You can't ignore the social cost of integrating and Americanizing new immigrants. You also can't brush aside the potential load in the social welfare system. The economic cost of immigration tends to be low, but that's partly because we mostly deny welfare services to poor immigrants. Having a class of people living here without a safety net, or being limited in your ability to expand the safety net for everyone is a bad thing, not a good one.

The system is already setup to favor younger and healthy individuals with higher education. To get GC you have to pass medical exams including AIDS test and so on.

OK then, what would your opinion be of tripling the number if H1B, and drastically reducing all other immigration programs at the same time, so the total amount of immigrants stays the same?

I'm not a fan of central planning. The market is usually more efficient at deciding what jobs are useful.

We are already centrally planning immigration.

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

It appears we are using different definitions of "central planning". To the degree that the bureaucracy dictates who is allowed to immigrate, when, and for what purpose, the bureaucracy is planning the economy.

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

Immigration Program X that already exists allows 100k with qualities Y.

Immigration Program A that already exists allows 200k with qualities B.

This is the state of the current world. We have an existing bureaucracy that dictates who is allowed to immigrate, and when.

Make change C so that Program X allows 250k, and Program A only allows 50k.

Change C is not changing the amount of government bureaucracy. We already had the bureaucracy! We were doing the centrally planning already, and making change C does not make it any more centrally planned, because it was already centrally planned.

Imagine a government run factory already exists. Now imagine making a change to the government fun factory. This change is not ADDITIONAL central planning, because it was already a government run factory.

Ok. So wouldn't it be better then to simply put a cap on the number of immigrants per month and not screen them for characteristics beyond criminality?

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

Sure, but let's say there are 10X the number of applicants compared to the cap.

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.

Randomness is a reasonable policy until proven inferior. It's efficient and ensures no systematic failure. I'd prefer an experiment comparing any selection strategy against randomness before using that strategy. Even then, it'd be helpful for future experiments to continue to use some random selection indefinitely.

I've worked with many large "successful" companies over the years. At every one of them I've found bureaucratic procedures which are worse than random. They're the kind of convoluted process which started out as a good idea and then morphed over the years into a tradition for its own sake -- "that's the way it's done!" -- and gathered false post-hoc rationalizations.

It would be interesting to have baseline federal standards and then let states handle some immigration decisions, actually. In Canada the provinces can do that (so e.g. Quebec can fast-track you for citizenship for speaking French). In Switzerland it is basically all at the Cantonal level.

That'd require some better surveillance to ensure an immigrant permitted in one state does not work in another. I'm not sure that's constitutional, though it is quite practical.

You could just make it for employment visa based on the employer. (or edu visas based on schools there). In most of those cases you already trust the employer to some extent, and can rely on audit and heavy penalties to deal with fraud after the fact. You would be doing the important anti-criminal/anti-terrorist screening to a consistent national standard.

It wouldn't be the full immigration system -- it would just be nice for states to have some role. There already are incentives to recruit doctors to work in underserved areas.