One of the basic premises of anti-immigrant policies is that you can somehow influence the ratio of "useful" vs "not-useful" immigrants.
Apart from the idea of sorting people into useful and useless being inhumane, it also seems to be counterproductive. It looks like every kind of screening of immigrants will deter the more desirable ones, as far as that determination is possible on their arrival at all.
It wouldn't be hard to have an immigration system which is biased toward useful vs. not useful. The question is: where do you want to have the cutoff?
I'm in favor of a solid border control regime (i.e. "build the wall"), combined with a transparent and straightforward points-based system for mainly immigrant visas. I'd eliminate the inherent racism in the current system (penalizing India and China vs. Equatorial Guinea and Monaco). As a first pass, just copy the Canadian or New Zealand systems.
Where we set the threshold for entry is a worthwhile debate. Should it be anyone who isn't likely to be strongly negative? Anyone where net benefit exceeds cost? Where net benefit is >3x the annual median income?
A baseline of "not a felon, terrorist, etc." for visitors, a solid system of constraining visitors to defined periods of time (thus making it easier to grant visit visas), and a straightforward path to immigration and citizenship for high-value immigrants is a better starting point than the current immigration system.
> I'm in favor of a solid border control regime (i.e. "build the wall"),
Having lived on the east side of Berlin (post Wall!) I cannot forget that that wall was supposedly built to keep people out but of course it kept people in.
I am Australian, and I have to admit the points based system does work there...but. I have lived longest in the USA where the chaos has been beneficial for the country, and thus for me. Australia doesn't have a culture of "creative destruction" and its system has kept that from arriving/emerging.
If the US does choose to shut the door and I'll jump through it before it slams...and continue starting businesses (and creating jobs) elsewhere.
The Berlin Wall was really about keeping people in. Make no mistake about it. It was erected as a response to losing too many people through emigration [0].
Can you say the same about U.S. border control? Hardly.
There's a very big difference between a wall that keeps unwanted people out and a wall that keeps wanted (or everyone) in by force.
In the latter case, even if you have whatever freedom you wish outside the wall, you can have it. In the former, you cannot.
US recently lost illegal immigrants during the down turn, so it might be about keeping them in. More people went to Mexico than the US from 2005 to 2015, though only by ~150,000.
> In the latter case, even if you have whatever freedom you wish outside the wall, you can have it. In the former, you cannot.
That is obviously and blatantly false. If the world turns hardcore nationalist, then it will be impossible for Americans to move elsewhere, because all countries will have strict imigration policies. How would you move to Mexico if Mexico doesn't allow for imigration? Where would you go?
Having immigration policy and not allowing immigration at all is not the same thing. Even Japan, whose immigration policies are very strict, has both sizeable number of foreign workers and immigrants too. US currently has very open immigration policy (1M immigrating every year) and a problem enforcing the immigration laws it has (tens of millions of illegal immigrants). It's a long distance between this and "no immigration" and there are many points on this way which one could choose to stay in.
Yes, but the reverse is also true. The soviet union, for example, allowed scientists to attend conferences in the west. It also allowed families to visit the ocean. So they did let some people out sometimes. Just as you say that Japan lets some people in sometimes. The end result is the same. Most people will not be allowed to immigrate or even travel in a nationalistic world. Whether it is because countries don't let people out or that they don't let people in is of no consequence.
A good example of this is the case of North Korea and China. NK has a very heavily guarded border between SK and NK. Basically no one has ever escaped via that border. However, people do escape to China, and China deports them back to NK. Is there a difference between NK not letting people go to SK and China deporting people back to NK? The end result, is the same. No one can leave NK.
> The soviet union, for example, allowed scientists to attend conferences in the west
Some scientists, for some conferences. It wasn't easy to get these permissions, and if you have security clearance, no chance. Maybe if you're word-class celebrity, not otherwise.
> So they did let some people out sometimes.
Yeah. It required to pass a lot of checks and having some connections. And depended a lot on where you're going - Bulgaria or Mongolia is one thing, Hungary or DDR is another, France or Spain yet another, and UK or US is completely different. Depending on how ideologically far the target country is, you'd require to be in the more trusted circles and have more connections to be allowed to get there. It's not like you just wanted to go there, you buy a ticket and go, nowhere near it.
> Just as you say that Japan lets some people in sometimes.
Not even close. You obviously know very little of both to compare. You can visit Japan as a tourist anytime. If you want to stay and work, it's harder, if you want to become a citizen, even harder. But entirely not comparable with USSR exit restrictions, not even close.
> However, people do escape to China,
Ah, you misunderstand the situation quite a bit here. People don't just "escape" to China. NK has a huge underground economy which is completely dependent on China. That's how NK has been staying afloat for decades now (well, that and international humanitarian help, which NK openly extorts by nuclear threats), otherwise they'd die out (well, not all probably, China would take over before that, but they don't really want this poisonous radioactive dumpster fire as part of their country or their official responsibility). Of course, this can not be done openly, so it is all done on pretend basis - Chinese and NK powers pretend it doesn't exist and from time to time deport some people for show. But they all know it's a pretense.
> Is there a difference between NK not letting people go to SK and China deporting people back to NK?
Of course there is. Ultimately, the welfare of NK people is the responsibility (and continuing criminal failure) of the NK government. China is not responsible for them, but in fact is trying to manage the situation while keeping the pretense of situation not existing at all, because it's their fault NK exists in the first place.
What is the chaos in the immigration system in the US that benefits you? The uncertainty and delays in the H1B process for employees? Australian US visas are a special case but I assume you are talking about employees. I'd be de privileging family unification visas and removing per country caps, primarily. Also eliminate h1b but as part of improving immigrant visas to accomplish the same mission but with benefits to both domestic and immigrant workers, penalizing the abusive body shops.
Does the ability for people to historically (and to some extent, currently) illegally cross the southern border benefit your business? Does people overstaying visa waiver or other visas help? It would seem to me that being able to easily hire and have a simple, deterministic, and painless process would be a net win.
I didn't think the Berlin part of the wall was ever claimed to be for security; the other inner German border was. I didn't look this up recently so mah be wrong.
> What is the chaos in the immigration system in the US that benefits you?
Sorry I was not clear. The immigration system is absurd and it appears that all the plans are to make it worse for the US (All the announcements I've seen are of enormous benefit to Europe, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore et al). It's a major liability to trying to do business in the US.
I mean the general chaos of life in the USA. Day to day life here is a grind (you just have to spend so much time on useless shit that you don't deal with in other advanced economies) but in exchange you get people willing to adopt something new at the drop of a hat, who don't give a shit about credentialism, are willing to take outlandish and ludicrous risks, etc. Think of it as the social or meatspace equivalent of Black-Scholes: options with huge fluctuations have higher expected value than more sedate ones. It has made it worth putting up with the dreadful lifestyle crap of the USA. In terms of QoL, Australia, Germany and France (despite everyone being miserable) are much much nicer and a hell of a lot more fun. But for the work environment, hell, you just can't beat San Carlos<->Sunnyvale.
As for the "illegally cross the southern border" part: Of course it is a net positive. Sure. I used not just "legal" labor but union labor to build my house (had my construction supervisor check everybody's paperwork among other things). My housekeeper and gardener are US citizens, unlike me. H1B people are very difficult to get because of the arbitrary crap and uncertainty, but the fact that hiring a foreigner for a startup costs so much more than hiring a local doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
But it's a net positive because those folks who come here "illegally" are the private sector working around a fucked up immigration system: not only are they a huge economic net addition to the economy (one that's integrated across the border in a massive conurbation) not only by doing jobs that go otherwise unfilled (the whole point of the bracero system) but because they pay rent, buy iPhones etc, but they add spice with great cuisines, music, art, etc. They do tend to be very conservative (heavy on "family values", fiscally conservative etc).
You bring up a great example of the fucked up immigration system. Before the Obama-era border crackdown people moved back and forth more freely across the border. Over the past couple of years, despite the net emigration south, the number of people leaving would be even greater without the border crackdown (the human equivalent of a wall). yes, as with east Germany, increased border surveillance increases the risk of crossing (or the risk of returning) so people simply stay put. An already visible example of what the East Germans got.
> I didn't think the Berlin part of the wall was ever claimed to be for security; the other inner German border was.
Indeed the Berlin part was considered an integral part of the security system. Which it was -- it's just that the sign was reversed from how it was described. My wife grew up next to the larger internal border, so as a kid she liked watching East German late night TV shows that came across -- they showed soft porn on TV allegedly in the hopes of increasing the birth rate.
For an example of the top of my head, take tax returns. In the UK the vast majority of people don't need to file one—your employer deducts the right amount each month from your salary and off you go. Moving to America I found I had to spend at least half a dozen hours trying to figure out what I had to do, eventually giving up and paying for a service to do it for me and am still unsure I filed correctly.
For another example, take getting a driver's license. In the UK you fill in a form online, they extract any other relevant details from your passport records and put in your credit card details and they send you a license within the week. It's a 15 minute process. In America I got to finding out I had to go to the DMV (and that I should go to the DMV in another city because it's somehow superior) and promptly gave up.
I know you said aside from healthcare, but even if you had the hypothetical best insurance available, with no co-pay or deductible, just keeping track of all of the arcane and opaque numbers, policies and restrictions is a huge administrative burden.
Now to be clear, I understand why some of these systems are the way they are and, in some cases, can see the necessity, but the fact remains that in almost any other developed nation there simply wouldn't be an equivalent administrative burden to just existing.
You've accidentally hit on a problem with much of the complexity of laws in the US: states have autonomy on a lot of things. Healthcare is a big one. It's regulated by the states. Insurance companies incorporate by state. Each state has it's own regulations. Some states are gun friendly, some are not. Although our federal government yields a lot of power, constitutionally, it doesn't have as much as its seems.
It's an interesting model. It was more like the EU in it's inception than today in that each state was it's own country under a thin umbrella of federal government. The outcome of the US Civil War changed that significantly, but not enough to have a coherent, omnipotent federal system. (The EU doesn't have one either; each EU country controls most of their own sovereignty). One main difference is US states can't secede from the US while EU countries can.
Another issue is free borders between states. If state A enacts universal healthcare, how does it prevent the sick inhabitants of neighboring states B,C,D,E from emmigrating and bankrupting the state? This model poses all sorts of problems. Even colleges have to deal with this. If you live in the same state as the college for a year, you are considered a permanent resident and get a significant tuition deduction (like 75% less). There are hundreds of examples of where autonomous states with free borders cause administration headaches.
Imagine if the EU decided to have a governing body that took taxes and distributed services, like healthcare, military, infrastructure, etc. It would have to cut out parts of the tax code for Greece and add parts for France, etc. Not only that, but by industry. Then tack on special interest lobbying. It would be a mess. Not only that, what if 1/4 of the countries didn't have universal healthcare?
Talk to an accountant with experience in dealing with tax both inside and outside the US, and watch them wither before your eyes when they describe the cacophony of the US taxation system. You gotta love a taxation system where everything changes depending on where something is sold versus where something is received versus where head office is, varying right down to the county level...
Most of the reason why Americans get so frothy about tax is because they've made it ridiculously complex to comply with.
One example is the very complex set of rules for specific professions in the US. There's no one-size fits all business licence as there is in some other countries. If you want to, for example, start a moving business you buy a truck, and then you have to register as a mover in CA, and if your client wants to move their stuff to WA you have to register as a mover in Oregon and Washington as well. You may then have to register into a special commercial fee system for using the highways commercially. This kind of thing really shocks the redneck crowd who thinks that if they've got a pickup truck then of course they can move that sofa for $20 bucks.
Apart from the other examples cited by others: back before paper checks completely vanished (mid 1990s) when I paid my housekeeper I used a special checkbook -- when she deposited the paycheck my taxes were paid automatically. Apart from that checks were already gone. Until the iPhone I could get a better mobile phone in Africa than I could buy in the US.
Paying all your bills is really complicated here, and full of hidden deceptive fees. Food is full of weird labels that don't let you know what you're eating. Send your kids to school -- my god, the TEACHERS pay for the kids' pens, and you have to send a huge number of things that were normally part of school (printer paper???). School lunches -- forget it! And working parents have to come help in school? WTF is up with that?
Buying a house -- what a nightmare (and a racket). This is one of the most corrupt systems in any country, but somehow the US adds insane complexity, at least in California. I have tried to explain this stuff to my kid who is going to university in the US but he doesn't see the point since he doesn't see much future here after graduation.
I could go on but it's too depressing. How about we talk about how people are willing to enthusiastically work for a startup even though chances are good it will go bust? That they will step up and take responsibility and complain less then most? That they are, in general, among the more law abiding people in the world? How great the national forests are? That the prices at the ski slopes are only outrageously high, but that I don't think anyone is trying to go beyond that to rip me off in a covert way?
I mean, living in the US is not much fun, but working sure is. And consider: some of my neighbors complain that poor Mexicans are driving poor "real Americans" out of work, that politicians are all corrupt and the economy is in tatters. A couple of years ago I flew to see my in laws in Germany and then my family in Australia (cheaper round the world ticket). In Germany, the richest country in Europe, the pub conversation was: poles were driving poor "real germans" out of work, that politicians were corrupt and the economy was in the toilet. When I got to Australia, in the pub I learned: that Vietnamese (or was it Indonesians?) were taking the work away from poor "real Australians", that the politicians were all corrupt, and that the economy was in the toilet (in something like the 20th consecutive year of expansion).
Well, I am inclined to like creative destruction and open borders too. But Australia and the US are democracies -- they are ruled by the people, most of whom seem to like a bit more orderliness.
Now if the democratic process is producing something like the White Australia Policy[1] then we have cause to cry out our moral censure from the rooftops. But whatever your view on the current points system, that's just a policy debate, not a great moral issue.
The WAP has been dead for more than 40 years, and 28% of the Australian population was born overseas (21% if you discount poms and kiwis). In comparison, the UK has 12% foreign-born and the US 14%. If you exclude the refugee crisis last year as a once-off, the only sizable western countries taking in more migrants per capita are Spain and Norway.
As national policies go, there aren't many that have been so resoundingly reversed. The only thing that keeps the WAP alive is people that keep on referring to it, thinking it represents the current state of affairs.
Yes I'm an old fart, born in the (fortunately waning) days of WAP. When I first visited the US, we landed at D.C. and drove north, because to drive south would have meant we would have to split up the family to stay in different hotels. Still, it seemed less racist than Australia.
Nowadays, both have improved but I feel like the positions have reversed. Then again, I don't think America throws kids off navy ships into the water. And they have only one overseas concentration camp that I know of, and I don't think the people in America's wanted to enter the US, unlike the people AUS sticks in camps.
Nobody is perfect. But really, it's astonishing how far Australia has come. Now if only the coalition could reflect that.
> Then again, I don't think America throws kids off navy ships into the water.
When did Australia do that? The claim was that the refugeees threw the kids overboard in order to get a rescue, not that the navy threw them overboard themselves for a photo op. The scandal was about the government lying about refugee actions, not that the navy was drowning kids.
He didn't say that exactly. On the other hand, there are persistent reports about the Australian navy letting refugee ships sink.
By the way, often the only alternative to self-scuttling their ships, for the refugees, is to let their ships be turned around and maybe never reach another shore for lack of navigation skills, water or fuel.
That comment certainly was a bit hyperbolic, but not that far from the actual truth.
In fact I first left Australia (with my parents) because of the WAP, which impacted me even before I was conceived (one of my parents was neither "W" nor "A" so the "P" caused problems). I still have an (older) Aussie neighbor around the corner in Palo Alto who has told me I'm a wog.
First, I doubt that the WAP was passed through a sufficiently democratic process as we understand it now.
Second, I don't accept any non-democratic policy passed by any supposedly democratic system as democratic. No matter the majority it has been enacted by. For me, discrimination by race is by itself against the values necessary for sustained democracy, and as such, not subject to majority approval.
Since you are Australian, you are probably not aware of how biased the immigration system is, against the Indians.
And thats what the earlier comment by throw2bit was referring to, that its better to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out while reforming the legal immigration to be similar to that of Canada and Australia where the most productive humans with greatest potential are allowed in, irrespective of which country they were born in.
> Since you are Australian, you are probably not aware of how biased the immigration system is, against the Indians.
I am not aware of such a bias, and I have a half a dozen Indian relatives living in the USA (I am an Australian with one Indian parent, currently living in the USA). I have not studied any current place-of-origin biases in particular (I know historically they were dreadful and for all I know they still are. Certainly the rhetoric is).
> ...that of Canada and Australia where the most productive humans with greatest potential are allowed in...
Ah, but it's all about who decides what is deemed "with the greatest potential". It's what is believed to be needed now of course, whether nurses, plumbers, or geneticists, but what about poets, lunatics, or those who write music I don't enjoy?
There's a limit to the number of green cards that can be issued for people from a particular nationality (country of birth than country of citizenship). This creates a backlog for Indians and Chinese nationals. The backlog causes a long wait time and uncertainty for Indian nationals. There are people, like me, who have been waiting for their green card for more than 7 years. I've been in this country for 15 years now, have a Masters degree and have paid more than half a million in taxes (a couple of acquisitions helped). With equity, I make close to $400k/yr and could probably make more if I had a green card. I have substantial (north of $250k) savings in cash which I hesitate to invest here since I've no idea if I'll get my green card or be sent back. My spouse was finally allowed to work here due to Obama's H4 EAD rule but now that's going to be revoked too. It sucks, since my spouse wants to teach kids with special needs and there's significant demand for such teachers. If my green card doesn't come through in the next couple of years, I'll most likely move back to my home country or one of Canada/New Zealand.
I guess I misread your earlier comment, I thought you were talking about Australian immigration policies to the parent commenter who was an Australian.
My bad, since you are talking about US, yes I agree with you.
> I cannot forget that that wall was supposedly built to keep people out
As far as I know, the Berlin wall was always supposed to keep people in. Strict exit restrictions was common in all soviet regimes, including one in DDR.
> Whenever people put up the walls for their house (which serve the same purpose) those are days of joy too.
I don't think that was the context of the OP's comment, but if you wish to extend to those kinds of walls then that's fine with me. It's just not the way I would have interpreted the meaning of a border wall.
Claims to the contrary the map is not the territory and a country is not a house. Finally, a wall around a country is definitely not the same as a wall or fence around your house.
Note that most dictatorships use walls around their 'houses' to keep the population in, not to keep others out.
Note that countries that are bordering other countries with great wealth disparity are using walls to keep the wealth concentrated and those on the other side of the wall poor so they may be further exploited.
This is not the same as you and your roughly equally wealthy neighbor sharing a wall in a duplex or a fence between your two gardens.
Those fences and walls are there for practical reasons and to delineate responsibility and right-of-way, not to specifically make it harder for your neighbor to share in the collective wealth of the neighborhood.
The equivalent of that would be a gated community in a poor country (which by the way look exactly like inside-out prisons).
>Claims to the contrary the map is not the territory and a country is not a house
I think you miss a "despite" or "notwithstanding" somewhere there.
In any case, even though a country is indeed not a house in some ways (no ceiling for one), it is quite like a house in others -- a set of people live there, some where born there, others came later, but in any case, it's their house, they (and their parents and grandparents) maintained it over the years, and its their decision who comes in and how it's run.
>Note that most dictatorships use walls around their 'houses' to keep the population in, not to keep others out.
That's not generally applicable, except when the dictatorship can't guarantee enough prosperity or is especially violent towards some groups. It's safety and/or food primarily. Otherwise, most people have little intention of living merely for political freedom.
But even if so, it's orthogonal to our subject. Dictatorships might do that (keep their population in), but we're talking about the inverse (keep non-citizens out -- which, by some logic, would be what democracies do).
>Those fences and walls are there for practical reasons and to delineate responsibility and right-of-way, not to specifically make it harder for your neighbor to share in the collective wealth of the neighborhood.
Borders are there for very practical purposes too. To define the area that a nation state controls, taxes, enforces laws, etc, and to keep non citizens of that state, outside of it unless asked to come in.
> I think you miss a "despite" or "notwithstanding" somewhere there.
No, I'm perfectly ok with what I wrote.
What I find interesting is that many people are perfectly ok with exploiting a poorer neighbor, but they definitely should stay on their side of the dotted line.
All this hoopla about illegal immigration, walls and repatriating jobs to the other side of that dotted line will have the exact opposite effect. Illegal immigration will go up.
Since we're in broken analogy territory anyway, why not use another?
So, in osmosis you have a wall - which should be easy to identify as your border - and two liquids on either side with a varying concentration of some substance. Say 'wealth'.
Now for wealth to stop flowing from one side to the other you will have to reach some kind of equilibrium first.
The faster you reach that equilibrium the faster you no longer have to worry about 'illegal crossings of the wall'.
In the end that border wall never was about people: it was all about wealth, and possibly about the sharing of that wealth.
>What I find interesting is that many people are perfectly ok with exploiting a poorer neighbor, but they definitely should stay on their side of the dotted line.
How is having trade with a poorer neighbor country "exploitation"? Or when manufacturing plants move to the poorer nation? How is that exploitation? It's not good for the higher-paid workers who now are unemployed in the richer country, but it's good for the workers in the poor country who now have jobs which they apparently want because those plants do get staffed quickly.
As for your equilibrium/osmosis analogy, what if that substance differs highly in concentration because there's fundamental differences between the two countries, and one of them is severely broken politically (the other one is too, just not as badly and not in the same way)? Until the fundamental problem in the poorer country is addressed, I don't see how you're going to ever achieve equilibrium unless it's to the severe disadvantage of the richer country (i.e., dragging them down). And the responsibility for fixing that is not with the richer country; doing that is generally called "imperialism" and not viewed positively these days.
> Note that most dictatorships use walls around their 'houses' to keep the population in, not to keep others out.
They use them for both, as it is common for prisons.
> Note that countries that are bordering other countries with great wealth disparity are using walls to keep the wealth concentrated
As do you - you keep your household's wealth concentrated in your house and your bank account, instead of putting it outside on the street and let anybody who wants take a piece.
> not to specifically make it harder for your neighbor to share in the collective wealth of the neighborhood.
My neighbor's walls definitely make it harder for me to share his wealth. I think that's kind of the point.
Yes, we really should put a stop to all those Americans sneaking across the border to work illegally in Mexico.
/s
> Walls don't impact legal immigration.
Yes, they do. But not in a way that you would immediately recognize as linked so I'll forgive you.
> They only only impact the proportion of illegal immigrants that sneak across the border.
Yes, so they will cross legally and then disappear into illegality. Same thing really, only this time you'll be able to put an exact figure on it.
You know what will really change illegal immigration from Mexico?
Making Mexico wealthy. And if anything that was already happening leading to a decline in people moving to the US and even a reversal (people moving back to Mexico).
But now with the border wall and companies being strong-armed to move their production back to the US how long will it take for that trend to reverse again?
I think it would be great to for Mexico to be more prosperous so people wouldn't have to leave their families to come to the U.S. But you also have to ask yourself: does that fit with the purpose of the U.S.?
Having a government necessarily means yoking people, stripping them of their natural autonomy using coercion and under the threat of violence. I'm by no means an anarchist, but the only way I can justify that state of affairs morally is by (1) putting the beast we've created under democratic control, and (2) giving that beast the mandate to work toward the prosperity of its subjects.
Saying that the solution to illegal immigration is for the U.S. government to work to make Mexico wealthy is really difficult to reconcile with what I see as the only legitimate purpose of government.
Well, it fit just fine until a few short weeks ago.
Mexico was getting wealthier, people were more likely to return to Mexico.
Ironically this whole border wall + move jobs back to the USA thing has made the chances of illegal immigration from Mexico to the USA for a given individual go up rather than down.
As for who would make Mexico wealthy: that would not be the US government but market forces and corporations, the things that America has historically been such a huge proponent of.
But that's all gone now, it's the new times now, market forces are bad, companies need to be 'incentivized' to move their production back to the home country and all those illegals need to rounded up and sent back.
Government would have a hard time achieving the goal of making Mexico wealthy but they sure can do a lot to make things worse which will put upwards pressure on Mexicans to seek a better life elsewhere.
> As for who would make Mexico wealthy: that would not be the US government but market forces and corporations, the things that America has historically been such a huge proponent of.
Market forces are merely a means to an end. The U.S. Government should only permit them to operate to the extent that has the effect of making the majority of Americans more prosperous (which it usually does). Do trade policies that have the effect of making Mexico richer have the effect of making the median American richer? I don't know the answer to that. Americans seem to think not.
> The U.S. Government should only permit them to operate to the extent that has the effect of making the majority of Americans more prosperous (which it usually does).
The US Government should do what is best for the country and it's surroundings in the longer term, not what is best for isolated groups of Americans in the short term, and it was doing mostly that.
Trade policies that only work to the advantage of one of the trading partners are bad for everybody in the long term, they need to be win-win to really work.
> Americans seem to think not.
Americans by and large seem to think things are reasonably ok, as they should given the fact that the country is doing amazingly well. All this talk of doom and gloom is mostly a stage show set up to galvanize the votes of the dis-enfranchised.
It's a natural reaction: who cares if the country as a whole on average is doing much better if your little pocket of it is doing much worse? Who cares about the world as a whole doing better if your part of it is sliding backwards.
Adapt or die is easy to say when you're the one that has adapted, it's a lot harder if you're likely in the part of the population that will simply die.
And that's the heart of the problem, not whether or not the median American is getting richer, if that were the case nothing should have been changed because that was exactly what was happening already.
This is a good point. Rationally, the US government exists solely for the purpose of advancement of the interests of the American people. However, trade wars are NOT in the interest of the American people either; free markets are. We don't even need to theorize about this, there has been an actual drop in illegal immigration from Mexico because of its rising prosperity. So the rational conclusion should be to continue down this path, as it seems like the only solution that seems to really work.
Also, it is not at the cost of American jobs; of course those specific jobs are lost, but unemployment is down, private sector is adding thousands of jobs etc.
It would barely impact them. Impoverished people who voyage hundreds of miles through the desert in search of a better life are not going to be deterred by a wall. They'll dig under it, climb over it, or smash right through it if need be.
Border Patrol reports a drop in illegal border crossings of up to 60% [fam units] and 40% indivs, over the last two months compared to the prev year, so it appears that just knowing the chances of deportation are higher is discouraging prospective illegal crossers.
I'm pretty sure if a wall in your house goes down it'd be a day of sadness for you. They say good fences make good neighbors, but it also depends on the neighborhoods (btw, check out rich houses - do they have walls and fences? do they have gates? do they have another gate around the community?) - and if you have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tijuana_Cartel as your neighbors, you may think a wall going up between you and them is not such a bad thing.
> The thing to keep in mind here is that such walls built to keep others out can be used just as easily to keep the locals in (on either side).
Somehow I'm not too worried about not being able to escape from the US to Mexico and the US trying to keep me in. I think you need to rob a bank or something to make that happen?
I'm concerned about potentially blocking US persons from exiting with a wall, but without legal changes it wouldn't be a problem. Even with legal changes, you'd need to restrict a LOT of technology on the US side to keep people from forcibly exiting, and I'd feel morally OK with using force to escape a country.
> I'd feel morally OK with using force to escape a country.
Illegal immigration is fine with you if it is to escape a country, but not if it is to enter a country?
Do realize that by using force to escape one country you'd immediately be illegally emigrating into another.
A lot of your Southern neighbors feel just like you. They use force to escape their economic situation, a prison whose walls are roughly as effective a one built out of stones.
America building 'that wall' is essentially simply making the wall a formal arrangement rather than a social construct that is already there.
I'm not sure why I should be ok with you using force to escape your country but why I should frown upon Mexicans using force to enter yours.
Because you apparently base your moral viewpoint around illigal immigration (rather than the other way round), why does the fact that it's illegal change whether it's right or not?
That's a really strange and horrible viewpoint you have.
In my world, it's always OK for someone for someone to enter someone else's land/property if they've been given permission. If's not OK to do so if they haven't. However, holding people prisoner is always morally wrong. That's pretty much the definition of slavery.
IMO, it's always OK for people to forcibly leave someone who's enslaving them; the complication is finding someone who will take them in. Assuming they've found such a place, what possible defense can you have for people who want to imprison them?
>Do realize that by using force to escape one country you'd immediately be illegally emigrating into another.
This is wrong. You're assuming the country they're immigrating into hasn't given them permission. This is a baseless assumption.
> That's a really strange and horrible viewpoint you have.
> In my world, it's always OK for someone for someone to enter someone else's land/property if they've been given permission.
Good.
> If's not OK to do so if they haven't.
Yes, because that suits you well. Because you only recognize those kinds of hardship that you yourself would want to escape from and ignore those that are actually in play.
> However, holding people prisoner is always morally wrong. That's pretty much the definition of slavery.
No, it isn't. There are some points in common but that's not slavery.
> IMO, it's always OK for people to forcibly leave someone who's enslaving them; the complication is finding someone who will take them in. Assuming they've found such a place, what possible defense can you have for people who want to imprison them?
Good question. Ask those who want to build a wall. You do realize that building that wall essentially says: Mexicans, you're on your own, you won't be able to vote with your feet any more, and we will not allow you to come to work in the USA to send money home in order to slowly increase the standard of living South of the border, made worse by American companies being strong-armed into operating North of that same border?
> You're assuming the country they're immigrating into hasn't given them permission.
I'm not aware of any of my friends who 'made it' having received prior permission to enter the country they fled to.
In fact, without exception they ended up in 'internment camps' after which they were allowed to apply to a number of countries around the world who might want to accept them.
Effectively they were in no-mans land.
> This is a baseless assumption.
No, in fact this is the way it goes. Given that I've actually lived on both sides of such a wall for a while I figure my assumptions are anything but baseless.
>You do realize that building that wall essentially says: Mexicans, you're on your own, you won't be able to vote with your feet any more, and we will not allow you to come to work in the USA to send money home in order to slowly increase the standard of living South of the border, made worse by American companies being strong-armed into operating North of that same border?
Please explain what prevents Mexico from improving its standard of living on its own. Mexico is not some kind of slave to America; it's a sovereign nation, in control of its own destiny. It's free to trade with all the other 200+ nations on Earth, or to attempt to negotiate having its people go live there.
Why does America get all the blame in your world for Mexico's problems? Who does America get to blame for its problems?
> Why does America get all the blame in your world for Mexico's problems?
Where do you think the vast majority of the money propping up the organized crime groups that are disrupting civil society in Mexico comes from? The flow of money from the US involved is, proportional to the size of target economy, equivalent to some other country funnelling something like $200 billion a year to armed anti-government groups in the US.
> Please explain what prevents Mexico from improving its standard of living on its own.
Nothing whatsoever. Except of course that no country exists 'on its own'.
> Mexico is not some kind of slave to America; it's a sovereign nation, in control of its own destiny.
No, it's a lot less in control of its own destiny than America, mostly because of America (incidentally, also the biggest consumer in the drug trade). To all intents and purposes Mexico is utterly dependent on what happens on the other side of the border. Of course it is easy to deny that if you choose to do so but it suits quite a few interests in the United States just fine to have a weak and poor country next door.
To the point that there have been serious interventions in Mexican internal affairs to keep it that way benefiting (mostly American) foreign strategic and economic interests.
> It's free to trade with all the other 200+ nations on Earth, or to attempt to negotiate having its people go live there.
To the extent that it is able to do so, it does.
> Why does America get all the blame in your world for Mexico's problems?
It doesn't. Why do you read it as such?
America is to blame only to such an extent that they first establish a whole pile of factories abroad when it suits them and then at the drop of a hat imperils the newly created stability and middle-class in a country next door. That sort of action comes with responsibility.
> Who does America get to blame for its problems?
With great power comes great responsibility. If you don't want to be seen as responsible do not continuously mess in other countries affairs and when you do realize that you can't withdraw that support overnight.
I used the Canadian Express entry system and migrated to Canada within months. I hope & encourage every talented immigrants in the US who are being discriminated based on the country of birth (rather than their skills) to follow suit.
Do not trust an immigration system based on lottery. Trust an immigration system like the Canadian Express Entry based on points which do not discriminate a person for his/her country of birth.
Its absurd and plain stupid that the green card quotas are country based for skilled immigrants in the US ! In Canada, even a temporary worker's spouse can work
right from the day they land.
Express Entry is humane & values your skills period.
"It wouldn't be hard to have an immigration system which is biased toward useful vs. not useful."
I think that's extremely hard in terms of startups. You're essentially expecting the government to select what is valuable and what isn't. I don't like unclear visa situations either, but I haven't really seen a country effectively implement "come here and do whatever for a bit as long as you can take care of yourself". Which is what I would think is most compatible with creating startups.
People founding startups are a very small subset of overall immigrants. There is probably another form of visa which would work well for that.
Also, most people who do start startups are also competent, if not educated, enough to probably qualify under a more traditional points based system. A specific job accepted might be a +5 (and maybe make it contingent on remaining there for some period of employment), a college degree might be evaluated on school/program and +1 to +5, other specific achievements might get some bonuses, age (youth; working life before retirement, generally) would be some benefit, and such. Proof of assets is some benefit, and maybe sponsorship/bond/whatever from some entity could be a factor.
I think we could probably have a lower point threshold than Canada, although I'm not sure. That is mostly a political decision and should involve a lot of factors beyond economics.
If the negative consequence here is you have to come to the US for a job, but your immigration status isn't tied to that job, and you thus have to work in the US for 2-4y before getting PR or citizenship, that's not a huge bar to entrepreneurs, IMO. If you don't already have the business or funding, working in the US first is probably necessary anyway. The problem with H1B is retaining residency after switching to the startup.
"People founding startups are a very small subset of overall immigrants."
True, even less create successful startups in a timely manner (even though they contribute overall). Which makes them so hard to target.
"Also, most people who do start startups are also competent, if not educated, enough to probably qualify under a more traditional points based system."
There's only so many ways to measure something and dropping out school to work for random Internet companies and starting your own before you have kids, which is a common profile for entrepreneurial people in Europe, tends to not tick a lot of them.
The US immigration system desperately needs reform, I just don't think any country has managed to create a formal system that is better for entrepreneurship than the realities of running your business illegally in the beginning (or at least pushing the meaning of a business visa). With some reservation for not having looked into the European startup/freelance visas.
Somewhat. The conditions are sort of awkward since you have to basically start a company, build contacts wherever you are for an investment and then at the same time build contacts in the US and move you company there.
I think a better situation would be something like a "mini E-2" where you with a lesser investment (say $20k) can start you US company directly, go there for a year and then after that show you meet similar requirements to an E-2, but with US investors. (there could be conditions that you can't hire people or whatever). I guess this is essentially what many people do instead of E-2, but with business visas and other visa schemes.
Yeah agreed the bar for E2 is a bit high and a bit contrived (also not very transparent). But I also understand the government's desire to prevent visa fraud as well.
For effective tracking you will need a national Id card for us nationals. That is something many different groups in the US are against for different reasons. Such an id could solve a lot of other problems and of course will create its own problems. But I think the net benefit outweighs the loss.
You could also potentially do it by retaining positive tracking of non-permanent visitors and then going after them as soon as status becomes disallowed. It would be challenging to locate someone in a disallowed visa status on transition without a national ID card, but there are probably ways.
One option might be to enroll them on entry with lots of biometrics, and then do a "not on blacklist" biometric check at government-provided services. That wouldn't necessarily require identifying the US people, just validating that the US people are not the other non-US people.
If we can dramatically reduce the number of illegal status people by making legal immigration reasonable, it becomes easier to go after illegal immigration with more resources per person, and higher penalties.
Other than going to the DMV once a few years, buying a house and flying, I rarely if ever use a government service that isn't transit. When I first come in I use a lot of government services, such as getting a bank account and an SSN, but that is a one time process that happens when your legal.
Yeah I mean, the problem is that we can't afford to "let them all in", so how do you decide who to let in? An immigration policy that is held be numerous other countries that favors skilled immigrants seems to be reasonable. On the other hand, brain drain. How will those countries continue to get better and enjoy a modern standard of living if all the smart people leave?
Also there is value in "go to US/SV, work there, return home with knowledge of how better systems work, establish in your home country", although there are probably scale effects so it's best for humanity overall for the best people to be concentrated.
(I'm not sure about the merits of immigration, naturalization, and then return to/interface with birth country, vs. a non-immigrant status. There is probably a good case to be made that having people gain US citizenship is overall better, and it provides optionality. With global taxation it is a clear net win for the US, too.)
I agree, but how many people come here from, say, India or wherever, work in IT in somewhere like SF and say ok I've had enough training, time to go make my country a better place? None. I don't blame them either.
Actually there are a LOT of Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs I know who moved to the US, worked here, and especially back in India are now building SV-style companies there. Or are putting parts of their global businesses there -- given how expensive labor is in the US and especially SV, it's a huge competitive advantage to be from, say, Ukraine and be able to set up a great engineering organization there.
I agree it makes less sense for an individual worker to move back (unless there are family or other concerns).
It depends on person, as usual. For many, the US residency is a blessing. Things are nice here, compared to where they come from. The quality of life is much nicer, and this is something i'd most definitely want for my kids.
However, there is also a greater advantage to going back home: Those markets usually lack the capital and the knowledge, and it's relatively easy to copy startups from here and implement them in their home countries.
Smart people migrate somewhere else because they are more productive there. Usually they even send back more money than they would earn in their home country.
> the problem is that we can't afford to "let them all in"
Why is that? I'm genuinely curious. Are you making an economic or a cultural argument? On the economic side, there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries, which should obviously be addressed. By and large, immigrants are net contributors to the economy.
> On the other hand, brain drain.
We can hypothesis that tight immigration policy actually creates more brain drain. It's so difficult to come to the US that you're not likely to go back, even for a few years, once you're here. If you can easily move between your country of origin and your country of immigration, you can probably alleviate the brain drain somewhat. Easy come, easy go.
> the problem is that we can't afford to "let them all in"
I believe that cost per person in developed counties is very high and if the marginal person is not paying a large amount of taxes then they will "cost" the system.
Think things like policing, schooling (for their kids), infrastructure usage, medical costs, administrative costs (documents, id, various "counting"), city services etc. etc.
IMO we should allow immigrants an option to fund these costs to jump the queue (eg, you can get a 4 yr visa for $500k or whatever). Many people feel these kinds of systems "unfair", but I see it as a way that a new person to the country and full invest their future in the good of their new country. Of course all the negative checks should still apply (criminal history for example).
1) thats why "or whatever" followed 500k, it was an example number.
2) 500k taxes over 4 yrs is not the point, the point is to match (or even over charge for) the marginal systemic costs of that person entering the country. Not just a fee for applying for the visa but all the infrastructure and social support costs.
> there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries
So, in other words, there is evidence that it does have negative consequences?
I myself don't know either way. I just think that, if what you write is true, an impact at the low end of the salary spectrum isn't something to brush off as if it's nothing and doesn't count.
There's no consensus on that, compared to other areas where there is consensus that immigration, as a whole is either a net benefit or, at worse, neutral. There are, however, individual cases where native born individuals will suffer losses. The answer is better access to retraining.
The attitude you just displayed is basically why Trump won the election. Let me translate your statements to an economic reality: "Screw the entire middle of the country and anyone who doesn't live in cities. Except those guys in Chicago, I guess they're alright."
Low wage earners are a huge chunk of the legal US population. After the government the next largest employer in the country is Walmart. Most of those people live outside major metros because at those wages it's not affordable to get housing in major metros.
I understand your city folk bubble, but I suggest you step out of it before spreading elitist rhetoric. Economies are complex systems which cause strong interdependence between cities and rural areas. The politics from both sides of the aisle of trying to injure their opponents is counter productive to the entire nation.
I apologize that my logic in support of open borders and extending the american jobs economy to immigrants has been construed as a Trump-esque attitude of "screw the [...] middle of the country"
For what it's worth, I am not on either side of an aisle, and am so disconnected from media that I have no idea how my perspective is in any way correlated to Trump's antithetical closed-borders policy. Please forgive my ignorance of that narrative.
To be clear, I'm not personally opposed to open borders. I'm responding to this line "that effect is only negative from the specific perspective of low end salary holders." which as a statement is deeply lacking in empathy for the fact that MILLIONS of people in this country are "low end salary holders" who are negatively impacted by the labor competition that open borders brings.
This doesn't mean that open borders is a net negative policy, but it does have a tremendous negative impact on real people. That's something that needs to be considered seriously in the policy proposal and mitigated if possible. Hand-waving it away is basically the standard rhetoric of coastal city elites who don't give one iota of brain power for thinking about the "rubes in flyover states". Giving some effort to have empathy for every man, woman, and child in this country and how they're impacted by the policies we espouse, support, and advocate for is one way we can reduce the divisiveness of politics and heal our nation so we can move into a better future.
Agreed, but isn't that perspective of preserving artificially high wages for US jobs is deeply lacking in empathy for the poor of the rest of the world? they are "real people" too, and in the case of mexico and central america, the US has a very real culpability in the economic conditions which created their poverty.
Well, first of all, many consumers are also low-end salary earners.
Second and perhaps more importantly, the more salaries are driven down, the less money those earners have to spend, which means businesses will see less potential revenue.
You are assuming a zero sum market. Generally, when the market changes, the labor force changes as well (skills retraining etc.). It might be inelastic (i.e. changes in labor takes more time to adjust to new markets) but it does eventually happen. This is how the US workforce made the jump from agrarian to industrial to service economy.
The rest of your post seems to be talking about cases where the market changes and the labor force changes as a result. But we're looking at the opposite, right? We're looking at a direct change to the labor force, and there may or may not be any commensurate change in the market. So I don't see how your example of the transition from agrarian society applies, at least not directly.
By the way, I'm asking these questions in earnest -- this isn't a debate to me, and I'm more than happy to "lose". I don't know much about this topic and would like to learn.
Because you end up with more people working and for low wage jobs there isn't all that much room to cut wages.
At the moment we have pretty good job growth combined with low unemployment so new people starting working aren't putting downward pressure on wages (evidence of this is that we are seeing wage growth).
It's an economic and cultural one, but not in the terms you have described.
So first you have to decide whether you support completely open borders, or borders. At that point we're arguing about who to let in and how many. Right? So my first comment "can't let them all in" is related to open borders. It would be an unmitigated disaster for a country like the US to have an open border policy. I agree with you that immigrants are net positives. But the details of which are nuanced and worth discussing because the benefit isn't a simple more immigrants == better economy. There are other factors at play.
It's also a cultural argument. People don't like change. They really don't like abrupt change that appears that they have no control over, especially if it involves people with real or perceived different cultural values. These are simple facts of human nature. Mass migration of any people to any other location on earth will inevitably cause tension and conflict. The absolute wrong thing to do is to take a large group of immigrants and settle them in a mostly homogenous community. Again, there is a lot of discussion to be had here.
In regard to brain drain, I think you're flat out incorrect. People may take a vacation to see family, but there is a negligible amount of immigrants that are packing their bags and moving back to their country of origin for any reason. Coming and going between countries is just not happening. If you manage to get a US Visa you're hanging on to it. Softening of the number of visas issued just means more immigrants, not that they return with money and skills to their home countries.
The West probably needs a comprehensive, global effort to teach, support, and train people across the planet. Global warming, conflict, and a widening technology gap will only make things worse.
> On the economic side, there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries
Oh just the low end huh? Why all the whining about H1-Bs on this site then?
> which should obviously be addressed
How? Increasing the labor pool is increasing the labor pool. That doesn't lead to higher or even stable wages.
You didn't get my point. I was alleging any kind of screening will keep those away which you would deem desirable.
Also, despite having probably the most easily "defendable" borders, Canada has quite the population of undocumented immigrants and refugees. Sure they talk a great game of selecting immigrants. But that mostly applies to those who don't come over the southern border or just overstay their visa.
Start running down the list of classic famous artists and you may be surprised at how many wouldn't have met those criteria at the time when they created their most important work.
To be fair... a lot were. If anything, most of the artists we still remember from before the modern era did their best work under wealthy patrons or a purpose (David's Death of Marat and Oath of the Horatii both being pseudo-propaganda for the French Revolution).
The view of the starving artist doing their best work for free is compatible with our modern, post Industrial Revolution views but largely inaccurate.
If the bar for "can support himself" is suitably low, someone could be an artist, immigrate to the US to work as an engineer or accountant or nurse, and be an artist. Once he can support himself through art (and is likely a citizen), then be a great artist full time.
Your bio says: "Aside from living on a Caribbean island during crypto export controlled 1990s, I've lived on a tiny artificial platform in the North Sea, plus more reasonable places like London, Amsterdam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and spent 6 months diving in Thailand."
So you've moved around a lot. But you want to make it harder for others to do so. It seems to me that you think you are better than others with your desire for a point based system. And your felon policy, should have made it hard for you to move around, given that you claim to have illegally exported crypto ;)
That doesn't make it any less absurd for you to have some kind of hatred of anyone who is a felon. You obviously think some laws are wrong given that you explicitly moved overseas to get around them. And you are a hairs width from not having complied, indeed, I think that a reasonable court could have convicted you (did you use knowledge that you gained in the US to help you write crypto?).
> I'm in favor of a solid border control regime (i.e. "build the wall"),
You seem like a pretty reasonable guy, so I'm curious: how do you justify the cost of building and maintaining the wall? And what are we getting in return? "Fewer mexicans immigrating illegally"?
For every dollar you pay in taxes, you want what % going to keeping illegal immigrants out? For me, I really couldn't care less, I'm fine with 0%. The idea that immigrants are more prone to crime or are destructive to the economy is wrong (statistically, if not morally).
It's statistically factual, at least in the USA, that illegal immigrants are more prone to crime, and that immigrant households are more likely to use welfare/EBT/etc. than native households.
That is, illegals commit more crimes and are less economically productive vs. the existing population.
> It's statistically factual, at least in the USA, that illegal immigrants are more prone to crime
The most legit source I could find for this was fox news: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/09/16/crime-wave-elusive-data... There are a lot of statistical slights of hand in there and I don't have time to cite them all. Fox News' reputation for being full of shit is well known; if you're unconvinced of that, there's not much I can say that hasn't been said already. From reading the statistics, my takeaway is, "odds are about even, but let's talk about drug cartels"
Is there a better source than that, or is that what you're referring to?
> that immigrant households are more likely to use welfare/EBT/etc.
You're talking about legal immigration now I think? This has nothing to do with "how do you justify the cost of a border wall to keep illegal immigrants out?"
Heh, although maybe you're suggesting we start kicking people out for being broke. That would be a sad state of affairs, if running out of money could get you kicked out of the country.
Anyway, my question still remains of "What's the upside of paying a ton of money for a wall on the border of mexico?" I guess you're saying "crime will go down and economic productivity will go up"? In which case, I just don't see that happening as a result of a wall...
If drug cartels are driving increases in crime (which I think there's evidence of), they can use drones or tunnels (and they are). They'll still kill anyone that is not them. With a wall, you're only keeping out less sophisticated groups that are not going to be adding to the crime statistics. You're keeping out housekeepers, nannies, and day laborers, not gangsters.
As far as legal immigrants not being economically productive, I refer you to the OP titled "Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups".
So again, what are we getting for all that money that would be spent on building, staffing, and maintaining a wall?
It is tough to find accurate stats, because the cities with the largest numbers of illegals immigrants, are also the ones that don't check immigration status. You can't know it if you don't track it... https://www.city-journal.org/html/illegal-alien-crime-wave-1...
However, even the studies from places that tend to being "pro-immigration" backhandedly admit that of an estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA, 820,000 of them have criminal records, about 7.5% of the population of illegals.
There is a detailed explanation of the data sources and methodology; you can scroll down to find the graphs if you just want to see their results.
Concerning your more specific question of "will the wall work" my view would be "we can build part of it to the new high standard, and see what happens" since it is a multi-year project after all.
> Concerning your more specific question of "will the wall work"
That's not my question. My question is "What are we getting for the money?"
Again, you seem to be suggesting "lower crime". I disagree, but let's play devil's advocate: how much lower do you think crime would be? Now divide that by the cost of the wall. That's your "per unit cost of lowering crime with a wall". What's the answer?
> my view would be "we can build part of it to the new high standard, and see what happens" since it is a multi-year project after all
Haha, I want to know what we're getting in return for $$$ and you just said "let's see what happens...", which makes you sound like you're selling timeshares.
See, this is why I didn't bother to answer your question in detail: despite me supporting with sources my factually accurate statement concerning lower crime, you simply hand-waved it away with no evidence of your own, as I suspected that you would.
Hey man, I wish we could all get along, we're on the same team. I read your sources; they prove nothing. You think immigrants are more prone to crime and we should build a wall on the border of mexico? But you can't begin to quantify what we'd get for it? Then you say shit like, "Well let's just wait and see how it goes, haha..." You're on the wrong side of history, and you don't even know why.
certainly talented people will have lots of different options as to where to apply their talent
but lets not pretend that all the places to apply talent are inherently equal, or that that the value propositions of those places is merely a function of whether those places are perceived as welcoming
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though its a highly imperfect analogy to a county, Harvard and Stanford regularly tell 95% of hopeful student that they're not welcome to come and study there, seemingly with little effect on their ability to attract the talent that they do want
I think that does indicate that talent attraction doesn't neatly equal welcomeness
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also seems worth noting, if one of the US's large assets in attracting talented foreigner is its large market available for entrepreneurial ambitions, one of its main competitors in this space doesn't have any issue categorizing entrants in their society based on their likely usefulness for their hosts https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/world/asia/china-work-per...
It has come to symbolise it, in a sense of "no more Mexicans." But op specifically meant it literally, as in: be strict about visa enforcements. If you have a wall, but a very liberal immigration policy, that's not racist.
Again: you're right in other situations, but in this specific case, he was playing with the words.
"A baseline of "not a felon, terrorist, etc." ..."
Australia was a penal colony ... yet they seem to be doing fine for themselves now. My point is ... why change the rules of immigration from what existed in 1800s or early 1900s
1) welfare state -- "bad" immigrants impose higher costs now.
2) technology -- bad immigrants (in the form of terrorists) impose potentially existential costs now.
Also, in that period immigration was inherently racist, which I'd absolutely like to change. ("Chinese exclusion act", etc)
Economics have also changed; costs of migration into the US are far lower than before, and we are far richer than we were then, so it changed who would immigrate. I'd expect a remote, expensive to reach place with endless land and a shortage of labor to have different immigration policies than a rich country next to a poor country a short walk away.
When it comes to immigration, there's two different concerns that we shouldn't try to conflate. There's the security aspect and the work permitting aspect and they should be handled almost entirely separately. As far as security goes, I'm fine with DHS and the various three-letter agencies being able to weigh in and veto someone's visa based on whatever vetting process they need to put in place. This part of the system doesn't seem particularly broken, despite how much Trump wants it to be broken so he can keep beating that drum.
As far as the work permitting process goes, that part is almost certainly broken. The H1-B system benefits body shops the most and is almost impossible for smaller businesses to use. It should be scrapped in favor of a system that puts the onus of determining who gets a work visa on the employers rather than the government. A points system is an unnecessary proxy for actually determining someone's ability to do the job and the job interview process is, despite how imperfect it is, the best tool we have for making that determination.
I'd be in favor of allowing any US company to get work a permit for any employee they want to hire, provided they pass the security screening. The necessary caveat would be that the company would need to maintain a certain ratio of US to immigrant employees and salary. This would destroy the body shops that know how to game the current lottery system. And it would make hiring immigrants much more predictable for smaller companies that currently don't benefit, at all, from the immigrant labor pool due to the complexities involved in sponsoring an H1-B visa. It would take race and country of origin almost completely out of the equation, at least from public policy since those decisions would be made by employers. And it would make life better for H1-B visa holders as well, since they could easily transfer to any company that was below the required ratio. Other countries have a ratio system and the worst that happens is they game the system by employing locals in no-show jobs, which doesn't seem like such a bad deal for those locals. It seems appropriately protectionist while still making it as easy and predictable as possible for immigrants.
As far as the wall goes, it's the dumbest public policy suggestion I've heard in my lifetime. Speaking as a Californian, our economy won't work without the steady stream of near-slave labor that comes across our southern border. It's an uncomfortable truth, but almost everyone in the state depends on the work of these people, whether they realize it or not. The fear of deportation keeps them from using services that cost us money. Getting rid of them would be like getting rid of the motor oil in a car engine. All the individual parts would still be there, but the engine would break down. And on top of destroying our economy, the wall would cost at least $20b as well, and Mexico won't be picking up that bill.
It's so easy to get into New Zealand, that it's used as a stepping stone for Australia. Spend 2 years in NZ, get PR, 2 more years get Citizenship. Move to Australia without needing a visa to live/work in Australia. You may as well just hand out Citizenship on arrival.
The government isn't doing anything to make people want to come to NZ to start a business, so New Zealanders literally just pack up and move to the UK / Australia.
I don't think you need >3x the annual median income (that's top 10%) for immigrants to benefit.
Economics research says high wage immigrants benefit while low wage immigrants benefit the natives on net, although it may harm some natives.
In my opinion, even if it may harm some natives, due to the poverty alleviating effects of immigration, we should open immigration to anyone who doesn't have a criminal record. This isn't that crazy, till 1914 in the U.S.:
"Generally, those immigrants who were approved spent from two to five hours at Ellis Island. Arrivals were asked 29 questions including name, occupation, and the amount of money carried. It was important to the American government that the new arrivals could support themselves and have money to get started. The average the government wanted the immigrants to have was between 18 and 25 dollars ($600 in 2015 adjusted for inflation). Those with visible health problems or diseases were sent home or held in the island's hospital facilities for long periods of time. More than three thousand would-be immigrants died on Ellis Island while being held in the hospital facilities. Some unskilled workers were rejected because they were considered "likely to become a public charge." About 2 percent were denied admission to the U.S. and sent back to their countries of origin for reasons such as having a chronic contagious disease, criminal background, or insanity."
>In my opinion, even if it may harm some natives, due to the poverty alleviating effects of immigration, we should open immigration to anyone who doesn't have a criminal record.
What is the point of government if not to act in the best interests of its citizens? Why are our governments now apparently obligated to act in the best interests of foreign nationals? This has nothing to do with alleviating poverty or humanitarian ideals. It's blatantly obvious that this advocacy for open borders is part of a power grab by the left to ensure that they stay in power for decades to come, at the expense of the people who actually built the society that they want to invite everyone else to live in. What party do they think these people are going to overwhelmingly vote for? I don't understand how people can openly advocate for destroying our society just for political gain.
> What is the point of government if not to act in the best interests of its citizens? Why are our governments now apparently obligated to act in the best interests of foreign nationals? This has nothing to do with alleviating poverty or humanitarian ideals. It's blatantly obvious that this advocacy for open borders is part of a power grab by the left to ensure that they stay in power for decades to come, at the expense of the people who actually built the society that they want to invite everyone else to live in. What party do they think these people are going to overwhelmingly vote for? I don't understand how people can openly advocate for destroying our society just for political gain.
I self-identify as a neoliberal (fiscally conservative); is that part of the left?
Economics research says low wage immigrants are a net economic benefit, so it is in the interest of its citizens, but not completely objectively as some people are harmed. Also, I think the extreme poverty in parts of the world can justify help, just like how 1000$ is more to a poor person than a millionaire.
No, immigration alleviates poverty as Americans are much richer than the average person. Why do you think so many people want to immigrate?
I don't think it's a power grab by the left (open borders are not popular, as you can see right here) and that's irrelevant to the merits of open borders.
> the people who actually built the society that they want to invite everyone else to live in
This criticism seems to be for leftists.
Well, I am against forcing racial diversity, so you can stay with your ethnic group/society in my proposal.
Realistically there is a group within the Democratic party which justifies illegal immigration because it excites the base and offers a potential constituency. We've had this cycle once before - in the 80s the Republicans agreed to amnesty on the condition of enforcement. The enforcement never came.
There's also a group of well-meaning people who see the plight of good people who just want to make a living and therefore are for open borders. The first group takes advantage of the second group and there's no way of disentangling them.
There is a very real criticism, however, that something like open borders could destroy the productive society people are fleeing to especially if that immigration is against rule of law or eventual assimilation.
As the descendants of immigrants who are now Americans, a lot of people are opposed to haphazard immigration without assimilation. American society is so great because people of various cultures come together and make it something new. It appears (to me) that some people don't care about what is sustainable and would rather win for the sake of politics.
>Economics research says low wage immigrants are a net economic benefit, so it is in the interest of its citizens
Economics is not the only factor to factor into someone's interests. Everyone has things they value more than money.
>Also, I think the extreme poverty in parts of the world can justify help, just like how 1000$ is more to a poor person than a millionaire.
How does that justify help? It's not just like you help them to get on their feet and you're done. They and their descendants will live in your society for generations. Nobody is obligated to give them this at the expense of their citizens.
>No, immigration alleviates poverty as Americans are much richer than the average person. Why do you think so many people want to immigrate?
They want to immigrate here because wages are higher. However, there are only a limited number of jobs, and so flooding the job market with more people prevents natives from being able to find work, which is against their interests.
>I don't think it's a power grab by the left (open borders are not popular, as you can see right here) and that's irrelevant to the merits of open borders.
It's exactly like Roosevelt's Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, where he tried to pack the supreme court with justices favorable to his political faction, except this time they are trying to pack the US electorate. These people and their descendants overwhelmingly vote left.
>Well, I am against forcing racial diversity, so you can stay with your ethnic group/society in my proposal.
That's illegal in the United States. Every ethnic group has to live among every other ethnic group. Nobody can create societies that only allow people of their ethnic group to live among them, so it's not true that anyone can stay with their ethnic group, barring some serious constitutional reforms.
> Economics is not the only factor to factor into someone's interests. Everyone has things they value more than money.
What are the things that affect the case for open immigration?
> How does that justify help? It's not just like you help them to get on their feet and you're done. They and their descendants will live in your society for generations. Nobody is obligated to give them this at the expense of their citizens.
What is the harm in them living in my society?
> They want to immigrate here because wages are higher. However, there are only a limited number of jobs, and so flooding the job market with more people prevents natives from being able to find work, which is against their interests.
No, there are not a limited number of jobs. See lump of labor fallacy. Some natives will have a harder time finding work, but there's a net benefit to natives.
> It's exactly like Roosevelt's Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, where he tried to pack the supreme court with justices favorable to his political faction, except this time they are trying to pack the US electorate. These people and their descendants overwhelmingly vote left.
Don't give immigrants the right to vote or full citizenship then. Problem solved.
> >Well, I am against forcing racial diversity, so you can stay with your ethnic group/society in my proposal.
That's illegal in the United States. Every ethnic group has to live among every other ethnic group. Nobody can create societies that only allow people of their ethnic group to live among them, so it's not true that anyone can stay with their ethnic group, barring some serious constitutional reforms.
Source for constitutional reforms being needed? I think the U.S. constitution only says the government can't discriminate based on race, ethnicity, etc.
>What are the things that affect the case for open immigration?
People worry about losing their cultural and ethnic identity. Nobody wants to be made a minority in their own country, no matter how much cheap labor they get out of it.
>What is the harm in them living in my society?
They bring their values and culture with them, and by sharing a society they change it, to a degree relative to how many of them there are, to be like theirs. The places many these people come from often have much different values than the American leftists who lobby for them to be here. I am particularly scared of this as an LGBT individual, as in a lot of immigration, particularly from Muslim majority countries, comes from places where public attitudes towards homosexuality are extremely negative and often violent (see: Omar Mateen).
>Don't give immigrants the right to vote or full citizenship then. Problem solved.
This won't work. Sure, the push now is just for them simply to be here, but creating an underclass of unrepresented people without the same rights as everyone else is a recipe for disaster. It will be easy for people seeking power to inspire hatred in them for their countrymen who are first-class citizens due to their unfair treatment, and then to incite them to violence for their political gain. A much better solution is simply to not let them in at all.
>Source for constitutional reforms being needed? I think the U.S. constitution only says the government can't discriminate based on race, ethnicity, etc.
No one can refuse to let people of a certain ethnicity live among them. This is racial discrimination, which was made illegal by the Fair Housing Act under the Civil Rights Act of 1968. You're right, this is not technically a constitutional amendment, but the result is the same: you cannot stay with your ethnic group. If someone from another ethnic group wants to live in your society, you are obligated by law to let them.
>I self-identify as a neoliberal (fiscally conservative); is that part of the left?
No. The left believes in the workers controlling the means of production and stopping capitalists from exploiting labour by appropriating value that they have no right to. I am for the concept of open borders, though. I wish for the destruction of nations, and like Marx, I am only in favour of 'globalisation' for this purpose - to break down and dissolve those old traditions and natonalities.
The dialectic of immigratation asks to investigate the reason why people immigrate - to move from one state of exploitation (or even a feudal way of living) into a slightly better one (such as you would find in the US). They also immigrate beacuse of war, moved on in no small part by the capitalism of the military industrial complex.
Rather than selfishly trying to 'fix' immigration by building walls, perhaps we should destroy the reason why people want to immigrate. It's unfortunate that world leaders have such little foresight to do this.
It's really not as complicated as you make it out to be. Everyone has a right to put the interests of themselves and their group first and foremost. Given that, the "solution" to immigration is to just not bother with it when it isn't in your interests. The reason the left wants immigration is because they overwhelmingly vote left. The reason the right doesn't is because they don't want to lose their cultural and national identity. Nowhere along the line does anybody care about why people want to be here - it's not their concern.
>The reason the left wants immigration is because they overwhelmingly vote left.
This is extermely narrow-sighted and very uncharitable, and fails to explain the radical left's stance on immigration, given that very few immigrants vote for, say, the Communist party.
>Nowhere along the line does anybody care about why people want to be here - it's not their concern.
And that's what I'm saying the problem is. People have very little foresight such that instead of trying to implement a much more effective solution to this perceived threat to "cultural and national identity" they just say "let's build a wall".
It does not fix the material conditions that lead to immigration. The wall crumbles. People are still getting in, because they want to get in. If those people really cared about their culture so much, they would be willing to help address the cause of immigration.
At the very least, it's a shoddy hack designed to plug a big hole. And this is where we are now; 'the right' wants to use a poorly thought out hack out of narrow self-interest. Because apparently the only humans who matter are those on this side of the line in the sand.
The "material conditions" that lead to illegal immigration in the US are lax enforcement of immigration and labor laws. If we had enforced our laws from the beginning, it would not be a problem. The solution then, is to enforce the laws we have, and remove their incentive to be here, not to go over there and make their country better. We have our own country to make great (again!).
>Because apparently the only humans who matter are those on this side of the line in the sand.
Everyone has a right to act in their best interests. Charity is never obligatory.
>The "material conditions" that lead to illegal immigration in the US are lax enforcement of immigration and labor laws.
These are material conditions, but they do not cover all immigration, so they are insufficient. The bigger material conditions are namely that people want to live better lives, and they think that they can do so in "better" countries like the US.
>and remove their incentive to be here
This is what I am talking about. You must fix the material conditions, which means that you must either (i) make your own country worse or (ii) make others better. Why not do the second?
>We have our own country to make great (again!).
America has always been founded on capitalist exploitation. It never was 'great'.
>Everyone has a right to act in their best interests.
Sure, and it's in your best interest to fix the material conditions for immigration if you don't like immigration.
>Charity is never obligatory.
That's true, but it seems very selfish to not care about the fate of others, simply beacuse they were born somewhere else.
I am not saying that and I think the only relevant change is welfare programs—which we can remove/limit for immigrants to stop it from being excessively costly.
The distinction often is more akin to "promising" and "not promising". Universities, employers, creditors, those looking for a spouse, etc. Everyone does it to some degree. Why can't a country?
I never finished university, and I started a bunch of companies. How do you sort out people on a "promising"/"not promising" scale for doing good things for the economy?
Under your simple scale you would exclude Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Stephen Hawking, respectively. I think they've all been supremely wasteful 'consumers of resources.'
Exceptions all. The point of any laws is not to catch the exceptions, but to state the rule for the average.
There's no way a standard policy is going to somehow separate the Stephen Hawkings from the general population before they have actually accomplished anything of note.
So your policy can either be cautious, or it can be over liberal.
The steven hawking outliers can apply under the O-1 visa type schemes, which he would definitely pass. A points scheme doesn't have to be the only scheme.
And you think of the millions of people wanting to get in here they're all world-renowned physicists or spiritual leaders? We would long run out of money supporting the hordes of cancer-stricken dirt farmers clamoring to get in here before the next Stephen Hawking shows up.
More importantly, how can you not think that? Logically a Canadian is going to be culturally a better fit, financially better off, and more educated and skilled.
It's got nothing to do with race or nationality, just a statement about the average Mexican vs the average Canadian. Don't throw logic out the window in service to liberal ideals.
Why would a Canadian be a better fit for southern california or texas? Is their experience moose hunting going to help in 100 degree heat?
Why would we even want someone who's "culturally" a better fit? I'd love it if the people around me were more diverse, it makes life richer and more interesting.
I used to know a guy in Phoenix, Arizona who grew up in Edmonton, Canada. He made tons of money with the business he created.
It seems like he fit in just fine, thanks to his command of English (his service business would have gotten nowhere if he didn't speak English), and an invention called "air conditioning" let him deal with the 100 degree heat, just like every other person in that metro area.
Honestly, your comment about moose hunting is downright offensive.
> Honestly, your comment about moose hunting is downright offensive.
It's supposed to be: the whole idea of allowing only people who are a good "cultural fit" is offensive. That's the point I was refuting. Determining "cultural fit" requires absurd stereotypes.
The idea that Mexicans can't find a place in our country is as absurd as the idea that Canadians can't.
No, it's really not; it's wishful thinking on your part. When someone doesn't even speak the language that most of the host country uses, they're going to have a harder time integrating than someone who does (esp. if they speak it natively, as almost all non-Quebec Canadians do). Thinking otherwise is just fantasy. I'm not saying "there's no place for them", but we're talking about the ease of integration into a new host country here. It's always easier to adapt to and get along in a country where you speak the native language, can talk to most everyone, and can read all the signs, and understand most of the predominant culture, than to go someplace that's completely alien to you and you can't talk to many people and can't even read the signs anywhere.
You're conflating language and culture. I'm against using "culture" as a reason for (dis)allowing immigrants in. A language proficiency requirement is reasonable.
How can you not conflate language and culture? The two are inseparably intertwined. While not all people who speak the same language (or more likely, dialects of it, e.g. American vs British vs Indian English) will have extremely similar cultures, I don't think there's any good examples of people speaking very different languages and having extremely similar cultures. Language and culture go hand-in-hand. Even for the different dialects, the cultures between UK, USA, and AUS/NZ are still very similar to one another; India is rather different but the way they adopted English is also very different and still for them it's really a 2nd language and used within India as a convenient common language because they refuse to standardize on Hindi as some wish. There is far, far, far more similarity between Australian culture and American culture, for instance, than Mexican culture and American culture.
You assert that there's more similarity between American and Australian culture than American and Mexican. I don't believe that. US cuisine borrows more heavily from Mexico than Australia. We have more Spanish speakers than Spain. We have Veep candidates pandering to them. The US and Mexico both like fake wrestling. We have large cities with Spanish names and an entire state named after Mexico.
But it's a dumb argument to go into because I probably won't convince you about cultural similarity and vice versa.
On the other hand, language can be quantitatively measured and gives an opportunity to ambitious people around the world.
>US cuisine borrows more heavily from Mexico than Australia.
This is just dumb. US cuisine borrows more heavily from China than from Australia too, but no one is going to claim that US culture is very similar to Chinese culture. I live in a little town and there's 3 Chinese restaurants here, and only 1 Mexican.
>We have more Spanish speakers than Spain
We probably have more Chinese speakers than Hong Kong too, but that doesn't make US culture similar to China either. The US is a huge country, #3 in the world by population. Of course it's going to have a lot of foreign-language speakers, especially when there's a ton of Spanish-speaking countries to the south and a lot of immigration from there. But that doesn't mean that the dominant culture in America today is extremely similar to the culture of Mexico; I'd argue that German culture is more similar to American culture. At least German culture is universalist, rather than particularist as are Latin American cultures.
>I'd love it if the people around me were more diverse, it makes life richer and more interesting.
Just to play devils advocate do you think that is the case if they don't speak the language? If they don't share the same values? If they stick to their own groups and don't integrate, does it really make your life more interesting and diverse?
The US already as plenty of people that "culturally fit better", are more educated, are skilled, etc.
We don't have enough people that picks Strawberry crops in California or does home construction in suburbs. We literally don't have those people willing to do those jobs, which can cause runaway inflation.
Immigration is not about adding more of the same. It's about filling holes in our economy and labor force.
How many Canadians do you think are going to go picking Strawberries in California?
I'm not sure why strawberry pickers are always the example. Is there really a shortage? When I was a teenager, in the country, that was a common minimum wage job mostly done by 14 year olds. It really does suck, almost any job would be better, but I didn't think better jobs were more available now than the late 90s. If anything I would have expected more people to be in the job pool for picking now.
Reading you other replies, I'm not sure if I understand the perspective you're coming from, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm curious. Do you consider yourself anti-union?
There really is a shortage of willing workers. There's all sorts of stories of companies in various industries not being able to find people willing to do actual hard work. And why should they? The public doesn't spend thousands of dollars to educate Americans to learn Calculus, ancient history, & Russian literature, only to end up picking strawberries like they're oxen? We'll have to figure out something else for this new class of citizens.
The perspective I'm coming from is "it's complicated". An example is about the Wal Mart here in the DC area, which tried to ban them a few years ago. You'd figure an wealthy liberal city like DC would forever ban them in favor of some fancy locally grown organic co-op farmers market or some crap like that. When the city council meetings came up to approve/disapprove them, the people that came up speak requesting approval were all the poor and the elderly, that relied on their low prices to make ends meet. Wal Mart in DC was approved.
And I would consider myself strong-union. At the very least every incorporated company that has any employee should have an employee representative on their board-of-directors.
> We don't have enough people that picks Strawberry crops in California or does home construction in suburbs. We literally don't have those people willing to do those jobs, which can cause runaway inflation
Then increase the wage paid. You're literally arguing for a slave-wage underclass.
Are you under the mistaken impression that increasing wages paid would cause people to work those jobs?
And you are literally asking for runaway inflation. Guess who pays for that the most at a rate higher than the rest of society? The poor and the elderly on fixed income.
Do you want to punish the poor and elderly on fixed income because millennials can't be bothered to work hard labor because it might interrupt their precious time?
Maybe you would like to take away the healthcare for the poor and elderly as well?
> Are you under the mistaken impression that increasing wages paid would cause people to work those jobs?
Has anyone actually tried paying $25 per hour plus benefits for strawberry picking?
Let me guess, you're entirely consistent in your beliefs and likewise oppose the $15/hour minimum wage for fast food workers. Because after all, that would lead to runaway inflation.
Their crops are getting ruined because they can't get workers.
I can't believe people don't understand how comfortable the average millennial is in this life, and how completely unnecessary it is for them to work hard labor.
And there's no faking it in economics. If you artificially raise prices for unskilled labor, you're going to raise inflation, and now you're back to square one in needing to raise wages again.
We need to have wages tied with age and skill level/profession. A blanket minimum wage is just a dumb idea. Teenagers don't need $15/hour, as they should be at school. The head of a family household does.
> Yes. Actually here's one article about farmers offering $25/hr picking strawberries:
Sounds like Mexicans weren't willing to do it either. What changed from year to year? Clearly there's something else at play if they couldn't even get Mexicans to do it. The article doesn't mention that the farmer is exclusively hiring legal citizens, Washington State is ranked 15th for Hispanic population, and the farm is near a major metro area, so I don't buy the argument that there aren't enough Mexicans available either. It's clearly something else.
> Teenagers don't need $15/hour, as they should be at school. The head of a family household does.
Great, now you've just created an incentive to not hire anyone older than some particular age in a low-skill industry.
Labor is a small part of the total costs of farming. Large amounts of costs are in capital equipment, land, packaging, retail location selling and transportation.
If you are really worried about high priced items that affect poor people, then perhaps we should be getting more immigrants that create these expensive things like healthcare.
If you are a doctor, they should automatically approve your visa application. Lets drive down that price of healthcare! If you make 100k+, auto approval as well. More tax money please! NOT strawberry workers though.
Not possible. Without cheap labor that kind of work would either move off shore to where labor is cheaper, or it'd be automated.
My father lives in rural Alabama and is a proud red neck. But he's a transplant and a little less provincial than many native Alabamians. I visited him a few years ago and noted how many Mexicans and Central Americans had moved into the area, starting from basically none 20 years ago.
Most of southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle is timber land, much of it owned by paper companies. As he explained it to me, at some point the locals became averse to planting new trees. It's back-breaking manual labor. Immigrants filled in the gaps until at some [inflection] point the work all of sudden became "Mexican work", which pretty much guaranteed no white or black native would ever work it again no matter the wage. In a very short timeframe you saw a large influx of Mexicans and Central Americans as the baton was passed from poor whites to poor immigrants. It was to my mind something of an oddity in the rural Deep South, at least since the last influx of Scottish and Irish a hundred-plus years ago.
If the immigrants weren't available, I have no doubt that the paper companies would have turned to automation. The machines they operate to harvest trees are marvels. A machine for planting saplings probably isn't that difficult; indeed, it probably already exists. Doubtless the days of manual sapling planting are already numbered. Nonetheless, the influx of immigrants was a small economic boon that the locals would have appreciated were it not for the typical racist and nativist sentiments almost universally held.
As my father put it, it's absolutely ridiculous that they look down on hard-working immigrants doing the work that they recently once performed but now feel themselves too good to do. To be clear, the unemployment rate in that area is much higher than the national rate, and always has been. But irony of ironies, the social safety net (such as it is in Alabama) provides just enough comfort that poor whites can get by without having to do such work. Mind you, "get by" is still incredibly impoverished, but in that neck of the woods expectations are much lower than most of the rest of the country.
Anyhow, I don't mean to argue with the notion that immigration has historically been used to suppress wages, and that it can contribute to greater income inequality. On the whole I agree with that--it historically has, even though I don't think it's a necessary outcome of immigration. But higher wages isn't always an answer. There are structural and cultural reasons that act as a barrier to natives (especially white natives) performing certain tasks, particularly in historically poor areas where both structural and cultural influences are exaggerated.
That said, maybe automation in this case would have been better than supplementing the unskilled labor pool. Maybe the wages paid to a few skilled machine operators would have been better for the community than the low wages paid to a large number of new manual laborers. It's all a very complex subject. What is certain is that there was no third alternative; higher wages for the manual labor was never gonna happen.
Either pay a higher wage and start paying a higher price, automate it, or do without it. Arguing in favor of exploitative labor practices because you just have to have strawberries or your lawn mowed is a horrible argument. We should not be importing impoverished people and keeping them impoverished for your own personal convenience and desire.
If planting saplings in rural Alabama wasn't a better life from whence they came, then presumably they wouldn't have come. There are some hidden assumptions there, but I think those are pretty safe assumptions given the actuality of their movement.
Also, all labor is "exploitation". Does your company pass through 100% of the value you add to the organization? I seriously doubt it.
Meaningful exploitation would be, say, Alabama benefitting from Mexican immigrant labor while simultaneously discouraging or preventing their children from going to public school.
Now, sending immigrants back home might put an end to that kind of exploitation. But it's disingenuous to say that it's a favor to them to do so. It also ignores the fact one could also end the exploitation by, you know, ending the unfair treatment.
Not everyone deserves to be treated equally. If you are the same as everyone else, what use are you? You become unnecessary. That is the fundamental rationale of life - we are not all the same chunk of organic matter.
Ensuring disparity is a good thing. Your life won't change because a rich person exists.
Also, anything can be considered "exploitative".
We should be importing impoverished foreigners in order to give them a better life here in the US, because that's what they want.
If you can't compete against these impoverished foreigners, then that's your fault, not theirs.
> How many Canadians do you think are going to go picking Strawberries in California?
Standing here, looking out the window at the cold snow blowing, I can say that I would very much prefer to be picking strawberries in California at the moment.
On the whole, a Canadian citizen will be more promising in the U.S. Canadians speak English which is close to Standard American English; the cultures are more similar, and the level of poverty is much lower, meaning they're less likely to become dependent on social programs. If usefulness is measured in ability to contribute to the productivity of the nation as a whole, then Canadians are a better bet (knowing nothing else about the individual).
All else being equal though, I don't see how you could make the claim that the U.S. is engaged in favouritism between equally-promising Canadian and Mexican potential immigrants. Mexicans and Canadians both (technically) need to get permits to work in the U.S.
The Québécois were estimated in 2011 to be about 43% functionally franco-anglo bilingual; seems they're becoming more so year over year, the estimate was about 41% in 2006. About 8% of Québécois have English as their mother tongue. 5% of Québec doesn't even speak French, granted some of those will be allophones and illiterates.
There are plenty of Mexican illegal immigrants in Canada, probably helping with our huge pulse crops.
Anyway, there's no point in enhancing the productivity of U.S. domestic agriculture. It is incredibly productive and food is incredibly cheap at the wholesale level. If it becomes a bit more expensive at the wholesale level, I doubt that will shift the consumer price all that much. The people who would have more trouble affording food would also have higher mean income, since they would be more likely to be employed.
Partly the screening process of universities is entirely different - they are much smaller entities, investing a huge amount of resources in individuals, and have a much better and much more well-founded idea of what kind of applicants will be successful. And then, even they get it wrong all the time. Students drop out and the least promising ones turn out to be superstars somewhat later.
For that matter, I would prefer universities only screen for effort, meaning the applicants show they are willing to work hard enough. That doesn't exclude tests for prerequisites, but it excludes certain things like age, income, parents, irrelevant prior education, origin...
the US is not being destroyed by immigrants coming and stealing the territory and resources. The US has plenty of unused fallow land that immigrants can buy/lease with real money and work with real labor. the US doesn't give free territory and resources to immigrants. It should allow them to freely trade in it.
You're strawmanning me.
I never said anything about the US being destroyed by immigrant or a stealing of territory or resources.
In fact I never mentioned the US.
The comment I responded to was:
> universities have limited classrooms and labs to fill. A country is not limited.
That's factually incorrect. A country is limited in a lot of ways.
To be honest I think that your definition of "immigrant" is biased.
There are many alternatives if you are denied from a university, such as applying to a different university or learning online instead. There is only one America
Well there are other countries, contrary to popular belief. With your logic, the answer would be to emigrate somewhere else. But I think that's not the point.
There's only one America though. If you want to live with your American cousin, work at an a company that happens to be headquartered in the us or just like America living in another country may not be an alternative.
Yes, but America is one of many "countries". If you want to extend the example to universities, then you have to compare America to say "Harvard". Potential students always have the chance to go to other universities, some with definitely lower standards of entry. Same goes for America and other countries.
E.g. I wasn't smart enough to get a fancy scholarship and entry to a top-tier American university? But, I sure was able to get into a good university in a third-world country. Options are available! America is not the only answer out there, so to phrase it as if America has the sole responsibility of fixing the world's problems is kind of one-sided.
It was common for dysfunctional parents to teach racism in the 1960's -- but parroting back this statement of fact didn't end racism. Simply stating "universities do it" isn't helpful, unless you're indicating where you'd like to start affecting change.
People need to be accountable to "the better angels of our nature" in order to affect useful change.
Yes, almost all countries have that kind of rules, with varied degrees of success.
You don't really notice before you move to live in a different country.
> One of the basic premises of anti-immigrant policies is that you can somehow influence the ratio of "useful" vs "not-useful" immigrants.
That's actually one of the basic premises of pro-immigrant policy, too (perhaps even moreso than anti-immigrant policies.)
Actually, anti-immigrant groups favoring a hard closed door with little attempt to distinguish useless from useful are probably more significant among the anti-immigrant side than the opposite I idea,puren-source with little attempt to distinguish, is on the pro-immigrant side.
Are you also against interviews or technical tests while hiring people? Do you suppose that jobs should be offered on a first-come first-serve basis, or through a lottery, since number of applicants would be higher than number of positions?
I'm pretty sure that has more to do with Trump making veiled mentions of building internment camps again. People who have either lived through that or know someone who has rightly share a "never again" attitude. Clearly Trump's campaign had no interest in even remotely cultivating the Jewish or Asian vote.
> you can somehow influence the ratio of "useful" vs "not-useful" immigrants.
I'm sure it's possible to do it, if you take a narrow enough view of 'usefulness', e.g. 'usefulness' = measurable economic productivity. You can screen out people with expensive preexisting medical conditions, people who cannot work, etc., and that will obviously raise the average productivity of immigrants. But it's immoral. Rich host countries are poaching productive individuals while selecting against people who are most in need of help, leaving them to be taken care of by their (usually) poorer country of origin. The fair thing to do would be to accept a random sample of would-be immigrants.
> The fair thing to do would be to accept a random sample of would-be immigrants.
Why? You appear to be making an argument that a sovereign nation has a moral obligation of care for another sovereign nation as a penalty for their success. What is your rational basis for believing that the US should take in immigrants that are unable to contribute to our society?
I'm generally pro-immigration, but this type of argument stinks of an insidious combination of American exceptionalism and white guilt. What makes you think someone who is unable to be productive and needs care is better off immigrating to a wealthy foreign country rather than staying in their home country? In their home country they have shared culture, family, and a social system that allows subsistence living more easily. Someone like this coming to the US would be faced with language barriers, likely homelessness, and an immediate need to rely entirely on the government as they'd have no other support system. I'd argue if they're trying to immigrate to a wealthier nation for other reasons they'd be better served going to Northern Europe, not the US.
> they'd be better served going to Northern Europe, not the US
You're right, for most people, there are better places to migrate to than the U.S.
> You appear to be making an argument that a sovereign nation has a moral obligation of care for another sovereign nation as a penalty for their success
A sovereign nation is not a natural kind. What is your basis for believing that humans have a moral responsibility to care for humans on one side of a political line, but not the other side?
What coherent moral framework leads one to conclude that we should care only for compatriots?
> What makes you think someone who is unable to be productive and needs care is better off immigrating to a wealthy foreign country rather than staying in their home country?
That's for them to decide. The discussion is about letting would-be migrants in, not yanking people out of their home countries against their will. If they are trying to migrate it must be because they think they will have a better life in the host country. I wouldn't presume to know better than them.
(To reiterate, I said accepting a random sample of immigration applicants, not taking in a random sample of the population.)
> But it's immoral. Rich host countries are poaching productive individuals while selecting against people who are most in need of help, leaving them to be taken care of by their (usually) poorer country of origin.
I'm failing to see how these economics work. Host countries have an incentive to acquire productive individuals. And subsequently they have a negative incentive to acquire those 'most in need' (need metric assumed).
A rough attempt to try and square up the two has me thinking we need two immigration systems. One that treats immigration as an altruistic endeavor, and another that treats immigration as an economic endeavor.
> The fair thing to do would be to accept a random sample of would-be immigrants.
I couldn't disagree with this more. Even with pretending that fairness is a thing, I have to argue that the 'most fair entry path would be some form of earning entry by establishing the criteria up front. Much the same as public universities do in the US.
> Rich host countries are poaching productive individuals while selecting against people who are most in need of help
I'm not sure that "poaching" is the right word. The US isn't seeking out potential immigrants and trying to entice them to come here, but that's what "poaching" suggests to me. Rather, it's just trying to filter those who have already established on their own a desire to come here.
I don't know about the US. I know Canada has a history of running targeted ad campaigns in South Africa and elsewhere, to get doctors to immigrate (while simultaneously complaining about locally-trained doctors leaving to get better paid jobs in the US).
Not the best source but it's what I could find on Google:
>"The fair thing to do would be to accept a random sample of would-be immigrants."
All points aside, isn't that exactly what the US is doing with the Green Card lottery system? It's entire mandate is to "increase immigrant diversity", by giving countries with low immigration to the US preferential counts towards the lottery.
>"But it's immoral. Rich host countries are poaching productive individuals while selecting against people who are most in need of help, leaving them to be taken care of by their (usually) poorer country of origin."
You know what is actually immoral? Forcing individuals that want to make a better life for their children, into staying in a country that "needs help" and they want to get out of. The world is not some giant "experiment" for you to optimize and fix. Let people leave and go where they want, and if you want to prevent people from coming into your area, well then let the majority current residents decide.
> You know what is actually immoral? Forcing individuals that want to make a better life for their children, into staying in a country that "needs help" and they want to get out of.
But that's also true of would be migrants who are most in need of help. In either case you are 'forcing' someone to stay in their home country. The question is, if you don't have an open border policy, which of the would be migrants will you "force" to stay in a rotten country? The sick, elderly, under-educated, or the able-bodied, educated, rich, etc.
> Let people leave and go where they want
Yes absolutely.
> if you want to prevent people from coming into your area, well then let the majority current residents decide.
The controversial question is what constitutes 'your area'. Depending on who you asks it's anywhere from your neighborhood to the entire Earth. Depending on your take on that you could conclude that you have a legitimate right to kick people out of your street or that we should adopt an open border policy worldwide.
>"But that's also true of would be migrants who are most in need of help. In either case you are 'forcing' someone to stay in their home country. "
Not entirely. In the one case, you're simply saying "you can't come here, unless you are X-amounts productive". The other one, which I was arguing-against, was more along the lines of: "You can't come here because you are Y-amounts productive and should stay there and fix your side of this earth."
The net result is not the same. The one prescribes that an individual has to be "X-amounts productive", whereas the other says "if you are more than Y-amounts productive, you are not allowed to come here". With all the upside-down incentives we have going on in the world right now with welfare and progressive taxation, this is the one area where government is still sort of "rewarding" the "productive" or "ambitious".
>"The controversial question is what constitutes 'your area'. Depending on who you asks it's anywhere from your neighborhood to the entire Earth. Depending on your take on that you could conclude that you have a legitimate right to kick people out of your street or that we should adopt an open border policy worldwide."
Well, as a Libertarian, I think borders are pretty damn arbitrary, too. But until we can get to that point, we have to be realistic about what we've decided to share with our neighbors. Ideally, we should be allowed to each decide how our tax money gets spent. If anything, we can restrict it's usage to the level of "openness" we wish to spread it around to. So some would want it only spent in their street, others to a city level, and the rest wish it to be spread equally for the whole world's benefit. That is, if we're talking about actually giving each person a choice, instead of what we call "Democracy".
"The leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of billion dollar companies was India with 14 entrepreneurs, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom with 8, Israel (7), Germany (4), China (3), France (2), Ireland (2) and 12 other countries with one entrepreneur.2
India: 14
Canada: 8
United Kingdom: 8
Israel: 7
Germany: 4
China: 3
France: 3
Ireland: 2
Armenia: 1
Azerbaijan: 1
Argentina: 1
Egypt: 1
Holland: 1
Iraq: 1
Norway: 1
Russia: 1
Singapore: 1
South Africa: 1
South Korea: 1
Uzbekistan: 1"
Does this look remotely like current US immigration? It does not. (Hey, you know what countries I don't see on that startup founder list? Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Jamaica, Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Peru, Ecuador...) If you were building a model to predict startup founding by nationality and personal details like IQ or ethnicity (no prizes for guessing what ethnicity that 1 South Africa founder is, or what religion that 1 Iraqi founder is), and designing immigration policy around that, it would look nothing like what has gone on for decades.
Using startup founders as an argument for the status quo of illegal immigration is a deeply dishonest bait-and-switch piece of equivocation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division ) and it makes my teeth grind every time I see someone go 'did you know 50% of startup founders/CEOs/scientists are immigrants?' Justify it on its own merits, don't pretend that Indian brahmins and Israeli Jews' accomplishments have anything to do with not building a wall along the Mexican border!
This is a very similar fallacy as the 'US has only 5% of the world population, therefore it only has 1 out of 20 of the best researchers/programmers/entrepreneurs' (most recently seen on Paul Graham's Twitter). This is not remotely the case because of differing health & political & economic & scientific development & mean IQ, and the further out on the tail you go (such as 'best programmers in the world') the more lopsided the global distribution becomes - much the same way that women make up 50% of the population but do not make up 50% of people over 7 feet tall or the NBA.
Your reference is irrelevant because it doesn't break down by country and you are pulling exactly the equivocation BS I just demonstrated OP was doing. Please reread my comment if you don't understand why you cannot justify current immigration policy by pointing at immigration averages or totals without reference to country.
> Hey, you know what countries I don't see on that startup founder list? Mexico, ...
Looking at >$1B businesses only, as this story does, presents a rather skewed perspective. Per Fiscal Policy Institute "there are nonetheless more small business owners from Mexico than from any other single country... Immigrants
born in Mexico make up 12 percent of immigrant small business owners, followed by immigrants born in India, Korea, Cuba, China, and Vietnam." http://fiscalpolicy.org/immigrant-small-business-owners-FPI-...
But 26.9% of immigrants in the US are from Mexico (as of 2015), which dwarfs the next largest country of origin India at 5.5%. Furthermore, the Mexican fraction was even larger in the past.
Nope, your argument does not negate the idea that those screening measures wouldn't turn away desirable immigrants.
I also see that you are listing a lot of countries with very small populations and an even smaller number of legal immigrants. If they don't show up in start ups, that would be the first thing I'd check. Not their supposedly lower IQ or education, which I would reject in the case of some of these countries.
> Nope, your argument does not negate the idea that those screening measures wouldn't turn away desirable immigrants.
No one ever said that screening measure might not have false negatives. The only way to guarantee that no desirable immigrant is ever turned away is to never turn anyone away ever, since there's always a chance. This is not to say that immigration could not be reduced drastically with minimal effect on startup cofounders, based on the research in OP which is being cited for drastically different claims than it implies.
> I also see that you are listing a lot of countries with very small populations and an even smaller number of legal immigrants.
In my sarcastic aside, I listed countries by order of the WP entry; they may be small countries, but they have nevertheless managed to send an awful lot of people into the USA. Numbers is not their problem. And if you are referring to the list of startup founders, many of them coming from small countries (with even smaller immigration into the USA) only emphasizes the disparity in odds between countries...
I don't see anything remotely hypocritical or authoritarian about pointing out that immigrant outcomes differ by orders of magnitude by country and that this has considerable implications for the immigration debate and that many of the arguments made by the left for illegal immigration & open borders range from ignorant to outright lying with statistics.
No amount of statistics change the fact that arguing against open borders is an authoritarian stance. I could throw just as many statistics against you and your drug use if I wanted, but I'm not an authoritarian.
And as to lying with statistics, I don't think that the left is alone in that.
Yes, by way of tautology arguing for a regulation on the movement of people is arguing for a regulation which effects the freedom of individuals and arguing to regulate the freedom of individuals is authoritarian.
> Go right ahead.
" In 2002, 29% of convicted inmates reported they had used illegal drugs at the time of the offense, down from 35% in 1996." - https://www.bjs.gov/content/dcf/duc.cfm
Vs foreign born people with a total incarceration rate of just 0.57% vs native born people with an incarceration rate of 2.23%.
Obviously, from a statistical standpoint, you are far worse than your average mexican when it comes to crime ;)
> arguing to regulate the freedom of individuals is authoritarian.
'literally any regulation is authoritarian' --timthelion 2017
> you are far worse than your average mexican when it comes to crime
That's not true. The population of Mexican immigrants is not the same as the population of Mexico which is not the same as the population of the USA which is not the same as the fraction of drug users. You also get the conditioning wrong: the relative risk or odds is what matters, and that requires both population prevalences of drug use, and the lifetime drug use rate in the USA is quite high - for hallucinogens alone it's easily 10%. Throw in marijuana, underage alcohol, and so on... Also, illegal immigration is a crime, so if you want to compare crime rates, you ought to be taking that into account in estimating immigrant crime rates. (Illegal immigration is OK because it's victimless? Well, so is using LSD. You can't have it both ways.) Nor can you compare the immigration incarceration rate because the populations differ drastically in demographics (gender, sex etc) and is censored (given deportation, self-deportation, or voluntarily leaving afterwards).
This article is protesting the idea of further limiting H1-B visas. Presumably most if not all H1-B recipients are "useful". The problem is that there is a massive amount of H1-B abuse, mostly on the part of the employers bringing them over here. Large, cut-rate contractors such as Infosys have abused the system to profit at the expense of Americans and highly qualified legal immigrants alike. Evidence of abuse is everywhere. Here are just a few examples:
Which is a great point. The NEED for immigration and how to address it should be balanced with the NEED to develop the knowledge, skills and training of citizens. Importing labor because it's lacking doesn't address the problem of why it's lacking.
"One of the basic premises of anti-immigrant policies is that you can somehow influence the ratio of "useful" vs "not-useful" immigrants."
You mean like pretty much the entire western world's immigration policies, or the USA's H1B, O1 and E3 programs? We in Australia have plenty of people who still want to come, even though we are selective with who we let in.
>Apart from the idea of sorting people into useful and useless being inhumane, it also seems to be counterproductive.
I think this is already subtly done with investor visas. They don't outright deny you obviously, but there are different lines to stand in depending on your usefulness to the country you're going to.
There's also B, P, L, and other visa types. There's a lot of different lines to stand in depending on how useful you are and the temporaryness of your stay.
>Apart from the idea of sorting people into useful and useless being inhumane
How do you think it would affect a country to suddenly have a very large amount of low-skill immigrants? How would the native citizens, the people by which their government is held accountable and to whose interests their government's purpose is to advance, be affected? The answer is probably that they would be very adversely effected, in which case however "inhumane" it is to sort people like this, it is also inhumane to do wrong by the native citizens who built the country that those immigrants would be living in. Immigration is not a human right, nobody has a right to immigrate anywhere and no country has an obligation to accept any particular person or group of people as immigrants.
Humane or inhumane behavior has nothing to do with economic circumstances.
You assume some people have a right to the infrastructure of a particular country, for example competing for certain jobs, while others don't. It's very hard or even impossible to make that case without referring to very subjective morality standards.
>You assume some people have a right to the infrastructure of a particular country, for example competing for certain jobs, while others don't. It's very hard or even impossible to make that case without referring to very subjective morality standards.
Would these "subjective morality standards" be any different from the ones that you use to define "humane or inhumane behavior"? In any case, I'd like to see a subjective moral framework where citizens of their own country don't have a right to the infrastructure that they and their ancestors created. What incentive is there to have made our society a better place by the time we die than it was when we were born, if our descendants don't even have a birthright to what we intend to leave them?
Pretty much anyone who pays more taxes than they cost could be considered "useful", which is not a hard thing to accomplish and therefore a strong argument for allowing a lot more immigration.
In other words one of the basic premises of anti-immigrant policies is nonsense.
> Applying for immigrant visa of Canada under the Independent Class. Canada Immigration.
> This class has become very popular and also known as professional class or skilled worker class and the application is assessed based on a point system. An individual should make an application under this class if he/she wishes to come to Canada based on his/her qualification, work experience and knowledge of English or French language. [1]
Yes,all the immigrants I know are hard-working people, more so on average than people born and raised here. "Are you willing to go through the current immigration process?" Seems to do a pretty good job of selecting productive individuals already.
As an aside, this is probably my last post on HN, reading the xenophobic and likely astro-turfed replies to this and other threads has really reduced the value of HN comments to me. Seems to be as an increasing problem in all online venues :(
I too am shocked how HN is taking a hard turn to the authoritarian side. "lega" "legal" "legal" "is it legal" "but they're illegal" geeze. I live in a country where it used to be illegal to know how to tune your radio to western frequencies and emigrating could get your familly sent to a workcamp. Now the west is talking about legality as if it were the holy grail. WTF?
If you think HN is racist or authoritarian, the real life must be difficult to you.
There is nothing wrong with having rules who can live in your country. I'm not an American and live in poor country, but I totally support common sense what nowadays is considered xenophobic.
As someone who is not American - I am Indian, I find it crazy that legal immigrants have to go through a decade plus long wait to get a green card but a Mexican can pay a human trafficker to cross the border and then get protected status. I fully support Americans who wish stronger borders. I don't see anything xenophobic about their views. A nation should be able to choose who it accepts as residents from other nations.
It is not about useful or not useful, it is about the holistic impact. A change to immigration policy will have a lasting impact for decades. As an exaggerated example, if you allowed no one in to the US the travel and tourism industries would be devastated, if you allowed everyone and anyone in to the US you would have reduced costs in some areas like child care, but increased costs in others like taxes to fund social services.
Given the age of the population and the trouble paying for social security, working age imigrants can only help. Thans to the way social security is set up to pay out to the baby boomers, every worker in America today pays more in taxes than they will ever receive in benefits.
> Apart from the idea of sorting people into useful and useless being inhumane
Isn't that the goal of the hiring process, for example?
In general, the idea that citizens of any country - be it US, or any other - owe the rest of the world to provide them free entry to their country, regardless of anything, because putting any condition on it would be "inhumane", makes zero sense for me. It's like having a nice home would imply I have to let any stranger to stay in it, anytime they want, just because my home is nice and they want to be in it.
Moreover, refusing to discuss this reasonably - i.e. refusing to discuss the premise that some immigrants may be a burden to accepting society, and there's a limit how much burden a society can accept without having to sacrifice its way of life and prosperity - refusing to discuss this would only lead to disastrous results. People will see these results, and will grow sour on the whole "accepting immigrants" idea. That's not a good thing to have.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Just about every Western country legally favors immigration by the educated and successful. They use things like university degrees, job offers, published works, etc. to evaluate that.
>> It looks like every kind of screening of immigrants will deter the more desirable ones, as far as that determination is possible on their arrival at all.
I would say in the case of the US, just getting here requires a certain amount of motivation. Even the folks crossing the border from Mexico have to be rather motivated. Anyone coming from another country usually has to pay for transportation at the very least. When the country was founded, these challenges were much greater so I figure the US had the advantage of getting only immigrants above some level of motivation when it started - in addition to the other advantages it had.
And this matters because individual productivity is a log-normal distribution, like VC returns. As a country it's a good investment to invite millions of immigrants trying to find the next major inventor.
I suppose this also relies on national productivity being the product of, not the sum of individuals productivity.
It seems to make that cuts the other way. What is the cost of integrating and potentially supporting a million immigrants compared to the return from one billion dollar startup? (Especially when we're talking a billion dollars of Monopoly money valuation versus day a billion in revenue.)
Um, not much? Immigrants as a whole pay their way in the United States, have lower crime rates.
The revenue generated by Google, Chobani, and other companies is not "Mickey mouse" money. Not to mention that Microsoft and Google both picked immigrants to be their leaders.
"Immigrants as a whole pay their way in the United States, have lower crime rates."
Would that be the case if the US didn't have visa programs which select for high quality immigrants balancing out illegal immigration and visa programs which do not select for high quality immigrants?
Anecdotally, my first generation friends had parents who didn't come on study or skilled worker visas. They are all net contributors to society and many sacrificed a lot to get their kids into good private schools. They weren't upper middle class but still made it happen.
Besides, the US really doesn't have much of a safety net, so even if I wanted to live "on the dole" here I don't really know how that's possible. Closest I could think is TANF but even that gets cut off after a few years.
Besides, the US really doesn't have much of a safety net, so even if I wanted to live "on the dole" here I don't really know how that's possible.
Social security disability is certainly one way. Having children is another way that will guarantee benefits for years. The US spends hundreds of billions each year on safety net programs. Someone is living off of it.
It would be very interesting to see how many people are lifetime net-spenders of tax money (not counting money paid as wages to government employees/contractors). I can't find any study that has tried to estimated that, but I would think that anyone who spent a few non-retirement years on safety net programs or in prison and whose income never went above the 50th percentile would probably be in that category.
I'll assume you're talking about Brin when including Google in your post. He was 6 years old when he came to America. Maybe that is what is important. Did anyone pull stats on the value of companies started by immigrants who came to America already fully grown?
But the poster never mentioned founders, he says leaders.
Even when talking about Microsoft, I think he is referring to Satya Nadella since both Gates & Balmer were not immigrants.
It doesn't "cost" anyone much. Immigrants pay for goods and services and provide labor, so they economy just ends up expanding. It's not like taking "too many" immigrants will make you poor because it cost too much. More likely the cost would be social and political rather than economic.
You can't ignore the social cost of integrating and Americanizing new immigrants. You also can't brush aside the potential load in the social welfare system. The economic cost of immigration tends to be low, but that's partly because we mostly deny welfare services to poor immigrants. Having a class of people living here without a safety net, or being limited in your ability to expand the safety net for everyone is a bad thing, not a good one.
The system is already setup to favor younger and healthy individuals with higher education. To get GC you have to pass medical exams including AIDS test and so on.
OK then, what would your opinion be of tripling the number if H1B, and drastically reducing all other immigration programs at the same time, so the total amount of immigrants stays the same?
It appears we are using different definitions of "central planning". To the degree that the bureaucracy dictates who is allowed to immigrate, when, and for what purpose, the bureaucracy is planning the economy.
If your proposal is not affecting who arrives and for what job, then what's the point of it?
Immigration Program X that already exists allows 100k with qualities Y.
Immigration Program A that already exists allows 200k with qualities B.
This is the state of the current world. We have an existing bureaucracy that dictates who is allowed to immigrate, and when.
Make change C so that Program X allows 250k, and Program A only allows 50k.
Change C is not changing the amount of government bureaucracy. We already had the bureaucracy! We were doing the centrally planning already, and making change C does not make it any more centrally planned, because it was already centrally planned.
Imagine a government run factory already exists. Now imagine making a change to the government fun factory. This change is not ADDITIONAL central planning, because it was already a government run factory.
Ok. So wouldn't it be better then to simply put a cap on the number of immigrants per month and not screen them for characteristics beyond criminality?
We could cut bureaucracy and improve economic efficiency at the same time! I'm a small-government guy.
Randomness is a reasonable policy until proven inferior. It's efficient and ensures no systematic failure. I'd prefer an experiment comparing any selection strategy against randomness before using that strategy. Even then, it'd be helpful for future experiments to continue to use some random selection indefinitely.
I've worked with many large "successful" companies over the years. At every one of them I've found bureaucratic procedures which are worse than random. They're the kind of convoluted process which started out as a good idea and then morphed over the years into a tradition for its own sake -- "that's the way it's done!" -- and gathered false post-hoc rationalizations.
It would be interesting to have baseline federal standards and then let states handle some immigration decisions, actually. In Canada the provinces can do that (so e.g. Quebec can fast-track you for citizenship for speaking French). In Switzerland it is basically all at the Cantonal level.
That'd require some better surveillance to ensure an immigrant permitted in one state does not work in another. I'm not sure that's constitutional, though it is quite practical.
You could just make it for employment visa based on the employer. (or edu visas based on schools there). In most of those cases you already trust the employer to some extent, and can rely on audit and heavy penalties to deal with fraud after the fact. You would be doing the important anti-criminal/anti-terrorist screening to a consistent national standard.
It wouldn't be the full immigration system -- it would just be nice for states to have some role. There already are incentives to recruit doctors to work in underserved areas.
Even if that's the only group that's worthwhile, bringing in the rest of the world is like a loss-leader at a retail store. Being friendly is good advertising.
Perhaps you should comment on what exactly you find wrong with the original post. My reading is that your article is actually supporting the person you replied to.
"Why did the immigrant scientists succeed? Clearly these were some of the most highly-skilled people on earth but it was something more. Beyond their skills, Laura Fermi notes the unique characteristics and emotions that the foreign-born scientists brought to the atomic project: “The determination to defend America at all costs spurred the newcomers no less than the Americans, and the European-born may have come to this determination somewhat earlier than the native-born, driven by stronger personal emotions. The picture of their country under Nazi power in the event of a German victory was something the Americans could imagine only with difficulty.” That was not the case for those who had already seen their countries overrun."
Indeed it does. Criminals, polluters, etc. are a drag on the economy. However, that characteristic is not well-correlated with immigrant. It might even be anti-correlated.
I'm not against harsh penalties for criminals. I am not a fan of pretending to care about rehabilitation or deterrence, which clearly are not the purpose of our prisons. Let's call it like it is -- punishment and ejection from society.
I'm not arguing for immigration for ethical reasons, but purely out of self-interest.
In Europe once you are allowed in you get access to more or less the whole European welfare system where as in the US you have to pay for everything yourself more or less.
> It looks like every kind of screening of immigrants will deter the more desirable ones, as far as that determination is possible on their arrival at all.
that just leaves room for a real american to a founder! /sarcasm.
Immigrants are people whose lives matter. the should be given equal rights and equal value, because even if they are deemed "useless", their kids or grandkids might contribute to the future of humanity.
You don't kill an immigrant when you refuse to give him access to a country.
It has nothing to do with the future of humanity and everything to do with the future of the country.
(Edit: I am an immigrant. And of course immigrant lives matter. All human lives matter)
many immigrant lives are cut short because they aren't allowed to migrate.
The poor have only their labor to trade with. systematically discriminating where they can work, destroys their lives just as much as slavery can. It's stolen wages.
> many immigrant lives are cut short because they aren't allowed to migrate.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you cannot leave your country (because of your country policies) that's a problem, I agree. If you cannot enter, say, the US, you still have a lot of other countries where you can try to immigrate to.
Btw, when I use the word "immigrant" I mean "come to live in a foreign country". I'm pretty sure you are using a different meaning (maybe "refugee"?), could you clarify?
In fact that's what we all trade when we move to a foreign country. The general rules are to have enough work experience in your field or a degree, and you will need a proof that you're going to work or study. That applies to everybody.
> destroys their lives just as much as slavery can.
Ok, I don't know what to say. That's just purely disingenuous.
"Apart from the idea of sorting people into useful and useless being inhumane, it also seems to be counterproductive."
I'm sorry but this is totally unfair.
Nearly every nation has immigration criteria.
Canada, Australia and UK (non-EU) all have a 'points system' which definitely separates 'the useful' form the 'useless'.
Education, skill-set are key components.
I would argue language ability should be added to the list as it's the #1 predictor of integration. It's impossible to engage with a community that one cannot communicate with - and this will help a lot with those immigrants who are likely to be most marginalized (i.e. not the rich one's we are worried about). Language training should be a primary part of social support for newcomers.
"It looks like every kind of screening of immigrants will deter the more desirable ones"
No, this is not true at all. The most talented immigrants are entirely undeterred. The nations noted above are good examples of that.
"as far as that determination is possible on their arrival at all."
There is no 'determination' at arrival. The discriminating criteria are usually applied before immigrants arrive.
This doesn't preclude status for refugees and other family-class migrants either - you can have both.
Finally - I think looking at success rates of immigrants overall is a much better exercise than looking at a handful of billionaires, though the later does have value.
Really? Than why so many leaked memos show that Bannon and Miller want to reduce family Visas for those already legally here? Why is Bannon and Miller's favorite novel a racist French book about Europe becoming less white? Why when Bannon was interviewed on radio he said he wanted to bring the numbers on legal immigration way down?
You're fooling yourself if you think this is just about undocumented Mexicans, Muslims, or H1-B abuse. There's way too much circumstantial rhetoric that's been said that indicates this is something more and we invite peril if we don't harshly
Critique it.
This. so much this. Forget leaks, just stuff he's said in public is alarming enough including the fact that he takes issue with the headline OP posted here [1]. The book he keeps quoting is 'Camp of Saints' and you described it in the nicest way possible[2]. This man sets the agenda for the president :|.
As an immigrant in America, if Bannon and Miller were removed, Trumps policies are not that much different from any other boilerplate republican.
>> if Bannon and Miller were removed, Trumps policies are not that much different from any other boilerplate republican.
First and foremost thing that is apparent about Trump's administration is the anti-globalist "america first" approach. It's not just the rhetoric either - he's acting on his promises of bringing american jobs back, addressing the trade deficit disparities, cutting down on the debt (US debt is down by almost 70 billion in the last 2 months) and so on.
This sets him apart not only from the Dems but also from the mainstream and rhino GOP which is why they publicly denounce him.
Rhetoric aside, as you pointed out, this is only the beginning. Authoritarians always need a scrapegoat to blame for "failed policies". Once one group is eliminated, on to another.
There is no list of examples long enough to get the gun control people to understand why none of the pro-gun people trust them at all. Why should evidence matter here?
It's not when there's already evidence that we're slipping down the slope. We have verbal interviews of Steve Bannon's intent and philosophy and leaked drafts of policies aimed at slashing legal immigration by 50%.
Supporters of Trump and his policies go out of their way to try and soften and explain what he "really" means by saying to ignore what he or his advisors literally say. I think this is dangerously naive and the time is past giving the benefit of the doubt and sticking to rigid logical standards. This isn't philosophy class and this stuff poses real world dangers.
I had to look this up :). But I would have to disagree on that. Trump/Bannon have a recorded history of anti-immigration, anti-muslim rhetoric. And they also took a pretty long time to openly call out against the antisemitism.
The Obama administration has deported many many illegal immigrants and yet I've never felt that way for them.
While I appreciate the recognition of the fallacy, just because the reasoning fits the template for a fallacious argument doesn't mean that it is. The slippery slope argument is only a fallacy if other evidence doesn't exist to suggest we're on such a slope.
There is historical precedent in this particular instance...
There is ample historic precedent for regimes and loud minorities implementing agendas by first going after the easiest targets (jews, kurds,hooligans,illegal immigrants) then slightly generalising (disabled, kurdish supporters, all "potentially violent", immigrants in general) in some steps until the end goal (political opponents, political opponents, political opponents and...political opponents). Hence in this case, the slippery slope is a given and justified.
Why do you think they are authoritarians. I don't get this.
The right in the US is about freedom. The left is the part of authoritarianism. The progressive left especially has incredibly tight control of freedom of speech. Everything they don't like is called hate speech, all discussions are shut down, and PC terminology means that it doesn't matter what you say anymore, if you accidentally choose the wrong words, you are finished.
Except when it comes to a woman's right to choose, the freedom to assemble and protest, freedom from religion, freedom of the press, freedom of movement, freedom to use the bathroom associated with your gender, freedom to use drugs recreationally, or any other area of personal freedoms you'd care to name wherein - to be really, really generous - the right doesn't perform any better than the left.
Free exchange of ideas. This is by far the most important right. You must imagine that someone in power has enacted harsh laws that you oppose. These laws should never prevent your ability from finding other people who oppose these laws and having a means to democratically over turn them. This is the most important part of freedom.
Everything else you mentioned can be democratically overturned if enough people support it.
> woman's right to choose
I consider myself on the right, but I support women's right to choose. The religious right is on the way out. Yes, it use to be a big issue, but its not anymore. It was not a campaign issue, and Trump says he will "leave it to the states".
> freedom to assemble and protest
Can I have examples of this? We 100% support your right to peaceful protest and assembly. Can you provide some examples of ways Trump's administration is cracking down on this?
If you are talking about non-peaceful protests like blocking highways, preventing people from getting to work, ANTIFA wearing masks and attacking people at rallies then this is not acceptable and I support laws to crack down on this more.
> freedom from religion
Tick.
> freedom of the press
Examples that are not fake news please?
> freedom of movement
What do you mean here? US citizens who are not under parole or incarcerated can move freely anywhere inside the US.
> freedom to use the bathroom associated with your gender
What about freedom to use the bathroom associated with your own sex (physical M/F)?
Two sides to every "freedom" issue.
> freedom to use drugs recreationally
You want crack made legal? Weed legalisation is non-partisan now.
> personal freedoms
If these personal freedoms you talk of prevent you from being able to assemble and vote, then I support them.
Otherwise, laws should be enacted based on debate and democratic processes.
- Is it the act of calling a homosexual person, gay instead of fag?
- Is it referring to black people as african-americans and not niggers?
- Is it referring to Muslim people as muslim people and not ragheads?
- Is it referring to people of east asian heritage as Asian and not chinks?
Its 2017, so if we have to watch our words so that we dont disrespect people who have been humiliated for years, its not much to ask for. Unless you put up everyday with something that offends you, you have no idea how much your "PC terminology" helps a disadvantaged person feel comfortable in their own skin.
If I was on the left, I could make a big deal out of your incorrect use of the word homosexual, and I could make it look like you are as bad as someone calling someone a fag in an intentionally derogative way.
> Is it referring to black people as african-americans and not niggers?
Black people is not PC. Dude, are you a racist or what?
The correct term is person-of-color. But do not say "colored person" or you will receive a massive social media outcry.
"But I am not a racist you say?". Doesn't matter, once you say the wrong word, you are already one of them.
> Is it referring to Muslim people as muslim people and not ragheads?
> Is it referring to people of east asian heritage as Asian and not chinks?
2017 PC is not about using derrogatory terms.
> In 2017...its not much to ask for.
It seems like it is for you, because in your post you have used the incorrect terms.
Now, are you a racist and a homophobe?
The right would assume you are not.
The left will be keeping their eye on you, and now have material to take you down in the future if they want to.
I think it's more accurate that both the extreme right and extreme left are the parties of authoritarianism, and the center is about freedom. Leftists want to police what you say, what you think, how you earn your living, and who you associate with. Rightists want to police what you believe, what you do with your body, what substances you inhale, and how you travel. Both sides would do well with a chill pill and the idea that people could be or believe differently than you without being a threat.
>The progressive left especially has incredibly tight control of freedom of speech. Everything they don't like is called hate speech, all discussions are shut down, and PC terminology means that it doesn't matter what you say anymore, if you accidentally choose the wrong words, you are finished.
"Freedom of speech" has nothing to do with social opprobrium. Freedom of speech means the government is not going to step in and silence you for failing to use "PC terminology". It does not mean you should be immune from other people deciding you said something distasteful enough that they no longer want to employ you or associate with you.
The left blockades right-wing events to prevent people speaking. They physically try to prevent speech.
I think a lot of democrats don't see what is happening in the progressive left. I use to identify as a democrat, but after seeing this stuff, I no longer can.
You can associate with whoever you like. 100% agree.
Re: employment. So if you accidentally referred to someone as "colored" instead of "person-of-color", and you get fired for it...you are happy about this? You want to live in this kind of society?
Definition: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
I'm specifically referring to the current WH. It's authoritarian because it refuses to accept facts and wants to distort them to fit its own narrative. It will discredit the press if it does not "fall in line".
> It's authoritarian because it refuses to accept facts and wants to distort them to fit its own narrative. It will discredit the press if it does not "fall in line".
And on the right, its the press who is distorting facts for their own narrative.
The press being discredited is justified. And there is no problem with this. Imagine if all the MSM press was like Fox News? What would you say then? Your argument would flip around 180 degrees and you would be fine with news being discredited.
The press are just people. Look at how hard it is to have a debate with a liberal these days - do you think newsrooms would enjoy having Trump supporters as co-workers. Nope. They like having people around them with the same opinions, so we get the liberal MSM echo-chamber.
> And on the right, its the press who is distorting facts for their own narrative.
> The press being discredited is justified.
Its not simple being discredited, its being regarded as unnecessary. Sure you can discredit the press they're not perfect. But you cannot attempt to discard them or regard any criticism as fake.
> And there is no problem with this. Imagine if all the MSM press was like Fox News? What would you say then? Your argument would flip around 180 degrees and you would be fine with news being discredited.
Excuse me? Do you have a point here? Sure if all the food I ever ate started smelling bad, I would say all food in the world smells bad. What is your point?
> The press are just people. Look at how hard it is to have a debate with a liberal these days - do you think newsrooms would enjoy having Trump supporters as co-workers. Nope. They like having people around them with the same opinions, so we get the liberal MSM echo-chamber.
Bullshit. The reason they have Trump supporters is because a lot of American people are Trump supporters. And their willingness to work with people with different beliefs shows that they are willing to debate with them. You are contradicting yourself.
All of this is, again, besides the point that the current WH is authoritarian.
How so? Where do Trump supporters and right-wingers get their news from?
If you are on the right, you look at MSNBC, CNN, NYT, etc. and see a ridiculously biased and censored view of the world. So distorted that no one could see Trump winning.
Their viewers are mostly liberal and because of PC-culture there is a very narrow acceptable world-view. To write an article pro-anything-Trump did would put careers at risk.
Liberals receive a very censored view of the world. The ethos being something like, we need to control the facts you hear about otherwise everyone will turn into racists.
Its ironic how they are shouting fascist and big brother 1984, when they are the ones who are censoring the news, physically preventing ppl speaking at events, not engaging in debate, banning words, etc.
Look at wikileaks - use to be a hero of the left, but now it is an enemy.
A progressive-run government would be much more authoritarian.
---
> Excuse me? Do you have a point here? Sure if all the food I ever ate started smelling bad, I would say all food in the world smells bad. What is your point?
You perceive Fox News as a bad source of news in the same way that the right perceive the MSM as a bad source of news.
Its wrong to discredit the MSM...when its on your side. But if the tables are turned, you would feel the same way about the MSM.
> Bullshit. The reason they have Trump supporters is because a lot of American people are Trump supporters. And their willingness to work with people with different beliefs shows that they are willing to debate with them. You are contradicting yourself.
You think that there is 50% republicans running around the NYTimes newsroom? You think the people who work at CNN are anywhere close to 50% republican. No way. I am saying they hire like-minded people because its difficult to constantly be having arguments all day.
> All of this is, again, besides the point that the current WH is authoritarian.
> pm90: Definition: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
I really, really don't see this, compared to the behaviour of the progressive left.
I do not see personal freedoms of US citizens being violated. I see illegal immigrants being deported, laws being enforced, national borders being secured, and freedoms being protected.
Progressive-left is authoritarianism waiting to happen.
But I really wish you could convince me of this WH authoritarianism. I'm just not seeing it.
IMO boiling down the complexity of politics to a single axis is deceptive. Sure it makes it easy to find yourself on the map, but it really lends itself to a narrative of "ok here's US on the map. Over there is THEM."
IMO authoritarianism is totally orthogonal to right/left. It's clearly the case that members of both espouse changes that would limit our freedoms.
First they came for the illegals but I didn't speak up because my 401k has been making massive gains and this whole administration has been awesome for me but I can't say that out loud in California because people are still imagining a reason to lose their minds while the checks and balances are working out as intended the whole time!
And your 401k was up massively since Obama took office as well long before this current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
The market is up because of an irrational belief that Trump is going to enact the pipe dreams of the SeekingAlpha crowd with massive tax cuts that the Democrats are never going to approve.
Statistics show most likely there is going to be a big correction and a recession on Trump's watch. Never in the US's 200+ year history has it gone more than 11 years without a recession, check the NBER data.
So given the likely downturn in the markets when people realize that this stuff isn't going to be enacted, will speak up then because it's no longer "awesome" for you?
Nope. Let's give credit where credit is due. If it wasn't for Bush and Obama recognizing the problem and acting quickly to fix it, we could have had a crisis of much larger proportions. Now, I'm not saying they Personally fixed it. But they did recognize the enormity of the situation and actively took steps that helped remedy it.
Given the current composition of Congress and appointees, checks and balances are hanging on by a thread at the moment. That is what has people worried.
"Reforming the immigration system to be more “merit-based” is predicated on the idea that some of these slots are going to the wrong immigrants — immigrants who don’t have as much to give the US as the US has to give them. Proponents point to Australia and Canada — places that don’t have the American tradition of family-based migration, and that deliberately select for immigrants who are likely to contribute economically and assimilate culturally from the moment they arrive. In these countries, having a family member who’s already a citizen doesn’t guarantee you a spot as an immigrant yourself — having an advanced degree, being fluent in the language, and being able to support yourself (or have a job waiting for you when you arrive) matter as much or more."
Yes, Australia and Canada.
> Why is Bannon and Miller's favorite novel a racist French book about Europe becoming less white?
I could not find the quote from Bannon or Miller saying that "Camp of the Saints is my favourite novel"? Where can I find this?
> Why when Bannon was interviewed on radio he said he wanted to bring the numbers on legal immigration way down?
He is talking about H1-B visa abuse, just as the OP says.
"They get into graduate schools, they can’t get engineering degrees, they can’t get into graduate schools because there are all these foreign students, when they come out, they can’t get a job."
NOTE: "Foreign students". You do realise that by addressing this problem, he is helping all American citizens - who are all different ethnicities.
> You're fooling yourself if you think this is just about undocumented Mexicans, Muslims, or H1-B abuse. There's way too much circumstantial rhetoric that's been said that indicates this is something more and we invite peril if we don't harshly Critique it.
Re: This is about "merit"
>He is talking about H1-B visa abuse, just as the OP says.
Trump: Trump [...] asked him about keeping “our talented people in the country,” especially international graduates of Ivy League universities.
Bannon: “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think...” Bannon responded before trailing off, according to the Post.
Yeah, fake news, from the horses mouth himself.
Do you really think American citizens are having tough time finding work because of H1-B abuse? The unemployment rate in the tech industry fell to 2% in 2016, well below the level of full employment. The median salary is $90k nationally, and >$100k in major tech centers (CA, NY, TX, etc). Sure, H1-B abuse should be reduced, but more because it hurts companies truly trying to fill requirement positions to build products, by fly-by-night consulting firms.
Speaking of someone in the tech industry for 20+ years, I'd say the biggest problem isn't the immigrants, it's the education system and the culture. It is not the fault of immigrants that Americans aren't getting advanced degrees, or that entire Phd departments are F-1 Visas, or that so many native born candidates are lack luster. American culture's "melting pot" could benefit from an infusion of immigrant culture from those who are still hungry and have a very high valuation placed on education and grit.
Keeping them out just makes us weak and complacent.
> Here, this HuffPo article links directly to SoundCloud interviews where you can hear him say it:
I cannot find it. Please give me a timecode. It being his favourite novel is implied from MSM is it not?
> Bannon: “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think...” Bannon responded before trailing off, according to the Post.
Me and you will both have the opportunity to wait and see what happens.
Right now the left is all about scary predictions. Tell me an objective measure we can use in 4 years (or 2 if he is impeached as you like to predict), that we can point to to say that you were right and I was wrong about Bannon.
> I'd say the biggest problem isn't the immigrants, it's the education system and the culture.
H1B's are good to hire because there is the threat of having to leave, and losing ability to go for green card if they are fired. So they accept low wages, you don't have to give them pay rises, they will not leave for another company.
This is ripe for abuse. So its not just education and culture, its also government immigration policies -- and this is not the fault of the immigrants -- no-one is saying the immigrants are at fault here...
You're in denial, the evidence is staring you in the face, you're just not concerned. That's your prerogative, but you're probably not one of those who are going to be hurt by Bannon's misguided nationalism.
As for H1-Bs, the reason Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, et al, hire them is not to lock in slaves at low wages who can't leave. Yes, there are companies that do this, but the reality is, tech companies love to hire new advanced degree graduates and a large chunk of those with master degrees and above are immigrants.
If I want to hire a bunch of Phds in machine learning, optics, materials engineering, etc chances are they will be F-1 Visas and you won't see many native born in these programs in proportion to their representation in the population. This is just an uncomfortable fact.
What I find interesting is, conservatives will often tout this "pipeline problem" to explain away low representation of women and minorities in STEM jobs -- as a natural outcome that nothing should be done about it. However, when it comes to native born American (primarily white) males, who have their own "pipeline problem" at the advanced degree level relative to legal immigrants, you see them crying for government policy changes to protect what they assume to be their birthright privilege.
Most of the H1-Bs I have worked with, including my wife, were exceedingly talented, and hired by companies for their talent, not low wage slaves. This may not be true of consulting firms, but we can address those who abuse the system without lowering the overall number of H1-Bs allow -- that should be defined by market demand and right now, with unemployment at 2% in the STEM fields and salary inflation going through the roof, along with valuations, I question how much "protection" citizens need against importing the smartest people from around the world.
> I could not find the quote from Bannon or Miller saying that "Camp of the Saints is my favourite novel"? Where can I find this?
>> You're in denial, the evidence is staring you in the face, you're just not concerned. That's your prerogative, but you're probably not one of those who are going to be hurt by Bannon's misguided nationalism.
Its a book he has read. That is all. Fake news and false outrage.
> What I find interesting is, conservatives will often tout this "pipeline problem" to explain away low representation of women and minorities in STEM jobs -- as a natural outcome that nothing should be done about it.
You are saying the government needs to tell women and minorities to apply for STEM courses, because they are incapable of doing so? This is a cultural problem and it is fixing itself without government intervention.
> "pipeline problem" at the advanced degree level relative to legal immigrants
As Dr. Kaku says in the video, "the scientific establishment would collapse...50% PhD are foreign-born.". So your solution is immigration? Wouldn't the solution be to fix the education system?
What we are saying is focus on a sustainable solution - looking after the people you have. If you keep bringing people in, and they bring their families, and their kids turn out to be dummies because of poor education system, then you need to bring in more foreign-born...who will just perpetuate the problem and increase the burden on the country of dummies. Its a ponzi scheme. And it is actually an argument for restricting family visas, and favouring increase numbers of H1-B.
> Most of the H1-Bs I have worked with, including my wife, were exceedingly talented, and hired by companies for their talent, not low wage slaves.
Anecdotal, but yes, some/most immigrants are talented - of course. But there is documented abuses, and conditions available for abuses - which means abuses certainly happen.
>As Dr. Kaku says in the video, "the scientific establishment would collapse...50% PhD are foreign-born.". So your solution is immigration? Wouldn't the solution be to fix the education system?
Either-or fallacy. Keeping foreign born Phds out doesn't help us, and doesn't help create more native American Phds. We could strengthen our education system and education culture without Affirmative Action for White Males By Banning Foreigners.
You know, Clinton and Sanders supported policies that would have helped, by dramatically reducing the cost of college. Upper level advanced degrees are a filter/pipeline issue, and the more people in 2-year and 4-year programs, the greater number who might advance to graduate level.
The reason there are so many foreign Phds is that they often completed (free) 4-year programs in their home country, and go abroad for graduate degrees. My wife completed her masters degree in China, then came here and got a second masters degree.
What I hear you saying is "if only we banned these foreigners, maybe our native born people would have a chance in Phd programs". And what I interpret that to mean is "Let's not spend $80 billion on free college for everyone who wants it, because that would be 'big gubmint socialism', instead everything will work out if we just institute protectionism immigration policies."
I say, let's continue to drain the smartest people in the world to our shores and educate our own as well.
> What I hear you saying is "if only we banned these foreigners, maybe our native born people would have a chance in Phd programs". And what I interpret that to mean is "Let's not spend $80 billion on free college for everyone who wants it, because that would be 'big gubmint socialism', instead everything will work out if we just institute protectionism immigration policies."
You seem to view everything through a racial/foreigner lense. It muddies the debate. America is a melting-pot already, and US citizen focused policies are to the benefit of all US citizens regardless of race, birth-country, sex, etc. You are implying hidden motives in everyone's actions which cannot be argued against because we simply do not know what is going on in their heads.
Education is a big money making industry. It brings wealth into the country. There is far more incentive to bring in foreigners than to improve the opportunities for US citizens (who are not all white males - why does race and sex have to come into this I have no idea).
I appreciate the discussion, it has been a good insight to another side of the debate floor.
This is the comment that takes the middle ground and explains to both of you that nothing is black and white and there are bad and good things about Trump's immigration agenda. His plans could actually be philanthropically motivated, but they are undeniably being prematurely spun into action without reasonable consultation from an array of experts and this is the source of most of its flaws. These flaws may or may not be too big to ignore, but without a panel of unbiased experts assigned to investigate the matter we are making an immature decision to support his impulsive strategy of setting policy.
Don't say "There's no false middle ground" ... That is extremely assumptive and cocky.
Say what you really mean: "I only see this issue in black and white as a byproduct of my nascent understanding of the various forces at play in American politics and the motivations behind them."
You do understand that the average person sympathizes more with middle-ground attitudes, right? That speaking in extremes, except when necessary, can have the unintended effect of polarizing people? Affirming the beliefs of proponents and strengthening the resolve of opponents.
There is a reason that social disrupters who use Persona Management software aim for the middle ground when they speak. They use moderate voices that give a "balanced" view of both sides, before concluding one way or the other. Why? Because it has been shown to be a lot more effective and a greater number of people will be willing to digest the argument presented to them. Most people are on the fence and just need a little push in the right direction. They are more inclined to listen to a voice they sympathize with and less inclined to automatically become defensive and closed.
But keep up your strategy and we'll see how it goes. I'm sure your extremist "Everyone in the White House is xenophobic" argument is doing just fine.
Not to mention the efforts being made to stop legal immigration based on asylum seeking [1]. The whole "we're only against ILLEGAL immigration" cry is phony and does not square with the actual actions and opinions of policy-makers and enforcers.
What the book was actually about was the worry that the France was losing its national identity, the framework upon which it was built was Christianity. They want to preserve that identity. I don't think it's about skin color, but about shared cultural values that they found to be appealing and necessary. As it happens, white people were those people. You could easily reverse those roles with any other skin color.
This is a type of reaction that people have when faced with what they perceive to be a quick cultural change. Things to them were goo as they were, so changes present a threat to that stability. It's human nature.
Yes, tribalism is human nature, and we have done very many ugly things to one another because of it. Much of modern advancement in civil liberties and human rights have come about because of the recognition that human nature is flawed and we need to act to fight our worse instincts.
I don't think we should sweep racism and xenophobia under the rug with the argument that "boys will be boys"
>Yes, tribalism is human nature, and we have done very many ugly things to one another because of it.
We have also done as many ugly things to one another in order to build cross-national entities, like empires and communist-based internationalist mega-states.
>I don't think we should sweep racism and xenophobia under the rug with the argument that "boys will be boys"
Well, first let's not call the desire to maintain one's national identity "xenophobia", the same way wanting to have your own house and family, and live as you like there, and accept whoever you like, is not "strangerophobia".
Colonialism and Imperialism isn't about building cross-national melting pot entities, it's about strategic control of resources and geo-political regions.
You think previous empires were built because they were more concerned with equality and anti-tribalism?
>Colonialism and Imperialism isn't about building cross-national melting pot entities, it's about strategic control of resources and geo-political regions.
"Melting-pot entities" are concerned with the same things ("strategic control of resources and geo-political regions") too. Cross-national melting is mostly about whether you allow the peoples you control to keep their identities or you want to abolish them too, for less market friction and/or smoother political control. USSR comes to mind on the latter. UK/US/EU on the former.
What is racist about not wanting things to change? This is a totally separate issue from racism. Calling it "boys will be boys" or "girls will be girls" is a gross oversimplification.
When white people didn't want black people to use their water fountains, it was an existing status quo they didn't want to see changed.
You can justify anything by explaining away people'a xenophobia or bigotry by saying they didn't want change.
We just went through the same argument with gay marriage with people alleging great harm and the need to discriminate against gay people, causing greater harm to them.
I find great irony that people on HN who probably subscribe to ideas of dynamism and creative destruction and disruption as the life blood of innovation are defending cultural conservatism.
I don't think articles like "Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups" are all about anti-Trump, it's more like pointing out to the American public that immigrants are not a tax on the rest of society.
Not true. 70% of Somalians in The Netherlands are still on welfare after 2 years. Most other Africans, most Middle-Eastern types etc all hover between 25 and 50%. In comparison, most Europeans hover around 1-5%. And this is from the CBS (Central Bureau of Statistics), which is a government institution.
Edit: guys.. just read the link or come with rebuttals instead of this lame cop-out when facing the truth. I thought we are people of science and facts here?
How many Somalian immigrants are on welfare after 5 years? 10 years? What's the economic productivity of those Somalians -- not just the taxes paid, but the profit made by their employers? What's the cost of that welfare? How many citizens are on welfare in an average year?
I think we could use more facts before coming to a conclusion.
Netherlands is a different country that applied very different immigrant policies. Pretty bad ones, I would say. The fact that Netherlands immigration policy may be a failure does not imply anything about the US one, or about immigration as a whole.
I am sure there are some who don't like any kind of immigration; however, I believe most Americans are only concerned with illegal immigration, so it really doesn't do much to sway public opinion to claim that immigrants are good for the economy, since nobody is denying that and it is irrelevant to the issue of illegal immigration. Most people are fine with immigration, as long as immigrants come in legally. For example, my wife is an immigrant and currently holds a green card, but both of us are against illegal immigration. It's best not to conflate the two.
Bannon responded: “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” he didn’t finish his sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
> While Bannon didn’t explicitly say anything against immigrants, he seemed to hint at the idea of a white nationalist identity with the phrase “civic society.”
That seems like a pretty big jump from him citing a common stat to Verge accusing him of calling for a white nationalist state. He didn't say anything close to that.
He may hold nationalist ideas where he wants more American's founding good companies domestically. But I'm not really seeing where he is calling for a white society or for an end of Asians starting companies? It could easily just as much imply that he just wants to see more Americans being successful founders in the US tech industry in addition to Asians?
From someone outside of the industry it may be a rational concern question to ask why there aren't more Americans starting those top companies? You can ask that and be concerned about that while not being characterizing the problem as Asians taking some fixed amount of jobs.
The insistence of people to fill in all the blanks of everything Steve Bannon doesn't say with some generic white supremacist viewpoint is really strange to me. Like there's an attempt to discredit any of his ideas by associating them with white nationalism. Usually by cherry picking statements and inventing a bunch of implied underlying meaning - that may or may not actually exist - to fill in the gaps until a narrative is complete. It's actually quite brilliant from a partisan character assassination perspective.
Knowing that explicit white nationalism could be problematic, a white nationalist might speak in code. This is similar to the way someone might speak in code when discussing criminal activity, since it's illegal to surveil non-criminal discussion. The question in court is whether a reasonable person would interpret a conversation as normal speech or criminal code. "The eagle flies at midnight," is obvious code. Other speech is not so clear.
> It could easily just as much imply that he just wants to see more Americans being successful founders in the tech industry in addition to Asians?
First, Asians can be and often are Americans.
Second, why would Bannon bring up this point that more "Americans" should be successful founders? Is it that our schools are failing? No, because Asians attend the same schools. Ah, I've got it. Perhaps there's a cultural problem with white anglo-saxon protestants: anti-intellectualism and anti-education. Is that what Bannon is getting at?
Knowing that explicit white nationalism could be problematic, a white nationalist must speak in code.
You have got to be kidding me. Ok, let me play along.
Xapata is clearly a white nationalist! How do I know it? He doesn't speak in white nationalist terms! Those white nationalists need to speak in code, so the evidence is clear!
Not kidding at all. Was my comparison with drug-speak not clear? Let me try again.
Suppose I'm a nice girl. A guy just asked me if I was free to go to dinner tonight. I don't want to offend, so I say, "I'm sorry, I'm washing my hair tonight." The guy now has a conundrum. He can interpret the statement literally and ask if I'm free for dinner tomorrow night, or he can interpret it as that I do not want to eat dinner with him. Humans speak in codes and implications regularly.
In Bannon's case, we must decide what interpretation of his thought is the most plausible cause of his speech. I can come up with two options:
1. Bannon believes there's something hindering the ethnic and cultural majority from technological entrepreneurialism and we should address that problem.
2. Bannon believes the number of ethnic minorities achieving economic success will decrease the prevalence of the historically common culture. Being of that culture, he dislikes this trend.
Are there any other interpretations? What's the most plausible to you?
Not obvious at all. I thought we were sharing a frustration for the recent trend in politics to make implications rather than explicit statements.
I didn't think I was assigning new meaning, but only exactly what Bannon intended. I can, obviously, never be certain I've understood him correctly, so I just make my best guess. It's reasonable to expect that different people will make different guesses.
>I didn't think I was assigning new meaning, but only exactly what Bannon intended. I can, obviously, never be certain I've understood him correctly, so I just make my best guess.
Why are you guessing at all? Why are you assuming he isn't saying what he means?
A generous interpretation of Bannon would be that he simply wants to see more domestic workers founding successful tech companies. He might see these statistics not as a reason to get rid of ethnic minorities, but rather as a sign that something about American culture is discouraging Americans from entrepreneurism.
Why would he not finish his thought to clarify that Americans are not as entrepreneurial as Asians? That seems like an easy thing to say if that's what he meant.
It's possible he didn't think it needed clarification. This discussion took place within effectively a far-right echo chamber where everyone was already more or less on the same page. It's also possible he didn't even feel very strongly about this point to begin with and decided he didn't like it before even finishing his sentence. It's really impossible to say. During live, unscripted discussions it's very common for someone to begin a thought, decide they don't even personally like it while in the midst of saying it, and then cut themselves off.
So... that page is the understanding that the majority culture suppresses the entrepreneurial spirit or are bad at math and science? If that's the echo chamber of the far-right, that's a big surprise to me.
> decide they don't even personally like it while in the midst of saying it, and then cut themselves off.
That's possible. Indeed it sounds like Bannon cut himself off, but more for disliking the clarity than the content of what he was saying. It sounded like he caught himself and chose to insinuate rather than elucidate.
"When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think [...]" he didn't finish his sentence. "A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society." [1]
My problem with Trump administration rhetoric is there is this assumption that non-white == immigrant. Many Silicon Valley CEOs and entrepreneurs are second (or even third) generation Asian-Americans. And let's not forget the first generation Canadian or European founders. The fact that he singled out Asians in particular shows the undercurrent of racist ideology driving Bannon (the primary hardliner influencing Trump).
“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, not finishing the sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
I'll give you the benefit of doubt and believe that YOU are not trying to stop legal immigration. However, many are trying to stop immigration, some are against all immigration, some are against only those of a certain religion.
The first ban was most certainly not only illegal immigrants, it was legal immigrants such as green card holders and even on dual-citizens from a number of countries. Specifically, the first ban also banned permanent residents from a number of countries (i.e. greencard holders.) Note that permanent residents have to pay US taxes even on income back home, even if living overseas. They are very much legal residents that have committed quite a bit of effort (and usually also funds) into becoming legal residents.
Reference:
"It will bar green card holders," Gillian Christensen, acting Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an email.
As long as the Republican leadership stands with Trump, they're one and the same. The party in power does not get to separate themselves from the words and actions of the president or Congress.
If you don't feel that the actions of the Republican leadership represents your viewpoints, you are not a Republican. Republicans put Trump in power and are keeping Trump in power and they are directly responsible for anything that comes from that.
This is patently untrue and statements like these are not helpful to the overall political situation that you're upset about. Demonizing your opposition in your rhetoric is divisive and causes reasonable people to shy away. One of the reasons the Democrats lost the elections almost across the board in 2016 was because of their insistence on divisive rhetoric. To win elections you need the reasonable middle that are registered to neither party, this voting bloc overwhelmingly voted Republican in 2016.
The conservative ideology is not racist. In fact, strong conservativism was a primary hallmark of support for things like the civil rights movement. Unfortunately the Republican Party is more authoritarian and corporatist than conservative these days. Regardless, many people are registered as Republicans who abhor racism and bigotry.
>> Supporting Republicans means supporting racism.
> This is patently untrue
No it isn't. The border wall is an idea rooted in racism. Look at Trump's nonsense about rapists and murderers. The immigration ban is a policy rooted in racism. Look at Trump's nonsense about Muslims cheering during 9/11. Do you notice a pattern how support for these policies go hand-in-hand with racist comments? That's because these policies are inspired by the idea that white people are superior to non-white people. It's not hard to tie Republican economic and domestic policies to racism either if you're willing to go one step below the surface.
> Regardless, many people are registered as Republicans who abhor racism and bigotry.
Then they need to stop supporting it. Voting for racists or for people who stand by while racist policies are enacted is equivalent to supporting racism. This is simply calling a spade a spade. Republican policies are racist and supporting Republicans means supporting racism.
You clearly seem to misunderstand or be unable to separate Trumpism from conservatism. There are a lot of registered Republicans who are believers in a conservative political ideology. Trumpism is NOT a conservative ideology. Trump is not a conservative, he's a populist authoritarian. It's a seriously unfortunate circumstance for a lot of Republicans that Trump ended up being their party's candidate.
Calling /all/ of these people racists is extremely divisive and also blatantly untrue. Doing so does not win you elections and it doesn't move the politics of the US forward. All it does is make you look unreasonable to anyone intelligent and maybe win you virtue signalling points with Facebook-focused liberals. It also demeans the term "racism". Can we focus on the ACTUAL racism that's occurring within our current administration without painting large swaths of the voting population with an unfair brush?
Also, can you please take the time to breath deeply and realize that Donald Trump is not the only politician who was voted into office on behalf of the Republican Party?
I never once said conservative. Trump is the leader of the Republican party and no Republicans are doing anything substantive to oppose him. The modern Republican party is explicitly racist.
For a while, they were keeping green card holders from re-entering the country, and entirely barred people with legal visas from entry. It's clearly not about legality. It's a capricious approach to policy, which seems the message that after spending years navigating the legal system, and uprooting ones entire life to move to the US, one can be turned away for no particular reason.
This has a huge impact on legal immigration, which will have an impact on business in this country, both as we look abroad for strong workers and innovators.
How does this have a huge impact on legal immigration? There is not shortage people wanting to come to the US.
(this is not a comment on the merits of the travel ban, only the effect)
A pair of Republican senators are teaming up with the White House to introduce legislation to restrict legal immigration by slashing the number of visas and green cards available each year."
"It simply tries to get a handle on 1 million immigrants coming here a year, virtually none of whom are coming here based on their employment skills or demonstrated economic need," he said. " I don't think our immigration system is working for working Americans."
How does it make sense to let people in who will not work or fulfil a need? How is this sustainable?
"Reforming the immigration system to be more “merit-based” is predicated on the idea that some of these slots are going to the wrong immigrants — immigrants who don’t have as much to give the US as the US has to give them. Proponents point to Australia and Canada — places that don’t have the American tradition of family-based migration, and that deliberately select for immigrants who are likely to contribute economically and assimilate culturally from the moment they arrive. In these countries, having a family member who’s already a citizen doesn’t guarantee you a spot as an immigrant yourself — having an advanced degree, being fluent in the language, and being able to support yourself (or have a job waiting for you when you arrive) matter as much or more."
Family-based migration doesn't exist in other countries, and doesn't make sense.
There is a debate to be had here, but instead everyone is reading fake news headlines and confirming their biases.
> Family-based migration doesn't exist in other countries
Family-based migration absolutely does exist in other countries, including those you have specifically named. It may not be as extensive as in US, but that's a different matter.
And yes, having an eligible family member does effectively "guarantee you a spot as an immigrant yourself". Point-based system is for skilled immigration.
> Family-based migration absolutely does exist in other countries, including those you have specifically named.
Sorry, I genuinely meant that its not as extensive.
"Australia admits approximately two-thirds of its immigrants on skill criteria and strives to recruit persons during their peak working ages (Walsh, 2008). By contrast, about two-thirds of U.S. immigrants are family sponsored, without regard to skills or age (Wasem, 2007)."
Do you agree with me that the rhetoric and outrage surrounding this proposal are dramatically overblown when considering the statistics and practices in a very liberal country like Australia?
This is my main point. There is a debate to be had, and the left/liberal/progressive/MSM want to shut it down with scary headlines. This is most definitely an example of fake news.
The reason why the difference is so big is only partially because family immigration is less extensive in those countries. The bigger part is that US doesn't have a well designed skilled immigration track, while those other countries do. Most skilled immigrants come to US via H-1B or L-1, neither of which were originally designed for that purpose. Because H-1B specifically has an elaborate quota system, the number of people that can come under it is limited. But there's no similar quota on family immigration, and so the immigration system is dominated by the latter.
So if you want to see ratios more like in Australia or Canada, the first thing you should do is not clamp down on family immigration, but open up skilled immigration - e.g. by removing H-1B quotas, or (better yet) creating a proper work-your-way-to-citizenship visa with no quotas. That will increase the overall number of immigrants, but most of that increase will come from skilled immigration, evening things out.
Of course, at that point you'll want to have some merit-based system (points etc), because otherwise you'll get too many skilled immigrants to process...
I think that a lot of people on the left would actually be fine with that kind of tradeoff - point-based system, but without quotas. So larger number of immigrants overall, but eligibility bar is higher, and skilled immigration is more prominent compared to family immigration. Would you be okay with that?
What is the rationale behind this? Or how will this benefit existing citizens? Where do you draw the line for a cap on immigration, and why?
There is an almost infinite number of people who want to come to the US. Decisions must be made fairly and consistently, and to the benefit of the standard of living of existing citizens.
H1-B = 236K applicants / 85K spots
So that is ~150K high-skilled people who want to come but cannot right now. I would say the first priority is to ensure this system is not being used to drive down wages, and not being used to abuse migrants.
If companies still need these people to grow the economy, and cannot find US people to do it, then we should get them in first.
Family-based immigration must be done in a way to ensure that we are not creating greater demands on the economy. They should be able to support themselves and not contribute to the decrease in participation rate, and increasing unemployment.
> "28% of new [tech] startups in America are started by immigrants," - Ron Conway
> "Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Doll..."
This says that there should have some kind of entrepreneurial visa.
> What is the rationale behind this? Or how will this benefit existing citizens? Where do you draw the line for a cap on immigration, and why?
There was no rationale. You keep pointing at Australia etc as a desirable model, and I told you what you'd need to do to make your system more like those countries, and what the result of that would be.
In particular, those countries don't have quotas on skilled immigration. Well, not explicit ones - any point system establishes an inherent limit.
> I would say the first priority is to ensure this system is not being used to drive down wages, and not being used to abuse migrants.
I don't think there are many people who would disagree with you. As an ex-H1B, I don't see anything objectionable about the changes presented so far (and if I still were an H1B, I'd actually benefit from them).
Here are some nice charts here about who's using the system, and how:
Note that what these numbers clearly tell is that it's not Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc that are a problem wrt wages. It's Tata, Infosys and similar sweat shops. Those are also the ones who get most of the H1B visa quota. Ironically, they're also the ones using H1B as a true temp worker visa - they rarely sponsor their employees for green cards.
In contrast, for most major tech company workers, H1B is a vehicle to green card and citizenship, and the companies themselves do encourage that, sponsoring employees and paying all filing and legal fees, because they are interested in retaining those workers long-term (and are paying well enough that they're not concerned that people would leave once they're no longer legally bound to the company).
So, imposing more stringent lower limits on wages would benefit the Googles of the world at the expense of Tatas, and would benefit people using H1B as immigration vehicle over temp workers.
> Family-based immigration must be done in a way to ensure that we are not creating greater demands on the economy. They should be able to support themselves and not contribute to the decrease in participation rate, and increasing unemployment.
Strictly speaking, family-based immigration already has such requirements. The sponsor must not only demonstrate sufficient minimum income to provide for the person they're sponsoring, but they're also required to sign a legally enforceable pledge making them financially liable for support of that person:
This remains in force until that person becomes a citizen, which would be at least 5 years after getting green card in most cases (you need 5 years of permanent residency to apply for citizenship normally; 3 if you're married to a citizen).
This all is very similar to Canada.
> This says that there should have some kind of entrepreneurial visa.
There are visas for investors, but they require considerable sums of money upfront. I don't think there's anything for people who are not self-funded in that manner, which likely accounts for most of the startups.
I think we both agree system needs reforming, and subtracting the political rhetoric from both sides, there is middle ground reform that should hopefully prevail.
I would encourage you - and, really, anyone who is interested in any kind of immigration reform - to explore the existing laws and processes and find out how they work. I'm often amazed at how little most Americans (on both sides of the political spectrum) know about their immigration system - mostly the bits that come from the news, and which are, of course, cherry-picked to support some political narrative. The bulk of it is not really all that interesting, and so goes completely unobserved, but it's what most of us who have to go through this are actually dealing with.
The easiest way to do so is to put your immigrant hat on. Pretend that you're a foreigner who knows English, and see how you'd go about immigrating to US. Literally starting from a google search along the lines of "US immigration", and then go from there. When you see various different options presented to you (like student, family, investor etc), conjure virtual personas corresponding to either one of those, and see how far you can get down either track, what are the things that are required of you, what quotas apply if any, how much it costs in fees, what the processing times are etc. Consider how you'd plan around all that. Also see how it works if you're married - how you bring your spouse to the country, whether they can work at all before they can get a green card, what about children etc.
Once you get to the end of it, try doing the same thing, but for "legally bring my parents/siblings/... to the country". Again note the various options, requirements, fees, processing times etc.
It can also be instructive to do it for a few other English-speaking countries (or those that have their immigration materials available in any language that you can understand), just to see how they all compare.
It's a lot like gun control. Based on your politics, I think it's a safe bet that you get annoyed when left-wing politicians talk about "weapons or war" or some such, without any actual knowledge of how guns work or how to operate one, beyond "it's a shoulder thing that goes up". To write meaningful gun legislation, one has to understand guns well, right? Well, same thing applies here.
The Trump administration is trying to stop legal immigration. One way they are doing this is by reducing the number of refugees America accepts. This is a form of legal immigration that is being stopped, mainly by reducing it bit by bit.
I'm a legal immigrant here in US. I have a green card, and patiently waiting for when I can finally apply for citizenship.
After the mess that they have made with the first EO, when people with green cards were turned at the border, my main takeaway is that I'm not going to come anywhere near the border until I get that citizenship.
Yes, I am anti-Trump. Even if there were no other reasons, the EO alone would be quite sufficient to make me so, out of pure self-preservation.
I've also increased my monthly ACLU donation 5x. Not the least because I can never know if I wouldn't end up the beneficiary of their services some day under this administration.
> Whenever I see "Immigration" in the title, i think anti-Trump and get sad.
> No one is trying to stop legal immigration.
> Tech companies are mad because they are cracking down on H1-B Visa abuse. This is not a bad thing.
Trump allies in Congress are literally introducing a bill to cut legal immigration in half.
Whenever I see comments like this I get sad. The idea that the administration is only trying to stop "illegal immigration is just plain wrong. It's clear Steve Bannon sees successful immigrants, especially non white non Christian ones, as a danger. And as for Stephen Miller he literally broke up with a close friend because he was Latino.
Tech companies aren't just worried about profits, many are headed by immigrants and they're worried about an extremely xenophobic white house.
The only companies abusing H1-B visas are Indian outsourcing firms. The abuse though, is based on the eye of the beholder. From the outsourcing firm's perspective they are merely providing a service that is legally allowed in the market.
American companies aren't completely off the hook though, for example in WA, AT&T and T-Mobile don't hire many international students from universities, instead they prefer to bring in employees from HCL to work on H1-B visas.
There's growing evidence [1] that even when used by american tech companies H1Bs are largely being used to suppress wages of technical laborers (us). From a purely economic perspective, if you could pay someone on an h1b $80k when it would cost you $120k to hire an american, why would you hire the american? Tech CEOs calling for more H1Bs has very little to do with their politics and morality and much more to do with reducing one of their largest costs (labor).
As much as I'd like to see it happen the Trump admistration has stated that H1B reform is not a priority. I doubt anything will come of it. Just more bait and switch.
I assume what they really mean by Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups is that 51% of $1B+ U.S. startups have at least one immigrant founder, right? (as opposed to 51% of unicorn founders are immigrants)
From what I've read of the report, the 51% were all 100% legal immigrants. Therefore I'm wondering what exactly is the news story here? Would the Wall Street Journal really lead with a headline "Legal Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups"? I really doubt it... and think the title is disingenuous because it implies the notion that all immigration is good. I don't buy that line of reasoning and I haven't heard any compelling arguments or seen any verifiable data to back that up.
I do think that America--and indeed any country--should allow for, and advocate, that the best and brightest from around the world be allowed to legally immigrate.
But I agree with what capocannoniere is implying, that no one builds that kind of success alone.
> From what I've read of the report, the 51% were all 100% legal immigrants.
Anti-immigrant policies, including ones sold on rhetoric about illegal immigration, often include changes to reduce levels of legal immigration or erect new cosrs and/or procedural obstacles to it, so that people who were legal immigrants under the old system would be prevented or discouraged from legal immigration under the new system.
As a replacement for the odd and misplaced response I posted earlier, consider the new Cotton/Perdue immigration bill said to be backed also by Trump. The Senate backers (and Trump) have been big attackers of illegal immigration and blamed negative job impacts on that source, but the bill would halve the number of legal immigrants annually, partially by eliminating several family-based visa categories.
Hi dragonwriter, no worries about the mis-post I completely understand. Thank you for taking the time to post a reply.
I've read the article (although I don't put much weight in CNN's reporting) so I went straight to the copy of the bill (http://static.politico.com/ad/1b/a981934c4278bfef730dc51b341...) and then read some commentary on it from both sides of the political spectrum.
Okay so... firstly the assertion that limits to illegal immigration impacts pathways for legal immigration. I'm sorry but I'm still not fully convinced that this example shows your assertion to be the case. I concede however that it cannot be ruled out--so basically I'm still reserving judgement on this point and now that I'm aware of it I will definitely be keeping an eye out for any new data.
So why reserve judgement? Well you specifically said, "Anti-immigrant policies, including ones sold on rhetoric about illegal immigration, often include changes to reduce levels of legal immigration or erect new cosrs (sic) and/or procedural obstacles to it, so that people who were legal immigrants under the old system would be prevented or discouraged from legal immigration under the new system."
The RAISE Act is an entirely separate proposed piece of legislation and therefore it does not hold as a clear example of cause and effect. You could use abduction and say that the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the resulting political climate post his win has brought immigration as a whole into the spotlight, therefore there is a likelihood for a reduction immigration, including previously legal forms of immigration. While I would agree with that line of reasoning I would still reserve calling it a truth and I wouldn't adopt it into my belief structure as I generally hold out for cause and effect reasoning based on verifiable facts before accepting something as a 'truth'.
As to the RAISE Act itself, I think it actually sounds rather sensible. In essence they want to shift more towards entry through work merit as in, prioritising those with education and qualifications, similar to the points system in Canada and Australia. That means cutting back significantly on the low skill migrants and removing the diversity visa completely.
Would this hurt the number of people who go on to make a billion dollar company? I doubt it... I'm sure those people would go through the system legally and would be able to do so on merit. Would this hurt the average American? Personally I believe that it wouldn't... in fact I think it would help the 97.3 million Americans who fall into a low-income category, defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level (source: 2010 US Census).
If considering the effect the RAISE Act would have through the lens of supply and demand economics... less low skilled labour (due to a reduction of low skilled legal immigrants) would lead to more supply of low skilled job openings (which would need to be filled by the existing American workforce).
I should think that any government must consider the impact of legislation would have on low income households and the country's poverty line. In my mind there is no greater social program than a job and that Sir Thomas Browne's words ring true:
"But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? 'Charity begins at home,' is the voice of the world;".
As to the 'reduce legal family immigration', the RAISE Act retain immigration preference for spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. It would eliminate preferences for the extended adult family members including:
• Adult parents of U.S. citizens
• Adult siblings of U.S. citizens
• Unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens
• Married adult children of U.S. citizens, and
• Unmarried adult children of legal permanent residents.
I don't see how this is unfair. I get that immigration rights would cover your immediate family unit--especially minors--but why should it automatically cover adult children when they could apply under the same merit based system as other adults?
Two example policies (chosen because they were the first two in a Google search, and show contrasting approaches to the general issue, not, e.g., because of any special relevance of the two institutions):
Hi dragonwriter... I've visited both links and neither of them seem to be related to immigration and how limits to illegal immigration impacts pathways for legal immigration.
Also I did a duckduckgo search (I don't use Google due to their TOS and my perception of their ethics) and could find nothing on the first page of results to support what you were saying which is why I asked.
That...Was a mistake I somehow read your post as a reply to a different post of mine on a different thread. I have no idea how that happened. Since it's impossible to edit now, I'll replace (well, accompany since it can be deleted) it with a more relevant response.
The title clearly states what the (non-partisan) report says without making any implications whatsoever. Are we really going to complain about lack of bias in the media now?
It also heavily depends on the definition of "immigrant". Uber is listed, for example. The two founders of Uber are Travis Kalanick (born in Los Angeles, not an immigrant) and Garrett Camp (born in Canada, resides in San Fransisco). Is Garrett Camp an immigrant? Sure sounds like it. But is that really in the spirit of "founded by immigrants"?
I am not arguing in favor of an immigrant ban in any way, I think it's a bad idea, but when a headline is trying to argue against the ban the president has put forward and lists people from Canada and South Africa... well I mean yeah they're technically immigrants, but they wouldn't have been banned by the policy anyway. Now, Arash Ferdowsi, Iranian co-founder of Dropbox, that's your success story. Unfortunately the number of billion-dollar startups with founders born in countries listed in the travel ban is far smaller so it'd make for a worse headline.
I feel the inclusion of people like Camp and Musk hurts the point the story is trying to make. We have tons of important people from countries affected by the immigration ban, and it'd be worth it to highlight those people rather than just any immigrant. The president has never called for banning all immigration from any country regardless of anything. So the argument is disingenuous.
>Is Garrett Camp an immigrant? Sure sounds like it. But is that really in the spirit of "founded by immigrants"?
Yes, Garrett Camp is an immigrant. He just happens to be white and from Canada and is thus perceived less as "those other people" and more "American" because he blends in. If he came from Sudan would you consider him to be "more of an immigrant"? Your own comment implies this bias even if you didn't mean for it to sound that way.
>Your own comment implies this bias even if you didn't mean for it to sound that way.
I see your point, but I disagree in this situation. If there was no context around the discussion, you'd be exactly right. But there is context, and the context is the immigration ban put in place by the president. That immigration ban excludes people from specific countries. This article was very obviously written to show how important immigration is as a way to counter the reasoning that bore the immigration ban, but I feel it cheapens the point when you include immigrants who are not part of the ban.
Basically, if the point of the article was just "immigrants are good", then yes, you're right. But since the point of the article is "this immigration ban is bad!", it makes sense to restrict the discussion to people from countries actually listed on the ban.
To put it another way, what if the article mentioned Canadian immigrants, South African immigrants, German immigrants, British immigrants.... but no Iranians? No Syrians. No Iraqis. The conclusion of the article could then be portrayed as "see? muslim immigrants don't do anything useful anyway! ban them!" For every immigrant you put in the article that isn't affected by the ban, the case for the ban becomes stronger. That's why I think we should limit our conversation to the context implied by the article's conclusion.
> But there is context, and the context is the immigration ban put in place by the president.
Yes, your point only makes sense if the context of the immigration topic was limited to a travel ban in the countries that the Trump administration is currently focused on. But there is an even larger context of this administration's statements regarding immigration. If you are looking to apply larger contexts then keep in mind Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions' statements regarding immigration:
-- Steve Bannon:
"When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think... A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society." (He dislikes Asian executives in SV).
-- Steve Bannon:
"Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration? Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?" (He dislikes legal immigration from any country, not just muslim majority countries).
-- Jeff Sessions:
"The H-1B program is a “tremendous threat” to American professionals." (He wishes to curb visa programs for highly educated and professional immigrants).
At the end of the day, an immigrant is an immigrant. If Steve Bannon or yourself are accepting Canadian and South African immigrants' contributions, but wish to isolate those contributions from those of Sudanese, Muslim or Asian immigrants then there is a deeper bias problem that must be talked about. The current travel ban might be of 6 muslim majority countries, but you cannot ignore the very real statements by the Trump administration about their intention to stop legal immigration from as many sources as possible.
When you keep that context in mind, it makes less sense to add nuance to the situation and start isolating contributions of immigrants based on the countries they are from.
> I feel the inclusion of people like Camp and Musk hurts the point the story is trying to make.
I think the point of the article still stands. The current immigration ban is limited to a handful of countries, but xenophobic bigotry generally extends towards anyone not born in the US.
You think immigrants smart enough to co-found a billion dollar startup want to come to a country that hates the idea of immigration so much they want to build a wall they know won't work?
Considering the amount of people who are against the idea of building an expensive US/Mexian wall in the US, even among people on the right (for financial, efficacy, etc reasons), I doubt immigrants would expect life to be much different in the US. Besides maybe Mexican immigrants who may join communities affected by policies limiting illegal immigration at the southern border.
At least from a cultural perspective for the majority of legal immigrants I'm sure day-to-day life isn't much different than before the wall plan. There are still more than enough good people in the US. Especially in urban areas where most immigrants end up.
As someone who has applied for an American Visa, my main concern would be more about the available Visas suddenly changing after I've established a life there. The process is quite complicated and stressful, and the T1 visa was the most common one for my type of work. For T1 you had to get it renewed each year.
That was a concern even in a pre-Trump US. The immigration policies there definitely need some work. And have for a long time. I was happy to see Trump saying he was looking at Canada's immigration policy (where I'm from) as a good example.
It will always be stressful for legal immigrants when the immigration policies are currently in political flux.
I agree. My first instinct when reading the headline, sadly, is not to first find merit in the argument begin made but to question the true motivation for the argument being made.
The headline itself is somewhat disingenuous. It might as well read "51% of people who aggressively seek opportunity are highly successful." Now just swap out 'people' with 'immigrant' and use it to veil the actual motive. ... Disingenuous indeed.
A better way to make the argument would be to identify what these successful immigrants have in common and suggest that these attributes might be good filters for permitting immigration. But I suspect that the results would not validate the author's true motivations.
I appreciate Matt Yglesias's snarky tweet[0]: "Depriving Americans of valuable founder opportunities". The lump of unicorns fallacy is a nice update to the lump of labor fallacy [1].
Some people see studies like this and think, wow, think of how much we'd lose if we didnt let in immigrants. Our economy would be smaller, we'd have fewer jobs, etc.
Other people see studies like this and think, wow, only us locals should own, run, and be employed by these Billion-Dollar Startups. Bannon has explicitly noted this as a goal!
Some of us even see studies like this and think, wow, I wonder how many ways you can make headlines by framing arguments deceptively to support a pre-conceived world view!
People will always find ways of framing it into convenient political dichotomies. Only further blurring the much grayer reality of the situation. Which is why this article even made it on to the front page in the first place and why it should be flagged if it doesn't promote rational discourse.
This sense of entitlement due to physical proximity of birthplace is completely arbitrary, ridiculous, and counterproductive.
Discriminating on nationality (which most had zero choice in, and was decided for them at birth) is the same as discriminating based on skin color or biological sex. It's just standard anticompetitive in-group/out-group fear-driven nonsense.
It's not about birthplace. People mostly don't care where the baby was born, they care how it was raised. It's really about culture. Birthplace, nationality and skin color just happen to be good indicators for culture.
Most of those accused of being "anti-immigrant" aren't against immigrants, but are against illegal immigrants. There must be an orderly process to entry, primarily to prevent criminals & diseases, and also to keep the numbers assimilate-able.
The headline alone seems designed to invoke consternation where none existed, or to construe a common position as anti-immigrant which isn't.
Snarky misconstrued labelling aside: Yes. Targeted countries chosen (and approved by prior President!) due to previously-acknowledged problems with the vetting process. Timeframe for the "ban" was limited & short. "Muslim" was not specified in any way.
And the timeframe of the ban was based on the ability of those nations to bring their vetting process into compliance. 6/7 of those nations were failed states, meaning there is no assurance of government/legal accountability, and 1 (Iran) is the world's largest source of funding for terrorist organizations. No it was not about Muslims, as nations with 1.1B Muslims were not affected and only nations with 200M Muslims were.
Sounds like you didn't hear about people being asked about their religious affiliation, or POTUS himself noting on a radio show that Christians would get preferential treatment.
Religious persecution is a thing. If you're a normal adherent to the state-sponsored by-far-majority religion of a country, claiming refugee status via "violent religious persecution" is a stretch. If you're a rare adherent of a state-persecuted tiny-minority religion being violently exterminated with the tacit (if not declared) approval of the government, then you are exactly what refugee status via "violent religious persecution" is legally recognized for. Kind of hard to discern the difference without asking someone their religious affiliation.
ETA: Legitimate refugees, people actually being violently persecuted by the state for some aspect of their minority status, are unlikely to get proper vetting regardless of the quality of the vetting process, and 'tis quite humanitarian to take them in if they can be reasonably identified as such. Those not so persecuted are in the best position for their state to provide proper vetting, which if their state can't/won't provide proper vetting then we need to halt their immigration until reasonable vetting can be established. This has NOTHING to do with religion per se, especially when the allegedly discriminated-against group has over 5x as many members in other countries who can apply for properly-vetted visas without any difficulty.
I have yet to see anyone prove how even illegal immigrants are a detriment to our country. Also, xenophobia is xenophobia. Let's say we actually got rid of all illegal immigrants. You really think the debate about immigration would end there?
I have an honest question as I was not familiar National Foundation for American Policy before today.
Does anybody know how they are funded in general or who funded this study?
From some cursory research I see that Stuart Anderson, the person behind the NFAP worked on the Hill in the INS Office of Policy and Planning during the first term of George W. Bush. And his organization now regularly releases studies on public policy. This kind of screams lobbyist to me or at least retained by lobbyists.
I am not making any judgements on anything in the study or any statements about the current political climate I am just trying to read critically. I am curious to hear what other's might know about Stuart Anderson or the NFAP.
I would argue that the very act of immigration means you're getting a higher-than-average selection of a country's population. Immigrants, after all, are a self-selecting group. People who are willing to upend everything in their lives in order to better themselves and their families would seem, to me, to be quite well-suited for entrepreneurship.
The other reality is that traditional means of economic ascendancy in countries are often restricted to immigrants. Best example I can think of is the non-acknowledgement of certain foreign degrees in America.
I'm appalled by the need for statistics showing how "useful" immigrants are.
Combating xenophobia should be a moral issue, not a utilitarian one.
I understand some people will not be swayed by moral arguments, but society doesn't seem to try anymore. Utilitarian arguments have become the default.
That is literally the least we can do. Or would you rather we deny emergency medical treatment and let people just die? They do pay sales taxes, rent payments (they have to live somewhere) that go towards property taxes and the majority also pay into social security which they will never qualify for.
And by the way, many have kids that are Americans by birthright. So, I'm not sure what the benefit is to scapegoating the undocumented immigrant labor class. Maybe you can answer that.
I'm just offering you counter arguments to the idea that the government doesn't give out resources to people. I'm sorry you can't handle one refutation without turning to emotional arguments.
Another is Fannie Mae subsidizing housing. Another is public school. Another is protection under the law. Another is all public road/land use.
The fact of the matter is that we have finite resources. And simply being a person inside the US's borders give you rights to these resources, and if we do not make sure that the return we get from the presence of the people we're letting in at least makes up the cost of bringing them in, then we are doomed.
Speaking of emotional arguments, we're not all doomed.
Again, a lot of those public services are paid for through taxes immigrants do pay into, like property taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, registration fees, and even income taxes. And again, their children are Americans by birthright so public education is an investment in Americans.
We can argue resource allocation, entitlement programs but considering China has 1 billion more people with a land mass not much larger than ours, we're certainly not running out of space.
And if you gave them a pathway to amnesty it would be much easier to allocate entitlement programs and have common sense taxation.
I don't know what to say other than chill out. You have completely hijacked the original thread with your ill-argued cliche talking points.
The original statement was "I'm appalled by the need for statistics showing how "useful" immigrants are." Mine response is that it's a necessary framework. I in no way gave any conclusions about what I believe is the result of thinking in that framework, but you seem to harbor some sort of prejudice that makes it so you've assumed what I think.
You seem upset. You argued that "it's a necessary framework" and I provided sourced arguments that even under a utilitarian framework immigrants are useful.
Yet you describe my arguments as "ill-argued cliche talking points" and go on to state that I "harbor some sort of prejudice"
Perhaps a little introspection is in order on your part.
Lawful permanent residency is generally the ultimate goal of legal immigration. So if you let a million people in - tourists and (genuinely) temporary workers aside - you have to assume that you'll be dealing with a million permanent residents, and, eventually, citizens, somewhere down the line.
In fact, if that were not the case, it would make things even worse. Imagine if you take a million people, and after a few years, kick most of them out, and only a few get permanent residency. Who would want to build their life around that?
I am equally disappointed when people use moral arguments. The problem is: your morals != my morals. Utilitarianism gives you much more of an objective measure of something, which everyone can discuss on the same premises. This (hopefully) removes the need to resort to the pissing contest that is emotional appeals.
Utilitarianism doesn't actually give you an objective measure. It just shifts the subjectivity towards the definition of terms such as "harm" and "benefit". In case of immigration, this is very prominent: e.g. is cultural diversity beneficial or harmful?
That's all well and good. But do you think that telling people who are apprehensive about immigration (for any reason) that they are wrong/dumb/stupid is likely to change their opinion?
Or do you think that having a stranger tell them that they are a wrong/dumb/stupid person for feeling a way will further alienate them and reinforce their current opinion?
"Combating xenophobia should be a moral issue, not a utilitarian one."
Equating 'pro immigration' with 'morality' is the rather problematic basis of your statement.
Many countries (most, in fact) do just fine without large scale immigration policies.
Many nations with immigration are struggling to cope.
Moreover, there are serious flaws with US immigration policy such that one could be opposed to it on that basis.
Very, very few people 'hate immigrants'. But significant numbers of people think it's inappropriate to have people sneaking across the border, without documentation or status, and others just don't support large scale immigration, or perhaps have other criteria.
In my humble opinion not only are we doing a terrible job at educating our youth; but we are also condemning large numbers of them to a live of poverty.
Who is to say what our underprivileged youth could accomplish with the proper support and education?
Yes, this country was built by immigrants; but things have changed, we must accept that. Long gone are the days of prosperity for all. I would argue that today, our system is failing large portions of the population and addressing these failures should be our top concern.
The current environment of despair and hopelessness that suffocates many Americans makes it difficult to have a constructive dialog about immigration. Would you have this discussion in Flint, Michigan? Do homeless veterans have access to free Airbnb? Do aging Americans who on a daily basis must decide between food or medicine find this discussion fair? And you know I could go on and on...
I realize that modernizing our infrastructure or fixing our education system are very hard problems, addressing poverty and restoring faith in the system will be even harder. And yes, bringing prosperity and hope to all seems almost impossible; but these aren't reasons not to try.
My apologies for the rant; but I think many of the discussions around immigration fail to recognize that America is much more than the wealthy coasts. There is real suffering out there and we should be sympathetic to that and realize that despite our real or perceived cultural differences with the millions of disenfranchised Americans; this country is theirs too!
Your comment is premised on the notion that immigration vs. locals is a zero-sum game. It is not uniformly so.
Restrictionists claim: "If fewer Mexicans, Indians, and Chinese came to the US, then American citizens would be better off."
There frankly isn't compelling evidence that this will happen. The number of immigrants using up social services is minuscule and the amount of tax coming from 100s of thousands of H1Bs (and illegals/undocumenteds) is all going into social services used by veterans, American seniors, etc.
On top of this, because immigrants are usually the cream of their own societies and/or have taken big risks coming to the US, themselves and their children contribute via starting new businesses, etc.
This notion that immigration is part of a zero-sum game is likely flawed.
What does that have to do with the subject? I seem to have scored a critical miss on my reading check.
Do you mean that there is an immigration problem in Flint, Michigan?
This data answers a simple question: is immigration a net gain or loss for the economy? Data seems to indicate it is a net gain. Is it evenly distributed? It is indeed a real problem, with or without immigration.
A bunch of folks on this forum love to bash the H1B visa. But that visa is not so new - this is how America has always filled her need for labor. Please take a few moments to read about "indentured servants" - immigrants from Britain and other parts of Europe who came to the US in 1800s. They were required to serve 5 to 7 years working in fields. After that they were given land and free to work for themselves. The H1B visa has similarities. Guess what is the duration of stay for a H1B visa? 6 years. During this time they are pretty much tied to the company that sponsored their visa. After that they are given the green card, which lets them work for any company.
Wait, are you seriously, non-ironically using the similarity of the H-1B to indentured servitude as your basis for suggesting that people are wrong to bash the H-1B?
Yes. I am non-ironically suggesting exactly that. Indentured servitude emerged as a solution to a socio-economic need in a bygone era, like the H1B does now. Neither is a perfect system, and all stakeholders concerned - the company, the employee, competing employees, society - get some benefits, some pain. But overall, American society is the net beneficiary of the education, skills, and entrepreneurial drive that immigrants bring with them (circling back to the original topic). Want proof? Look at the America today that was built by the ex-indentured servants and their descendants.
People who criticize H1B are not generally criticizing skilled immigration in general. They're pointing out that the way H1B is set up, it's a very poor implementation of skilled immigration, especially when you compare it to other countries (like, say, Canada). The ongoing discussion about switching to a points-based system for workers, for example, necessarily implies that skilled immigration track remains.
> They're pointing out that the way H1B is set up, it's a very poor implementation of skilled immigration
H-1B is primarily a guest worker program, not a skilled immigration program. That is why despite allowing dual intent, the H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. There are skill-based immigrant visas in the US system, the H-1B just isn't one of them.
H-1B is de facto a skilled immigration program. The fact that it's dual intent, and that you can get a green card through employer sponsorship, seems to indicate that it is at least partially by design.
Those other programs that you reference are for "extraordinary talent" and such, and the bar there is much higher than for ordinary skilled immigration.
> After that they are given the green card, which lets them work for any company.
I upvoted as this is a comparison a hadn't seen before. However, what I quoted is innacurate.
They can HOPE to get a GC in 10 years (for people from India), provided their current company agrees to sponsor it and goes through all the necessary hoops (the biggest of which is the PERM application). And it's not guaranteed, no matter how much work you've put in.
They are tied to the company, but they can switch companies if they find another sponsor. It requires a lot of effort and is far more difficult than just changing jobs, but it's possible.
All pretension aside, you cannot presume to publicly forment xenophobic sentiments against brown people, implying that they are all kinds of evil, while at the same time presuming to make yourself attractive to highly-skilled tech workers from all around the world.
If you embolden racists, they will start harassing and attacking all kinds of non-white people and that includes, legal recidents from all around the world because frankly racists don't care.
Good study and all, but I think it misses the point of the current sentiment in the US. Regardless, yes, immigrants are more likely to found businesses than natives. Whether or not their businesses become billion dollar startups because of their efforts or venture capitalists is another question, but yes, they help the economy (As much as those who are a drag on it? Who knows).
I wrote a lengthy post about the effects of immigration recently, so here's I'll just focus on the issue of human capital.
Immigration creates a situation for rich countries to be able to draw from a much larger pool of talent than they otherwise would since they take talent from other countries. This is a great situation for the host country, and devastates developing economies. It's basically colonialism all over, except instead of stealing physical commodities you're stealing human capital.
And of course, there are negative effects in the host country, namely that there's more competition for jobs, which can drive wages down, eliminate some jobs for natives altogether, etc... The hope is that this effect is offset by the job creation effect, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The US rust belt certainly doesn't seem to be gaining much, but other areas are.
Anyhow, the whole point of this is that there's well known pros and cons to immigration. It's not all pro, nor all con. You need to ask exactly what you want the end-game to be - not just for the US, but for the world. Human capital flight is the single biggest obstacle to development for the third world. At the same time, it allows the west to gather all the brightest minds in the world to maintain its hegemony. What's more important - maintaining a dominant place in the world, or more equal development that doesn't leave anyone behind? (I mean, I know the answer - we're willing to destroy countries who go against western hegemony and simply absorb the migrants)
You do understand that the implication of your argument is that those people who come to US should be, effectively, forced to stay in their countries of birth, and work for their benefit?
You talk in terms of benefits and drawbacks for societies collectively. What about benefits and drawbacks for individuals? A person who is coming from, say, India to US is doing so because they want to, not because they're forced to. If you deprive them of that ability and that choice, you're harming them - specifically, you're restricting their individual natural right to freedom of association and to pursuit of happiness.
If your claim is that it is unfair, guess what? Forcing people to stay somewhere just because they were born there is also unfair by the same metric. If you're willing to restrict people's choice and force them to associate with a particular society to mitigate that unfairness, why are you only applying those restrictions to immigrants - why not to Americans? Let's send some of the best and brightest Americans to work in India. Oh, they don't want to? Too bad, we have the harmful effects of colonialism to mitigate, and no-one is entitled to live in a developed country until that's done.
> A person who is coming from, say, India to US is doing so because they want to, not because they're forced to. If you deprive them of that ability and that choice, you're harming them - specifically, you're restricting their individual natural right to freedom of association and to pursuit of happiness.
Here's a question for you: Can the US absorb all 1.3 billion people in India? Then how about another billion from Africa? May as well throw in another half billion from other poor countries around the world.
Yes, it's all nice and good to say an individual should be able to do what they want. But at some point you're faced with limited space, resources, and social and economic issues.
No, I don't think US can absorb that many people, and I don't object to the notion that US can institute some sort of a screen to pare those numbers down - ideally, merit-based (which would be both fair, and beneficial to US).
But that is a completely different argument from "we won't let you in, because we want you to work for the benefit of the country from which you come" that you've been making. In a system with a screen, it's still the individual's choice to decide to immigrate or not, and to try to get past that screening - or to shop around for various places and pick one which is more likely to be acceptable given the skills they have, or that are feasible for them to acquire (e.g. if you can and are willing to learn French, Quebec might be an interesting option).
Quote from it: Weakness in human capital and particularly skill deficiency is a drag on investment and growth
in Africa. Progress in overcoming shortages of skilled and trained manpower seems to be
disappointingly slow, despite substantial resources devoted by both governments and donors to
this effort during the last three decades (OED, 1994). This deficiency is sustained at the same
time that Africa is losing a very significant proportion of its skilled and professional manpower
to other markets and increasingly depending on expatriates for many vital functions.
OIC countries face multiple challenges in achieving their development goals and reducing the gap with developed countries; one of the main challenges is the plight of human capital flight or what is known as brain drain.
In recent times, brain drain has been exacerbated by globalization which has increased people mobility
across country boundaries (see Iredale, 2001; Shenkar, 2001; Stalker, 2000). Furthermore, the
internationalization of professions and professional labor market has led to an increase in the level of
mobility and thus brain drain as documented in the works of Carr et al. (2005) and Iredale (2001)
Like I said, this is a well known, well understood phenomenon. Hell, a generation ago the Canadian government was trying to stop brain drain to the US since it was a drag on growth.
I was trying to gather more information, not debate.
But now that you mention it, none of those citations support your hyperbole that human capital flight "is the single biggest obstacle". They all refer to it as "a" problem, or "one of the main."
Sorry, I'm just jaded (seems any statement on the internet is met with "source please").
Anyhow, it's not politically popular to state such in today's climate, but it is the largest impediment to development. We could also add war, famine, and a lack of institutions, but those are arguably caused by a lack of development and lower human capital. It's not exactly a politically correct thing to say but, if all the educated people move away from a country, who's left to rule it?
Anyhow, lots of sources list corruption, inequality, human capital flight - my opinion is based on both my education (in economics) as well as my experience.
Indian immigrants seem to lead the pack, but it is still the tip of the iceberg. If the current shackles are taken off from Indian immigrants, I bet there will be way more entrepreneurs. I would love the calculate the impact on US GDP based on immigrants who are not allowed to start a company
The linked study has one "key finding" that "The billion dollar startup companies with an immigrant founder excel at job creation" but I don't see anything in the study to indicate how the job creation at these immigrant founded companies compares to "non-immigrant" founded companies. The provided data appears to just be a table listing how many jobs were created at these companies with no mechanism for relative comparison.
Does anyone know of existing evidence to support this claim?
What percentage of all startups are founded by immigrants? If it's on the order of 51%, you can't rule out the possibility that this number just reflects the base occurrence rate of immigrants in the "population" of all startup founders.
Good studies must discuss denominators as well as numerators. The 51% is misleading. What would be important to know is how many immigrants were founders with a denominator of how many founders were there.
Moreover, there is some (wrong) assumption that an American could not have been a founder in place of the immigrant founders of a similar company.
H1-B visas were created for the intent of not displacing Americans but rather filing jobs for which Americans do not have the skill.
Americans have skills for almost all of the jobs that are filled with H1-B visas. There should be a independent committee that verifies that there are absolutely no Americans available for each individual job.
The 51% is misleading. What would be important to know is
how many immigrants were founders with a denominator of
how many founders were there.
The statistic here is: "51% of unicorns had at least one founder who was born in another country". Palantir, for example, is included as an "immigrant-founded company", which it is, but Peter Thiel (Germany) is one of five co-founders. So with a subset of one company, only 20% of founders were immigrants.
Could be true but looks just as bad. If 51% of all startups are founded by a tiny minority of immigrants relative to the general population, then why the hell do we want to keep these people out?
I'd be careful with this information. It did not serve German Jews in the 30's very well to emphasize the fact that they had become important elements of media, finance and science. Instead of showing appreciation, there was a backlash by Germans who felt they were being excluded from these things. It's even easier to see how that same misguided victim sentiment could be applied to immigrants "taking" the opportunities to create and own tech from American.
your point is relevant but I think you're missing the conclusion that first comes to my mind. when dealing with revenge-driven mobs of ignorant bigots, there is NOT rational argument that can persuade them. this is implied by your statement and I agree.
what is to be done though?
the only historically proven thing a person in a potential victim class (such as my own Jewish grandparents) could do in those circumstances is flee for their lives. I hope that things never get to that point in America. We've already a few steps in the wrong direction though.
I'd personally start by not calling them racist bigots at every opportunity. They may have "started" this whole conflict, but they hold the cards. Until Fentanyl takes care of the problem for you, we should probably deprioritize fucking with them.
The immigrants that started all of these companies including all of the immigrants that have started all of their businesses in the last 30 years that employ Americans...first let me say Thank You.
Second.....someone should create a list off all of these companies, their geographic location, number of Americans (not family members) but number of Americans they employ, income, contributions to the communities etc.
Once they have this list maybe each business can submit a small 2 minute video entitled I am an Immigrant and I employ ____ Americans.
Then create a Website that has all of these videos....might want to censor some info to keep telemarketers from contacting these business owners.
To draw attention to these businesses I'd gather up some of the funniest and well known comedians on a Ted Talk. After the comedians break the ice.....have some of the most successful business owners get up on stage an tell the World why they came to America! Why they fled their homeland.....etc......Might even include anything like their sons and daughters serve in the Military, Law Enforcement or local Hospitals. If they are doctors have some of their patients tell the world about how this doctor
I wonder what would have happened if they stayed in their own countries? Would they have built billion dollar or even million dollar businesses there as well? Would that have been of more benefit to said countries than allowing one of their best and brightest to "jump ship"?
Wouldn't it be more useful to see the percentage of total startups- and even better, the percentage of GDP created by these startups? That would seem to include key measures such as job creation, etc. Simply measuring the percentage of giant companies doesn't seem as useful.
No one questions immigration.
Conservatives complain about 'illegal immigration' believing that this would be the source of most criminal activity, ignoring that the 'war on drugs' is the real problem.
If you go back far enough, immigrants or children of immigrants founded likely 99% of US companies. Is this really surprising given the US is a almost entirely a nation of immigrants?
I was unable to get past the paywall (with the web option) but I'm wondering if race and inherent privilege that comes with it is considered in the study.
For the people saying why an article from 2016 is on the front page, here is why this issue is still relevant:
"Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." - Congressman Steve King, Republican Iowa, 12th March, https://twitter.com/SteveKingIA/status/840980755236999169
Who exactly is not an immigrant in the states? If one traverse lineage of any of these so called "non-immigrants", within 3-4 generations one will see they were an immigrant too.
It's fascinating to see how the people pushing this argument prioritize economic nationalism exactly to the extent it promotes open borders, and exactly no further.
This dovetails nicely into another discussion [1] I got tangled into because I don't view the world as the average HN user seems to. It's about the claim that the richest n% take-up the bulk of opportunities (or some versions thereof).
The same HN readership who believes this narrative also gets on board with the idea that we need immigrants in order to innovate.
If the latter is true it very much supports my claim that opportunity in the US has never been greater and that the rich are not keeping anyone from reaching for the stars.
It also supports the idea that rising inequality has nothing to do with the rich doing things the rich do but rather a complex set of factors, ranging from education to lack of drive and motivation. Some choose to blame others (the rich) for their ailments instead of going after root causes. The latter is far more difficult and time consuming.
Immigrants arrive at our shores devoid of these pre-conditions. Why, then, is it that they excel and thrive? Simple: Drive, motivation, dedication, commitment, grit and lack of victim mentality.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who understands subjects such as competitive sports. Often the difference between athletes of similar physical capabilities is in their minds far more than anything else. Same characteristics I listed above: Drive, motivation, dedication, commitment and grit.
A few months ago I could not dead-lift 325 lbs when just a few days earlier I had done 320. I could not get the damn thing off the ground. My trainer looked at me and said: "Dude, it's all in your head. Take five minutes and think about that". Minutes later I completed my set as if nothing had happened.
If it is true that we need to "import" innovators and entrepreneurs this is a sign that our approach to education (and other areas) need a serious pivot. With over 300 million people this country should not need to import entrepreneurs or well qualified candidates. Tech companies would not be crying for qualified people if our educational system was doing a good job.
How many high school kids graduate with a solid understanding of how business, money and finances work? Virtually none.
Our kids graduate with, for the most part, a binary view of the world ahead: Enlist in the military or be a good employee for life. The vast majority of them have trouble calculating a tip at a restaurant and couldn't tell you what simple interest is if their life depended on it. They know more about Kim Kardashian than they do about business, finance, investment and career building.
How can this be good for the US?
And we blame the rich for a gap in equality? How about we stop living in fantasy and address real problems?
Interestingly enough, another thread on HN today [2] echoes some of the issues with education as it pertains to opportunity. A quote I like from the current top comment:
"At the same time, we have a public school system that after 18 years with a child...has not actually prepared them to get a job. That's borderline criminal IMHO."
Clearly some understand the realities of where we are failing while others prefer the simpler path of blaming others for all problems.
If you want world prosperity this isn't a simple issue at all.
Why should the richest country in the world get richer by taking the best and brightest who could have helped elevate their own countries? Isn't this just contributing to a world stratification of wealth?
People are not resources. They aren't being "taken", unless you're talking about literal kidnapping and forced labor here (which, I believe, last time happened during Operation Paperclip, if we're talking about US). They come to US, because they believe it is a better place for them. If they wanted to "help elevate their own countries", they'd stay there. Coercing them to do so (including indirectly by depriving them of the opportunity to make that choice in the first place) is unethical.
Speaking as an immigrant myself, I don't believe my country wants me. It might want my skills and abilities, sure, but it seems to strongly dislike my liberal political views, and they can't have one without the other. So they get neither.
Yeah, to me it just seems like another way an unbalanced economy slides into alignment with the power rule of 20% of the world's population containing 80% of the wealth. It's not healthy to base your immigration policies on how financially well-off and easily gentrified each applicant is. Not healthy for anyone but the financial elite.
And "immigrants" killed over 99% of the native North American population with small pox and the like.
We are all immigrants really. I agree with the spirit of what the article is about, but there is a serious Us vs. Them going on here that will not end well.
Now that we know immigrants are better businesspeople than those US-born, the next logical step is to find out which immigrants are the best, and preferentially allow those...
Place a moratorium on legal immigration. The economy is a means rather than an end, and, three-hundred-million people is more than enough for North America.
The difference between someone being legal or illegal immigrant is a passage of a law declaring them such, nothing more. So it doesn't really imply anything else about them (in particular, their capacity to integrate or innovate).
To remind, until 1950s or so, it was basically impossible to legally get US citizenship if you weren't white.
Well sure, because that travel ban was ridiculous. I'm just saying most of the time "Trump" and "immigration" are mentioned together it's regarding the southern border, not ME immigration.
Unauthorized immigrants face the most immediate danger due to the law but the Trump administration is hostile to legal immigration as well. They're seeking to decrease legal immigration and considerimg an executive order to deport legal immigrants for using welfare.
They are trying to ban by executive order legal immigration from arbitrary Muslim majority countries and all refugees (possibly temporarily but I expect them to try to extend it).
Steve Bannon sees the number of asian CEOs (which he greatly overestimates) as a bad thing.
> They are trying to ban by executive order legal immigration from arbitrary Muslim majority countries and all refugees (possibly temporarily but I expect them to try to extend it).
Arbitrary? This is blatantly false and disingenuous.
There are some 50 majority muslim countries and these were not pulled out of a hat.
>Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups
Curious if the overwhelmingly-Jewish editorialists at WSJ would likewise rationalize unlimited non-Jewish immigration to Israel based on spurious "greater good" economic arguments.
Maybe there's something more important than the economy at stake when deciding the fate of a national inheritance?
It's so important to the discussion quality on Hacker News that users comment civilly and substantively, which is why we bring ourselves to repeat it so often. They're related, too: unsubstantiveness leaves much room for comments to be read as uncivil, even if they weren't intended that way.
I would expect better of HN. The casino comment is pathetic. Native Americans have founded many businesses despite the many problems with dealing with banks from a reservation perspective.
Alright settle down there. Racism exists enough that you don't have to go looking for it. It's a fact that in many places, Native Americans are the only people allowed to own casinos, so it's an entirely accurate statement. Likewise, there's no law saying Native Americans can't own other businesses, so the only businesses that are reliably exclusive to Native Americans are casinos.
I don't think that comment implied anywhere that the only businesses Native Americans own are casinos. Merely that only Native Americans are allowed to own casinos in many locations.
Looking for racism where it doesn't exist doesn't help anyone, especially those who are actually victims.
"Alright settle down there. Racism exists enough that you don't have to go looking for it. It's a fact that in many places, Native Americans are the only people allowed to own casinos, so it's an entirely accurate statement. Likewise, there's no law saying Native Americans can't own other businesses, so the only businesses that are reliably exclusive to Native Americans are casinos."
Las Vegas and Atlantic City might disagree. I think it implied what it said. Its a cheap shot.
[edit]that "Alright settle down there." is probably one of the most rude ways to start any comment
Point to any business type that has state of federal laws saying "Native Americans are not allowed to own this kind of business" or even "only white people are allowed to own this business". Can you name 10? How about 5? How about just one?
On the other hand, I can name one where the vast majority of business are only allowed by law to be owned by native americans. Yes, LV and AC have a lot of casinos, but I can count hundreds of them in my state alone, and they're exclusively Native American owned because that's what the law allows.
Point is, "casinos are the only business that can be exclusive to Native Americans" is a true statement, and calling that racist is not only offensive, but is a statement made in really (really really) poor taste. Because racism exists, and that comment isn't it.
It's not racism. Under the law, many locations restrict casino ownership to Native Americans. Fact. It's not racist to point it out. So yeah, settle it down. Let's reserve the cry for racism to places where it actually exists. Falsely calling someone a racist is far more rude than anything I've ever said.
Look, I'm not going to argue with some theoretical construct
Point is, "casinos are the only business that can be exclusive to Native Americans" is a true statement"
Is false, ask the current President or visit Las Vegas or Atlantic City. It was a cheap shot that is acceptable because one group can be put in other. Also, Native Americans cannot just open casinos. A tribe can if the state allows it.
I guess. This is a semantic argument but I'm actually a little curious. Does this mean that Europeans who settled in lands not specifically claimed by native Americans or European powers aren't immigrants? Also what's your opinion on whether you call someone am immigrant if they took the land by force and just declared it their's?
The research involved conducting interviews and gathering information on the 87 U.S. startup companies valued at over $1 billion (as of January 1, 2016) that have yet to become publicly traded on the U.S. stock market and are tracked by The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones VentureSource.
The report runs on 30 or so pages and includes descriptions of companies with immigrants in key positions and, how they came to the US, and mini-bios of many of them.
This is true but it needs perspective, and I am by no means anti-immigrant. I'm actually a pretty open border person, and am 100% against Trump's proposals (though perhaps there are some instances of H1B being abuse [see Disney].) However, this study should have a big caveat, for starters there are significantly more tax benefits for starting a business if you are an immigrant. Secondly, immigrants don't have entrenched interests or preoccupations that would otherwise give them a very high opportunity cost to starting their own business. So the start-up industry is a bit skewed in favor of immigrants naturally.
I would love for us to equal the playing field, not by blocking immigrants, but by leveling the field on tax benefits and subsidies (ideally getting rid of subsidies and flattening the structure) and have reforms that lower the opportunity cost of all Americans that allows them to start their own business. There are way more reforms needed too outside of that, which everyone already has to deal with in regards to starting a business.
So, imo, the complaint or point here shouldn't be that immigrants are better, or Americans are worse or there's only so much of the pie etc...it should be that we need reforms that makes it easier for everyone to start a business.
I should clarify, there's no -direct- tax benefits. It's largely to do with capital (immigrants generally pool capital better) which they can write off for years. Most Americans don't put up as much personal capital. There are also grant programs and guaranteed loans which immigrants can utilize which regular citizens generally don't have access to. Though on a whole the raising of capital is similar.
> for starters there are significantly more tax benefits for starting a business if you are an immigrant.
What, specifically, are you referring to here?
I think a pretty easy explanation for the difference is that, almost by definition, if you are an immigrant you are someone who is uncomfortable with the status quo, and you are going to take a considerable risk to change it. It's not surprising those people would also be more inclined to be an entrepreneur than your average person.
> for starters there are significantly more tax benefits for starting a business if you are an immigrant.
For example? Legal US immigrants pay the same taxes as everyone else.
> Secondly, immigrants don't have entrenched interests or preoccupations that would otherwise give them a very high opportunity cost to starting their own business.
One of the most popular routes to US [legal] immigration is via family, which naturally leads to preoccupation. Your notion of who immigrants are is very skewed.
By attracting and immigrating the best and brightest, the US actually does injustice towards its citizens.
And then its also an unfair act against other countries. The other countries that send immigrants technically stay poorer and weaker - because their talent is gone!!!
Make a choice - Do we want to keep pouring in the best and brightest from the globe - or Do we want to keep our citizens employed? - Can't have both in longer term. Keep it unsolved and something extreme might happen to resolve it.
Apart from the idea of sorting people into useful and useless being inhumane, it also seems to be counterproductive. It looks like every kind of screening of immigrants will deter the more desirable ones, as far as that determination is possible on their arrival at all.