Comment by nostrademons
9 hours ago
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.
For those who aren't doing the math, there are now about 340M Americans, so 500K immigrants per year would be about 0.128% or roughly 1/780 of the population arriving as immigrants per year. If you figure the average immigrant stays for about 5 years (there's likely a long tail, where many people on temporary H1Bs go back to their home countries in 3-5 years while green card holders stay forever), you'd expect < 1% of the U.S. population to be immigrants under this system, and the average person would know maybe 1 or 2 immigrants.
FWIW, my community is 30% foreign-born and we don't really have any social cohesion problems. I think that length of time in the country actually matters more than the absolute number of immigrants; people who have been here since they were teens are very well acculturated. But if I were to put numbers on how many new people a group can absorb per year without radically changing its culture, I'd put it at about 10% (that's like having one new person on a 10 person team hired within the last year). If we extrapolated to the whole U.S. population and assumed they were all evenly distributed, this'd be 34M people/year.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is that they're not evenly distributed. Some places in America never change, over generations, and remain very suspicious of outsiders. Other places become 80% immigrant over a span of 10-15 years, and then they never talk to anyone outside their ethnic background. In not very long, you end up with multiple different Americas that can't relate to each other. The parable of the polygons is very relevant here:
https://ncase.me/polygons/
How does 65000 workers translate to millions of unskilled relatives? Even green cards for relatives are a nontrivial process.
Indeed. That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker. You really wonder about the IQ of the people who believe this propaganda.
Also case in point, both me and my wife went from F1 to green card. We never worked illegally and had fully funded gradute programs. Our parents refuse to settle in the US, they have assets and families in home countries and rather live there. We haven't tried to bring in any other relatives. 3 of our siblings have also went through the F1 route, all of them fully funded gradutes, one of them left the US after graduation, other two settled and got green card.
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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.