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.

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#Erection_of_the_in...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just curious, can you provide some examples? (outside of healthcare, which is the well-known hell). Thanks!

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.

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?

Most of the reason why Americans get so frothy about tax is because they've made it ridiculously complex to comply with.

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).

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy

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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair

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.

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.

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.

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?

What specifically do you mean by that. As far as I know many Indians get Resident visa because of their skills.

My bad, since you are talking about US, yes I agree with you.

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.

Walls going up are days of sadness. Walls broken down are days of joy.

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).

Depends. Whenever people put up the walls for their house (which serve the same purpose) those are days of joy too.

Same for nations that fought hard to establish their borders and sovereignty.

And fewer national borders is not some "wave of the future" -- it's what was tried and rejected when nation states became a thing.

We had large, all-encompassing empires before and it wasn't that nice...

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.

Well, consider a country as a people's collective house.

In this, a border, if not analogous to the walls, is at least analogous to the fence around the house and/or the lock on the door.

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).

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.

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.

It's akin to a chemistry process called osmosis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis

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.

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.

Because HNers will fill in the blanks for you?

Claims to the contrary the map is not the territory and a country is not a house.

The correction is saying this should be:

Despite claims to the contrary the map is not the territory and a country is not a house.

This does not seem to change the meaning, but rather makes the sentence read sensibly.

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.

/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?

Because the people will follow the work.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Give it some time.

Not if you're a cell.

For animal cells you would use the cell membrane as an equivalent.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

Sure, that's fine as long as you aren't illegally immigrating into another.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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 it makes less sense for an individual worker to move back (unless there are family or other concerns).

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.

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.

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).

How many people do you know that pay $500k in taxes over 4 years?

You may as well make the cost $500 million, you'll get the same number of applicants.

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.

3) Actually there is kind of an entrepreneur system in place anyways. And they allow upto 10k per year https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/gree...

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.

that effect is positive for businesses and consumers.

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.

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.

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.

Honestly I think the statements I made are extremely simple.

Is it false that low-wage earners are also consumers?

Is it false that low-wage earners have less money to spend as consumers?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Is an artist useful?

Are they a respected contributor in their field?

Can they afford to support themselves here?

The view of the starving artist doing their best work for free is compatible with our modern, post Industrial Revolution views but largely inaccurate.

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 ;)

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).

What's the upside here?

That is, illegals commit more crimes and are less economically productive vs. the existing population.

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.

The BJS doesn't seem to have newer stats, but there is this: https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=836 6.6% of USA population will go to jail during their entire lifetime (via following this FAQ: https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=qa&iid=404 )

So illegals, 7.5% (thus far; some are younger and may commit crimes later in their life) vs. 6.6% for USA population as a whole.

The "immigrant households more likely to use welfare/EBT" can be seen here: http://cis.org/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-Native-Households

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.

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.

That's exactly the opposite of factual. This has been debunked extensively. Here's a review piece with some links: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/trump-illegal-immigran...

Source ?

Also, as compared to what ? Legal immigrants or existing population ?

regardless, the problem is if you are perceived as not wanting immigrants, the most skilled ones will go elsewhere, because they can.

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

------------ ------------

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

-----------

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-...

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."

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island#Primary_inspectio... )

What I want is this minus the racism and disqualification for health problems except maybe for contagious diseases.

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.

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 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.

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.

Just read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_immigration

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

Are you sure nothing has changed about the economy since 1914?

Tell me a relevant change that affects my case.

Take a look at https://openborders.info for lots of reasons.

Universities do it.

Ask Australia? But at a very basic level:

* Criminal background -> sorry

* No high school-equivalent education -> sorry

* Crippling, expensive disease -> sorry

Those are just three basic things that let you know straight away that this person has little chance to do anything but consume resources.

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.

As a fellow dropout, I think you just took this chance to show-off (like many dropouts/unconventionally successful do).

You think a person from Mexico is more useless than a person from Canada?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

Then increase the wage paid. You're literally arguing for a slave-wage underclass.

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?

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.

Yes. Actually here's one article about farmers offering $25/hr picking strawberries:

http://komonews.com/news/local/local-berry-farmers-lament-la...

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.

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.

I know tons of people who'd take that job.

Raise it to 100$ an hour and I'll volunteer to do it myself.

If prices go up, then prices go up. Supply and demand.

Which people are most affected by the change in price?

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.

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.

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.

Ok.

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.

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.

Who do you think is better for controlling the US inflation rate?

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.

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...

Selective schools don't need to, less selective schools don't want to.

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.

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.

On top of that, people are born in a random country leading to very unfair [dis]advantages.

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.

Don't employees do that as well - "we want people with these qualifications"... is that terribly wrong?

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.

Pro-immigration groups sometimes will advocate screening, usually they don't.

I think there is a very strong correlation to 'documented' vs 'undocumented'.

"Science vs" had a great episode on immigration that talks specifically about the difference in these groups: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/immigration/

Let the downvotes begin.

It's why Asian-Americans went from being part of the Republican base to overwhelmingly voting Democratic.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Not the best source but it's what I could find on Google:

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/columnists/2007/02/05/the_et...

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.

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.

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".

This is exactly what the study shows is not just possible but easy in screening by nationality. Think about US immigration statistics by country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...): you'll see lots of Central and South American countries. Now take a look at what the study finds (http://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Immigrants-and-Bi...):

"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.

> Immigrants are found to have higher business ownership and formation rates than non-immigrants.

https://www.sba.gov/content/immigrant-entrepreneurs-and-smal...

And let's go ahead and ignore just how unfair Manifest Destiny was to begin with and even more recently Mexican Repatriation.

When you say it includes all immigrants, do you mean it includes the groups that would be affected when isolated from the rest, or overall?

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-...

http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/larg...

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.

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...

And as to lying with statistics, I don't think that the left is alone in that.

That so?

> I could throw just as many statistics against you and your drug use if I wanted, but I'm not an authoritarian.

Go right ahead.

> And as to lying with statistics, I don't think that the left is alone in that.

And yet, that still doesn't make it right.

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 ;)

'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).

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3004501/h1b/proof-that-h-1b...

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/top-10-companies-request-visa...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h...

Legislation is needed to reform the system. I would be in favor of expanding the program if the widely abused loopholes were taken out.

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.

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.

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.

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?

In other words one of the basic premises of anti-immigrant policies is nonsense.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/european-immi...

> 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]

Canada's doing just that.

[1] http://www.canadaimmigrationvisa.com/visatype.html

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 :(

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.

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 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.

I suppose this also relies on national productivity being the product of, not the sum of individuals​ productivity.

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.

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.

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.

Changing the numbers around on our existing centrally planned system doesn't make it any more or less centrally planned.

If your proposal is not affecting who arrives and for what job, then what's the point of it?

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.

We could cut bureaucracy and improve economic efficiency at the same time! I'm a small-government guy.

How do you choose which ones?

If you put on any cap, you are picking and choosing.

Personally, I'd sort by salary/expected taxes.

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 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.

I'm not talking about a billion dollar startup, but trillion-dollar technology. Think Manhattan project, not WhatsApp.

So established scientists from Western countries?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2011/11/11/a-vet...

Edit: I apologize for the snark. As long as Hungary, Russia, Poland are counted as the West (and they generally are), then I agree with you.

"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."

By that logic you can easily argue it's imperative to weed out those with productivity close to 0 (and below 1).

Great people inspire greatness, awfully people can bring their whole environment down. That's why ghettos are such a bad idea.

From your arguments alone I wouldn't be able to tell which side you are arguing for.

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.

I.e. the US get 80% of the most resourceful immigrants while ex Europe get 80% of the least resourceful.

Will see if I can dig up the report.

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.

that just leaves room for a real american to a founder! /sarcasm.

(Edit: I am an immigrant. And of course immigrant lives matter. All human lives matter)

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.

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.

As someone who self-selected the name 'bayesian_horse', can you please cite the evidence you're basing this on?

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.