You’ve pretty much described the USEB-5 visa program.
[QUOTE]
[But I’d be interested in seeing some stats on how many people would be able and willing to pay … QUOTE]
The results of DV lottery suggest thst, even from countries that have not been major sources of immigrants, there are tens of milions of people willing to come and pay the processing fees, plane tickets and setup costs.
The extra BC fee would deter some, but not all.
I don’t think we need to worry so much about it. Our economy will grow as the population does.
If we are stupid about it, and we just let them in and then do nothing further to assimilate them into being productive residents and eventually citizens, then problems may very well occur.
If we go about it right, and give everyone an opportunity to get the education and training to do jobs that help our country, then there is no real limit to the population we can absorb till we start running out of food, and we should be ale to produce enough food to feed well over a billion easily.
The reason that China and India are getting so powerful on the world stage these days is because of their population. I’ve heard that there are more students in STEM fields in india than there are student in the US. Doubling or even tripling our population is a good thing, IMHO.
The only “downside” is that in doing so, us white men will no longer be the majority. I put “downside” in quotes, as I do not see it as a downside, once again, IMHO.
I think anyone that wants to be here, should be here, assuming no criminal history. But this is where it gets hard: how do you vet a country, say, North Korea, that doesn’t let people out? Even if they establish relations and support a citizen database, they can simply say everyone is convicted of non-party thoughts, or some other thing that’s a red flag.
And what degrees of criminal history? I think Canada is completely stupid for not letting in people for tourism purposes that have DUI convictions. People make mistakes, and they clean themselves up, and they’re no longer a threat (note: this does not apply to me; I’m clean).
Despite the news, we’re still the greatest country on the planet when considering the big picture. Why does our constitution only protect people who won the birthplace lottery?
How is what you propose/accept substantively any different from a full scale invasion and conquest by a foreign power? I’m all for diversity and moderate legal immigration, but a billion people?
Respectfully, that is an absurd proposition that belies the true purpose of those on your side and makes any reasonable attempt at immigration reform difficult to stomach as it foretells the end of the slippery slope.
Every nation has the right to its self-identity. Bringing in triple the native population from foreign nations who likely do not share our history or ideals is the instrument of our own demise.
No, you aren’t. The US is first in all bad measures (People in prison, death by gun, life expectancy for poor children, for black People…) and among the last in the good measures (education, disparity index, …) among all modern industrialized nations.
It’s just that People in poor countries have Access to Hollywood, and nothing else, so they, too, believe the Propaganda of “American Dream”.
A similar Problem is why so many People are trying to get into Europe - they hear exaggerated stories, either from smugglers lying about how much Money they will receive there, so they can get a commission; or from relatives who don’t want to admit how bad it is to live illegally and earn Little Money.
I wonder why Immigration is conflated with controlled entry when talking about “keeping the bad guys out”.
You don’t conduct a 10 day Background check at the NY international Airport. A lot of People enter with visas, so a real Immigration Reform would have People applying to the US embassy in e.g. Sudan, where the staff have direct contact with the Sudanese authorities, and a valid translator at Hand, do the Background checks and issue a “Visa provisional for Immigration” (considering only serious convictions from a small list).
Then, once the applicant has arrived in US and lived there for 3/5 years, can pass an English test, has a Job, has two friends from local community, he can complete his Immigration and become naturalized, because he’s obviously integrated.
Also: any crackdown on Immigration or entry will always hurt honest People much more than effectivly Keep bad guys out. Because: Bad guys don’t Keep the rules. They lie, they falsify passports and so on. Or they come with a student’s visa and overstay. (That’s also why “no-fly lists” are so stupid and ineffective).
Yes, but for those of us who aren’t in prison, shot by guns, have poor children, black, we’re better than everyone else, and we haven’t perpetrated the attempted mass murder of an entire race like certain European countries, dude.
Don’t call me dude.
So the genocide against the Indians doesn’t Count because it’s too Long ago, I guess?
And yes, those who don’t have it bad, are fine. That’s not how conditions are usually measured, though.
XT, you do understand that solutions can be scaled. If the 3k or 5k or whatever per immigrant processed was directly added to the department’s budget, and you had competent leaders allowed to hire people and buy equipment as needed, it could be done. I mean we as a country have nationwide banks, we have space programs, we have web sites that handle more personal data than a background check for free (facebook), it’s clearly feasible.
What you are observing is that government agencies are not known for being efficient. Albeit by some metrics they are efficient and this is a political subject.
Agree. How would you expect otherwise? With limited immigration rates, most immigrants get “melted” into the identity of America. Sure, that identity is not constant, it is shifting over time, hopefully overall for the better. But this collective cultural identity - this set of shared values - is why America is reasonably successful and why people want to move here. But if we allow in unlimited numbers of people from failed countries (since obviously they will have the most incentive to move), and it’s really a billion people, they’ll shift the cultural average to the one that failed.
That doesn’t sound like a winning strategy.
In every possible way. A full scale invasion and conquest by a foreign power would have a foreign state government directing armed people to come into our country without our permission, destroying things, killing citizens, stuff like that.
I can actually see no similarities other than “foreigners are coming”
Respectfully, that’s bull. First, it’s my personal opinion on what would be good not only for those wanting to come here, but for those who are already here already. Second, “belies the true purpose” insinuates that there is some dark sinister plot against good 'ole murica. There is no plot, unless improving the lives of people is a sinister plot.
Ahh, the slippery slope fallacy rears its purdy little head. Any attempt at immigration reform is difficult to stomach to those who do not want immigrants to come here. Me posting my opinion on a messageboard isn’t the cause of xenophobia.
People talk about american exceptionalism all the time, and they seem to think that it is an inherent property of our country that it is exceptional. That’s not true. It is the people that make us exceptional. And what makes us exceptional is that we are a country made of immigrants. We have people from all different ethnicities and cultures working together, side by side, to achieve common goals.
That is the self identity of the United States, we are a nation of immigrants. And unless our identity is a nation of immigrants who got ours, and now are pulling up the ladder to prevent anyone else from achieving what we have here, then letting in immigrants only strengthens the american dream and our national identity.
What you are saying is ignorant. The immigrants who our ancestors let in were *not *just anyone.
I won’t try to claim any particular racial or cultural group is better or worse, so I’m not branded a racist, but immigration policy in the past was selective, and America is highly successful. Maybe selective immigration had some causative effect.
It’s amusing that someone with such a total lack of historical knowledge would call someone “ignorant” for stating that America is a nation of immigrants. Perhaps you’re not familiar with a national monument called “the Statue of Liberty” and the inscription that it bears, which was a foundational principle both before and for decades after, such that the US has the largest immigrant population of any country in the world.
Other than blatantly racist laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, there were no meaningful controls over immigration until Congress reacted in the 1920s with the emergency Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 followed by the Immigration Act of 1924. However, it’s important to note that then and now, remarkably through all these years, immigration limits have been heavily focused on ethnicity and country of origin, along with just random lotteries for eligibility, which in recent years have let in numerous murderers, terrorists, and other undesirables. Other countries, by contrast, are much more focused on merit-based admissions criteria. If you think pretty much open immigration policy followed by race-based policy and random lotteries has somehow constituted “selective immigration” and has been the “causative factor” for America’s success, you need to (a) explain how you reconcile this belief with your claim of not being a racist, and (b) go back to school and elect “history” as a special point of education for a while, with a focus on immigration history.
The crucial flaw in what you are neglecting to mention is that most of the world’s population pre-1920 was too poor to come to America or there weren’t significant amounts of shipping running that way. Hence it was mostly just Europeans.
I am not going to claim that Europeans are better or worse than anyone else, simply pointing out that an open boarders policy today would be letting in different immigrants from different cultures than the pre-1920 mix.
And if the flow rate is so high that they outnumber the “natives” (even if we aren’t really natives) the rational outcome would be a massive cultural change, with the new cultural being mainly weighted towards the culture of origin of the immigrants.
And if that culture is a “failure” creating a “shithole” : what do you reasonably think would happen.
I think we need a merit-based system.
LHoD:
Let me clean up your example. Assume a terrific screening program. Up the cost to $10,000 with a mandatory 2 year wait. Pull in the banks to provide financing, maybe escrow services, if problems arise and you need to deport someone for lying about their Nazi background.
You still get a massive influx of foreigners, driving down wages for those in the US who have only a high school diploma. Quite probably for other workers as well, including those in the professional class.
Wonky: Existing studies show this effect to be limited but that’s under the existing system. Wage elasticities may very well change when you vastly increase the number of new workers with lower reservation wages.
Furthermore, I’d fully expect 3rd worlders to retire to the US, to take advantage of our safety net.
There’s not a country in the world where a majority of its citizens would agree to such a plan. It might ethical, in some glibertarian way. But it’s way out of bounds.
Counterplan: issue blue cards. They cost $3000, etc. etc. as per the OP. But the key element is that they are limited in number. They also contain some form of work requirements. If there are more applicants than cards available, use a bidding process to allocate them. Start in the agricultural sector - vary the quantity according to the wage levels. Penalize employers if they hire illegal aliens. This is also a non-starter, because the farm lobby likes the status quo. But it’s a helpful thought experiment.
Really, you claim that we are not a nation of immigrants? That we didn’t come from all over the world? You know nothing of our country’s history, if that is the case.
Now, I realize that you don’t want to be branded a racist, but everything you said in that paragraph after your “disclaimer” was in fact, racist. Claiming that selective immigration from europe is what made us successful is historical revisionism that does the service of promoting white supremacy. You ARE claiming that northern europeans are superior to other cultures and ethnicities.
You are simply factually wrong on this. I would not say that you are a racist, but wherever you got your information from most certainly is.
Hmmm, who are you leaving out here?
Did anyone come from Africa pre-1920? Anyone at all that you can think of?
How about china? 12 million came here in the 30 years after the civil war.
People came from all over the world and contributed to our culture and helped build our nation (sometime voluntarily, sometimes not so much). You seem to think that the only valuable people in our country came from europe to the point of revising history to make that claim.
It wasn’t until relatively recently, about a 100 years ago, that we started restricting immigration, and we did so specifically for racist reasons. Before that, it really was open borders.
So, we had open borders, then we restricted immigration for openly racist reasons. We continued restricting immigration, but as being a racist fell out of favor, we kept trying to justify it as not being a racist policy, when, pretty much it inherently is.
You want a merit based system, you say? Okay, so we take immigrants from only other well developed countries with educational systems that are capable of producing people with the skills that you think we need. Other first world nations that really feel no pressure to come here. No desire to dramatically increase their standard of living. No loyalty to a country that lifted them from real poverty to comparatively luxurious standards. Most people from other developed nations don’t really want to relocate here that much, (and the number that do is dropping quickly), and when they get here, they have no great loyalty to us.
You really think that because someone lives in an undeveloped nation, they are stupider, they are lazier, they have less work ethic or poor morals and family values? Just the basics of surviving in some of those environments would tax most of us lazy first worlders to the point we would just lay down and die from exhaustion. Someone who comes from an environment where bare survival entails 14 hours of gathering wood and water a day is going to thrive in an environment where the most basic elements of life of running water and heated houses and stoves that just turn on when you flip a switch are available. Just through statistics, you can see that there are geniuses in these billions of people that we let live in squalid conditions. There are likely people in these countries that we write off that are smarter than anyone in our country. And we just let that potential rot away, because we don’t want people from those countries.
If we want to “make America great again”, we need help, and lots of it. There’s much that needs doing in this country.
If we want to do that without getting our own lazy asses off the couch, we need even more.
I form this policy from purely selfish pragmatic reasons. I want America to be the greatest country in the world again. I don’t see us doing that on our own, and I don’t really want to get off my couch anyway. Lets bring in other people to do the heavy lifting of rebuilding our country, and then they can join us in sharing in the fruits of their labors.
Wait, the risk to immigration today is that the residents of shithole countries – the shitholians, if you will – have become more prosperous? Do you think there’s a risk that the shitholians might do the same thing if they came over here and, like, grew the economy or something? 
Plus, as already noted, it wasn’t just Europeans, although the demographics of immigration has indeed been changing.
My dear fellow, you have clearly and repeatedly implied that Europeans are better than everyone else. You appear to be so unaware of it that you just did it again, in the very same sentence in which you tried to deny it.
What “culture” would that be? I wasn’t aware that there was a monolithic culture of “other”, which for lack of a better term perhaps we could call “shithole-ism”, the universal culture of the shitholians. This would be an understandable viewpoint only if one views the world as consisting on one side of white northern Europeans possessing the “correct” values and culture, and on the other side, everybody else, who can be summarily dismissed as shitholians coming from shitholes, and therefore useless.
I reasonably think that maybe it would create communities more like Toronto. Toronto has become arguably the most multicultural multiracial city in the world. A city in which nearly 52% of the residents are now visible minorities or, according to your definition, shitholians. The shitholians have somehow inexplicably been able to acquire productive jobs and pre-approved mortgages. They live in houses and – something that I personally appreciate – have helped to substantially drive up property values, and they raise families consisting of little shitholians, pretty much as white suburban Americans did in those halcyon days of the 1950s that all the anti-immigration zealots so desperately want to get back to, as portrayed on Father Knows Best.
Yet despite all the shitholians – some might even dare to say at least in part because of them – Toronto is a thriving, clean, safe, economically prosperous and culturally vibrant city with a high quality of life and a low crime rate despite the population of the greater metropolitan area now approaching 7 million. Indeed, in keeping with its multiculturalism Toronto is a forward-thinking city invested in the future; one of its current initiatives for example is the Quayside waterfront pilot for the smart city of the future, being done in collaboration with three government agencies and the Alphabet (Google) Sidewalk Labs organization:
Sidewalk’s initial ideas – in a 220-page document made public Tuesday – show the company with an agenda that represents significant innovation in architecture, construction and urban design. Within the area it develops, private cars would be banned; streets would be served by autonomous vehicles and freight robots moving in underground tunnels. Intelligent signals would manage traffic on pedestrian-friendly streets; buildings would be designed to be highly flexible, constructed using modular units that are produced nearby. These would be home to what Sidewalk describes as a “radical” mix of offices, retail, residence and maker spaces, a blend which would challenge existing zoning and building-code regulations.
Those buildings would be linked by an energy system that would reduce the district’s energy consumption by 95 per cent below city regulations. And a digital layer would measure movements of people, energy, traffic and goods through the district.
That’s pretty funny, because:
(a) if that’s a tacit acknowledgment that America does not, even today, have a sufficiently functional merit-based system, then the only remaining explanation I can see for your “America became successful due to past immigration” hypothesis is that it was the “right” kind of immigration, viz.- white northern Europeans, regardless of qualifications.
(b) if there is an effective merit-based immigration system, then why would it matter where anyone is from, shithole or not? Because here, the only explanation I can see is that we don’t like their race or ethnicity.
As you can see, the evidence does not support your post at all. America was 84% white people in 1930. The primary minority was black people. Other groups were negligible.
That’s not a very diverse racial mix. It stayed that way for decades after that.
To be totally frank, if you actually try to measure whole populations for “superiority*”, Asians usually come out on top. I’m hardly a white supremacist. (and if you must know, I am not asian myself) All I’ve been saying is :
a. The facts are, our ancestors didn’t in reality let just anyone in pre-1920. I don’t know where the 12 million Chinese workers went, they aren’t there in the census data.
b. Some people are probably better than others as individuals, regardless of race. We should go by merit instead of having just “no limits, anyone and everyone”. Also if our merit system happens to favor people who happen to be from some races more than others, we should still use it, so long as the system is in fact race blind. There is an argument for affirmative action to make up for past wrongs towards our own citizens, but I do not think this should apply to immigration policy.
*metrics like crime rate, higher education completion, how hard someone works, intelligence, child geniuses, it’s mostly asians winning the competition by large margins.
My post was that you were falsely claiming that we have always restricted immigration to northern europe, and that that is why america is great.
You did completely forget about a fairly large population that we dragged here.
As far as the chinese, I did misread my cite there, in that it it was talking about all immigration in those years, not just chinese. It doesn’t give a breakdown on the numbers from China, especially since many worked here for a while, then returned (and many worked here for a while, then died in the mines or in railroad accidents). But to say they contributed little or nothing, when their labor was key in exploiting the mining in california, and for building the transpacific railroad, is very blind.
They have contributed much to our culture, to our language, and to our culinary traditions.
They were also key in shaping our racist immigration policies, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Because that was when we started implementing immigration policies to keep “the other” out. And keep in mind, racism wasn’t always whites against non-whites. Racism has been against all immigrants as they came in. There was racism against the irish when they were immigrating, the polish, and so on.
When you break down that diversity in terms of all the different places that they came from, and all the places that their contemporaries called “shitholes” you see a much larger spread. You seem to think that “northern europe” was some monolithic culture, but it was as diverse as any other continent full of people. When the irish were immigrating in mass, people were worried about losing our “cultural identity” then too.
It is only that now that we decide to conglomerate a group, and loosely call them “northern european” that that has become our “national identity”. That was one of the first melting pots that was america. These cultures didn’t have much in common with each other, didn’t get along too well, but when they came here, they ended up working together.
If you are trying to measure populations for superiority, you are doing the whole “I’m not a racist” thing entirely wrong.
As noted, the 12 million was my mistake, but in any case, some died, some worked for a while and returned home, some were forced out by racial policies.
But yes, prior to the chinese exclusion act, there were no controls on immigration, and even with that, it was just the chinese that were not allowed in, because of racism.
To be practical, we do have to have limits. Like I said, I don’t know that we can feed much more than a billion people with our current agricultural practices. (If we went to more involved things, like vertical farms powered by nukes, or even just reducing our standards to where the bulk of nutrition comes from crickets and algae, we have no real limit). But, what “merit” are you looking for? If merit means having a first world education and can speak english, then you are doing very little better than a racist. If merit is being willing and able to work hard to improve the lives of not only themselves, but those around them, then we can afford to look a little wider than just the countries that are already developed.
If we have a merit system that tends to favor one race over another, then it is very likely that that merit system is flawed and skewed in order to favor one race over another, not that one race is better than another.
Those two can be objectively measured, and are largely a reflection of the country’s ability to prevent crime and educate its people, rather than something inherent to the people themselves.
These cannot be objectively measured, especially as you skip over people who are not in areas where these will be noticed. If you live in a highly impoverished country, and you manage to survive, you are working harder than 90% of the rest of the world. Your intelligence, even your child prodigies, will go completely unnoticed.
First world nations win first world competitions, yay us!
In any case, we are pretty much dead middle (actually a bit closer to the bottom of the list [126 of 219]) of countries by homicide. If we want to maintain our “cultural identity”, we should be taking immigrants from around us on the list, not the top.