https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

EDIT: just checked and it’s obsolete. Not sure if there is a post-Brexit equivalent. https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-investor

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/17/key-facts...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/08/06/h-1b-...

The second link you posted lists a large number of anti-immigrant ideas that Trump had. That was the general tenor of his administration as I personally experienced it: rhetoric about unauthorized immigration, actions against legal immigrants.

(I used to be on an H1B and got my green card last year.)

On the other side of the aisle, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Trump’s offering a “dead-on-arrival plan that is not a remotely serious proposal.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed it as a “despicable abdication of moral authority” that would have kept Blumenthal’s own immigrant father from entering the United States.

…

Democrats on Thursday also took issue with the White House’s characterization of the kind of immigrants who bring “merit” to the United States.

“It is really a condescending word,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference on Thursday morning. “Are they saying family is without merit?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act#Full_details_of_the_...

The goal of the RAISE Act was to substantially reduce family-based immigration while not increasing employment-based immigration to compensate for that.

I didn't realize Trump had his own plan (that was never going to be law anyway). But based on what I actually personally experienced Trump actually do, my Bayesian prior for it being helpful to immigrants is extraordinarily low.

Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).

Doesn't seem their system works very well in practice. At least the U.S. employer based green card system mostly guarantees that employment green card recipients already have jobs.

I am not sure if this logic is accurate. There can be housing shortage if people move to certain part of the country internally too. USA has 'housing crisis' but houses are plenty and cheap in peoria IL.

- Racial bias

- Sexual bias

- Age bias

- Candidate's English / French ability.

- Candidate's actual experience isn't relevant enough.

- Candidate's personality.

- Candidate's appearance.

- Candidate's communication skills.

Why would I give you the real reason when I can provide a generic reason and stay out of trouble?

Some people I know went to college to get local credentials. Luckily community college is affordable and respected. Others changed fields. Others started their first business. A few left the country.

Canadian here. Nope.

But FAANG stuff? No, these are the companies that just had layoffs.

And we can see exactly how this has played out in Canada. Too many upper class professionals gouging each other's eyes out for $1M starter homes, and not enough people with real physical skills, like building them.

Well, tradesmen build houses, schools, and hospitals people and a growing society need. There's only so much demand and value for society that (non-SV) programmers add. You could survive in a world with only tradesmen and farmers, but not so much with only JS coders.

Programmers are valued in places like the US because US is the home to big-tech, an industry generating trillions in revenue for the US, but the US is the global outlier here. In other places of the world that don't have big-tech, programmers have much less value to society.

South Park also did an episode on this.

Housing crisis is because of unsustainably high immigration levels.

In 2023 alone, there was a net inflow of over 1.3 million people. It's a lot for a country of 39 million. Where will they live?

Another major issue is the suppression of wages this causes.

Also there is a serious lack of diversity in the immigrant population (no cap by country as in the US). This is tearing apart the cultural fabric of communities.

As someone who had someone come over on a O-1 visa, I 100% would have been willing to pay double for that person specifically.

It also removes the common issue of people who are hiring people below market rate or are trying to push salaries down for certain industries. It makes companies really make sure they actually need that technical expert from overseas.

Then open it up to everyone else if there are quotas.

If an employee is recruited at $250k, they clearly have skills the market values.

The point would be that we fill and address the talent problem longer term. AKA if you need to hire foreign workers, you have to invest in developing new talent.

I would say that total comp should be taken into account, but we should take a more strategic approach to addressing workforce gaps rather than just relying on importing talent.

My proposal for green cards:

zero-sum - points based system based on your current salary, taxes paid and the occupation shortage list OR straight up auction

non-zero-sum - let people apply for a green card as long as they've stayed in the country for X years without any criminal infractions, have earned above N*min-wage for all those years.

If you're asking about work visas, probably just ranking by location-adjusted-salary and handing them out should do the job.

The problem is they don't update it constantly like Canada does. Needs funding I guess.

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-e-chapter-...

Those wouldn't be perfect metrics, and they might be easy to fudge. So it then becomes a question of if disqualification of the capable is worse than qualification of the incapable.

I personally prefer to let more people in than less. It's not like it's smooth sailing in the US if you can't do skilled work.

IIRC 3 years of work experience are considered equivalent to 1 year of college education, which allows those who didn't get a degree but have extensive experience to also have an avenue for obtaining a Visa.

Simple and objective.

Make it 250k for 3 consecutive years and forget about school.

I know plenty of people in this boat from India who wait 15 years to get a GC because of our idiotic process.

If I were to propose something different, it would be ratios by job title/salary, with obvious veto ability by government TLA agencies for security risks. Points systems for skilled migration are an in exact proxy and miss out on talented people with less formal educations. I’d rather place the burden of deciding who gets to work here on businesses who are trying to fill actual positions. Let them decide who is actually qualified based on the actual skills they’re looking for. And because they have to hire a requisite number of similar-level Americans, the worst thing that might happen is a sort of jobs program for Americans when companies are forced to employ more Americans to satisfy the ratio needed to hire foreigners.

This would have two other benefits that I can see. First, it would make it much easier for small companies with primarily-American workforces to hire foreigners since they wouldn’t need so much legal help or luck in winning a visa lottery. Second, foreign workers would integrate better because they’d always be working with Americans.

The main weakness that would need to be protected against is companies under-classifying and underpaying foreign workers (i.e. the janitors are American but are up-classified as software engineers and the software engineers are foreign and paid janitorial wages), but I feel these sorts of situations should be addressed by judges when complaints are made against companies trying to game the system.

I think you can derive generic and robust definitions of “exceptional” like this too; eg anyone that is getting paid $1m/yr is clearly exceptional. This is robust to Goodhearting because again, net contributor to the wealth of the country. (1m is an arbitrary number for discussion, obviously you can tune it to get the count you are looking for.)

Trouble is, “exceptional at art” is fundamentally subjective and won’t show up in salary. Similar salary concerns with “exceptionally talented PhD”. I think you need per-industry considerations here. Top N most-cited AI researchers should get a pre-filled green card sent to them.

Personally think we should be allowing any PhD or med school graduate from top institutions to stay indefinitely; so many talented researchers come to the US to study and then get kicked out. We want to keep these people.