Huh? My comment directly disproves this claim I replied to.
“However, border officials (in the EU) do not have substantially wider powers at the border than the police have inside the country. You don't lose your constitutional rights just because you happen to be a non-citizen trying to enter the country illegally with the intention to commit crime.”
Clearly asylum seekers in the EU do not have the same rights as EU citizens.
No, you are conflating the immigration process (which is an attempt by an individual to obtain the same rights that citizens have whilst in the country) with the crossing of a border (which is a much simpler process and is usually handled right at the border). The two are completely disjoint. The article deals with border crossings, not with the immigration process as such, though usually if you want to immigrate you first have to cross a border. This is why the United States is so picky about people that start their immigration process once they are already inside the United States. They would much prefer you to start that process from without so that you can be stopped and refused entry at the border. Doing that later - for instance, through deportation - is much harder.
Asylum seekers anywhere do not have the same rights as the citizens of that particular country or immigration area: if they did we wouldn't call them asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are simply a special class of immigrants for whom special processes and documentation requirements may apply and who may have extra rights based on their asylum seeking status. There are whole bodies of law around this theme.
Finally: the EU doesn't have a constitution. So you can't directly compare the EU situation to the United States one anyway, and from both a border crossing and immigration perspective the two are vastly different.
The thing you are referring to is that specifically undocumented asylum seekers (of which there are many) can have their phones searched to ensure that their story matches. You can agree or not with that policy (personally I'm conflicted about it, I can see both sides here) but that isn't anything at all like the border guards being allowed to search any phone they think is interesting.
My response was not specific to border crossing or the immigration process, it was the broader claim:
"The US also has unusually large differences between the rights of citizens and non-citizens. In the European way of thinking, most rights are human rights. Citizens only enjoy a limited set of additional rights."
So I posted a link to an article showing that, no, the EU is not that different than the US in having a different set of rights for citizens and non-citizen.
Your comment about "Asylum seekers anywhere do not have the same rights as the citizens of that particular country or immigration area", which basically agrees with the point I was trying to make.
The EU doesn't derive most rights from human rights. Every country has its own constitution and the differences between EU countries is vast, as is the relationship of each country in the union (and plenty outside of it) with the EU.
All these generalizations serve no purpose and are strictly speaking off-topic. If you're going to make such comparisons you're going to have to work a lot on clarifying the context within which your comment is made because it is very easy to misconstrue what you write on account of the gap between the situation as it really is and how you present it.
Dragging in asylum seekers serves no purpose, that's not what this is about at all, so you categorically can't illustrate any differences between the US and the EU regarding the rights of people crossing borders by shifting the topic like that.
Even if such a comparison in the abstract might be interesting. We could also start a conversation on emacs vs vi in this thread, it would be about as off-topic.
All these generalizations serve no purpose and are strictly speaking off-topic.
I agree, but I'm responding to a comment that made a generalization, not bringing a generalization into the discussion.
Dragging in asylum seekers serves no purpose
I'm responding to a generalization, so providing a specific example where the generalization is untrue, serves the purpose of proving that the generalization is untrue.
If you have concerns that specific topics shouldn't evolve into broader topics (that seems to happen in the comment of every HN post?), that's fine, but I think your comment would have been better directed at the person I originally replied to that introduced the generalization.
No, you introduced the topic. The parent to your comment did not mention asylum seekers at all. Unless you have some other comment in mind, in that case would you mind pointing it out?
The comment I originally replied to said "The US also has unusually large differences between the rights of citizens and non-citizens. In the European way of thinking, most rights are human rights. Citizens only enjoy a limited set of additional rights."
Which is clearly broadening the conversation beyond just border inspections.
“However, border officials (in the EU) do not have substantially wider powers at the border than the police have inside the country. You don't lose your constitutional rights just because you happen to be a non-citizen trying to enter the country illegally with the intention to commit crime.”
Clearly asylum seekers in the EU do not have the same rights as EU citizens.
Hence, my response was directly relevant.