He's visiting a conference not immigrating.

Crazy thought: perhaps the visa folks are thinking that he already missed the conference and they have stacks of other work to do.

Plus, people aren't having kids like they used to. So you need to replace population somehow. See also: Japan.

I fear in Australia we are creeping towards a regressed, more limited form of democracy. Foreign workers who come here not as free agents, but within the constraints of a specific work contract are an ever increasing fraction of the population - a fraction that skews heavily towards non-professional working class - and have no access to political representation.

This leaves them vulnerable to exploitation, and that exploitation is used as an economic lever against the entire population.

I believe bringing people to work in our economies without a clear fast path to full citizenship is eroding citizenship for all.

Agreed. But ~90% of all permanent residencies approved have nothing to do with education or employment. It's just family reunification.

Also a good thing in and of itself.

I fundamentally disagree with you, but I’m interested in hearing your viewpoint. Would you be willing to expand on what you mean by this statement? Are you referring primarily to jobs and government assistance?

> I fundamentally disagree with you, but I’m interested in hearing your viewpoint.

Is there any country with unfettered immigration?

Scroll back a few centuries, and what we’d consider to be “open borders” was much more the norm.

Then again, a few centuries before that and the vast majority of residents in Europe couldn’t legally leave the land that they were on, forget the concept of immigration. Leaving town could make you an outlaw, let alone your country.

I personally feel that defining "citizen" in any other way than "people who are currently living here" is a form of apartheid and antithetical to our constitution.

Given my downvotes it seems others here are not so interested. Nevertheless, I will give you an example.

Housing. I am a bay area native and through my lifetime I have seen certain immigrants from Europe and South Asia, push up the cost of housing. Those tech H1B workers only serve to exacerbate this issue.

I can no longer afford to buy a property unless I work in tech or win the lottery. Others like myself have grown resentful, rightfully so, of these transplants and immigrants.

Edit: housing prices are somewhat a function of demand, and I don't think you've adequately shown that any excess demand is driven by (recent) immigrants. You're being downvoted because this rhetoric is blatantly jingoistic. There ARE nuanced conversations to have about immigration policy; "immigrants make Bay Area housing expensive" is not one of them.