Comment by fngjdflmdflg
11 hours ago
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/green-card-holders-a...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024... via https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/u-s-immig...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec...
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them leave the company so employers don't tend to do that a lot.
The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country. The population growth of the US and the world as a hole has also risen by more than that factor, even in the past two decades or so it has more than doubled.
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate
What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.
>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not
The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?
>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country
Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?
>population growth of the US and the world
The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U... "As of September 30, 2019, the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420."