Comment by bubblethink
6 hours ago
The vast majority of immigration to the US is based on luck (family, diversity etc.) or misery (asylum, refugee, etc.). That's about 90% immigration. The remaining 10% is employment. Where did you pull the $1M figure out of? Is the Mexican sibling paying $1M in taxes to immigrate here? Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I did go in details in another comment so I won't repeat myself because that comment is LONG.
But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.
In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)
But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.
That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation. And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.
Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that. According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic. I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.
He's speaking specifically about the green card process, at which point you've already been in the country for a long time and paid into U.S. taxes. Not people who might want to pay money to immigrate here (although for them, the EB-5 visa program exists).
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
Cato did a study in 2017 that asked people if they supported immigration. Most people did. Then they asked people what they thought the level of immigration should be. The median answer was around 500,000 a year. The real level is 2-5 times higher than that. That’s why nobody will push for a real skilled immigration system. Once you open up the issue to public debate, a likely outcome will be a demand to drastically cut the level of legal immigration.
For example, right now, nobody is thinking of how many immigrants come to the U.S. through family unification for each H1B worker that eventually gets permanent residency. If you open up the issue now it’s going to become a firestorm when people realize that “65,000 skilled workers a year” actually results in millions of people every year, most of whom aren’t skilled workers.
I can't find the study in question, but I'd be interested in the polling process. The average person has zero understanding of what 500,000 immigrants per year means. For context, the average American is off by at least a factor of 2 about the population of the United States. If the questioning wasn't something along the lines of "of the people you personally know, what fraction should be immigrants" or something, I have no idea how you'd get anything resembling useful responses.
1 reply →
How does 65000 workers translate to millions of unskilled relatives? Even green cards for relatives are a nontrivial process.
7 replies →
Any changes to immigration require the legislature. Congress hasn't changed anything in over 30 years, so all this is moot. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It's a bit silly to reason backwards about what the anti-immigrant types want. There is no grounding principle there.
This line of reasoning will shut down practically any interesting conversation that has to do with wanting to change the system. Extremely unproductive.
> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.
The argument at its core says wealthy immigrants are preferable, which is predictable bias on on a forum frequented by tech workers.
> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
Yup real chud. I'd play world's smallest violin in solidarity with these most productive people.
We are talking about Microsoft employees.