternative is to tell people that are LEGALLY trying to immigrate here that they cannot, because we gave their spot to an illegal immigrant. At which case that'd inspire a lot of people and the floodgates would open. Why legally immigrate here if you can illegally immigrate and get away with it?

Steem On!