Fun fact: due to a strange quirk in geography, neither Canada nor Australia are the United States of America.
How about you stop defending arguments that haven’t been made?
The point is that the people he affiliates with make immigration proposals like this one for bigoted reasons. It is thus reasonable to think that Trump is enacting their policy proposals for bigoted reasons.
For some reason you keep saying that a policy that reduces legal immigration is a good policy. It inherently isn’t. Not when we already have an illegal immigration problem. A good immigration policy would mean that we make sure those illegal immigrants that we apparently need to keep our economy functioning could get here legally.
It’s not a hard concept. The only part of our immigration system that is broken is our illegal immigration problem. This makes this problem worse. Therefore it is bad policy.
treis, you keep saying that Democrats would be perfectly fine with this policy if it were by anyone else. Bullshit. Democrats are the ones fighting for the illegal immigrants. So a policy that makes immigration more difficult would not be one Democrats would support.
It is true that both sides agree that immigration policy is broken in the U.S., but we do not agree on which way we need to go to fix it. Democrats generally want wider immigration. Our solution to the illegal immigration problem isn’t kicking people out, but finding a way that these people can legally be here.
And what other countries do has no bearing on this. Just because we mention other countries for Universal Health Care doesn’t mean we’re idolizing these other countries. Other countries largely don’t have our illegal immigration problem. They don’t have so many industries built on undocumented workers.
Oh, and if Americans were willing to do those jobs, then they wouldn’t need to use undocumented workers. It’s not like America’s unemployment rate is particularly high anymore. A certain amount of unemployment is just normal.
(Though it is possible that there are geographic restrictions involved. You kinda need to live close to where migrant labor is actually used. The Midwest, where the white lower class mostly lives, is not that place. Similarly, most non-white lower class are in cities, for some reason. I do wonder if subsidizing migration would help.)
This seems like a stretch. I’m sure there are a few industries that benefit greatly from the cheap labor illegals provide, but the US economy wouldn’t grind to a halt if we scaled back illegal immigration drastically.
What other countries do doesn’t matter? Yeah. Try to be consistent with that.
The fact is what other countries do does matter to some degree and it’s perfectly relevant to reference them. Especially, when what other countries do pops up all the time in so many other debates.
In several countries including the US I’ve met people who weren’t really offended by the immigrants picking lettuces: what was a personal attack was the immigrants in jobs that the offendee themselves or their children weren’t qualified for.
Employers in high-skilled fields like energy, technology, engineering, biotech, and even manufacturing have been complaining for years about a shortage of qualified candidates. I remember first reading about it in Alan Greenspan’s memoir over a decade ago. Many experts have proposed increasing legal immigration access for the types of individuals who could fill these roles. The points-based system of Canada has done an exceptional job of attracting such individuals, and if we were to reform our legal immigration system to mimic theirs it would very likely attract the workers we need to maintain the cutting-edge in the industries of the future.
And, yes, proficiency in English tends to be rather important when working in the US. I believe it is over-weighted in Trump’s policy and that we should compensate with a further emphasis on educational attainment.
Cutting back immigration via family relations is probably the most controversial aspect of this proposal. The proposed cutbacks should likely be scaled back as I do believe we need to provide opportunities for family members of immigrants to also come live here. A 50% reduction is drastic and I would be comfortable with leaving it at current levels.
I sincerely hope that any proposed reforms of immigration are not met with immediate obstinance out of ideological impulse, particularly since we have models that have performed very well in other countries and which are overwhelmingly supported by their citizens. Liberals have been touting the success of the Canadian and Australian immigration systems for years. Suddenly we are back to American Exceptionalism?
Of course, read what I posted and you see that it was clear that the data used from CIS as one big reason for this “reform” was wrong or a lie. And many have caught CIS doing that with data before. Thing is that After finding that the well they got the information was flawed to begin with, then one should consider the source.
Great - you’re going to dump people with poor language skills and questionable job outlook into areas already facing a depressing lack of jobs. That sounds like a recipe for making ghettos and a permanent underclass, not integrating immigrants into the larger whole.
I don’t have a problem with a points based system on principle, but the one being proposed, plus the drastic cuts, are colossally stupid and would greatly harm the country.
As I often hear “fluent English” defined no, a lot of adults can’t improve their language skills to that point. Past a certain age, also known as puberty, language acquisition becomes more difficult. This is based on biology, not effort or motivation or lack of them.
Someone who learns a language as an adult will almost never achieve native levels of ability and will never be mistaken for a native speaker (outside of professional actors with language coaching, and even they struggle with it). That does not mean an inability to communicate effectively. You don’t need perfect English to be a doctor or engineer or a lot of other things.
An example of a successful entrepreneur in our world that would be excluded by this new policy is Arnold Schwarzenegger who came to the US with almost no English, with the very non-vital profession of “body-builder”, and nothing more than a high school education. Despite being a “burden” on society he went on to become a hundred-millionaire (worth about 300 million) and the governor of California. But yeah, people without good English and STEM skills are scum and should be kept out because they’ll just suck off the public teat and need welfare all their life.
Of course, not all immigrants are going to do that well, but the point is that it’s really hard to predict whose going to be an asset or not down the line. There’s more to being a good citizen and contribute to society than perfect English.
I’m not in favor of a completely open border, but this policy strikes me as too restrictive, with bad priorities, and dare I say it, un-American.
I’d really like to see some substantiation of this, whoever it comes from. I know it’s agreed that the vetting system needs fixing, but not in terms of legal immigration, rather to prevent terrorists from entering the country. And I know that those on the right in favor of MAWA (Make America White Again) want to cut down on immigration. But I haven’t heard a whole lot of outcry from the left that quotas should be increased or widened.
Just because the economy wouldn’t go tits-up doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be ill effects. How would you like to see any product using the ‘fruits’ of agriculture increase in price (pun unintended)? Do you have any conception of how many products that is? And how much would that contribute to inflation?
There are two ways to go with this: either
Increased wages (to attract workers) = increased prices, or
Decreased productivity = decreased supply = increased prices.
Actually, there’s a third, which is
Increased investment (for efficiency improvement) = increased prices.
None of the above is good news for the small farmer or the consumer. Conglomerates won’t like it, but will have the resources to deal with it.
They might not have been qualified because the immigrants were there. In my area of the IT world there’s basically no entry level jobs available. That level is filled by Indians who are here on visas. Generally, they aren’t the best and brightest or exceptionally skilled. They just happen to be the ones that won in the H1B lottery.
Why are you asking for substantiation for something you already know?
That makes little sense to me. I assume it costs a good deal of money to sponsor someone to come to the US under the H1B Visa program. So why go to all that trouble to hire someone for an entry level position? I assume the same amount invested would let you import a higher-level employee. So why would any employer bring in someone only to staff a low-level position, one that could be filled by someone already here with some limited training? Plus the H1B visa holder has to have a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or twelve years of experience. On the other hand, many entry-level IT positions don’t even need a bachelor’s degree.
Some of them are higher-level employees, but for entry level positions they are more experienced, cheaper, and less able to move to another company than American workers. It’s not that expensive to apply for H1B visas, especially if you are doing it in bulk. Probably less than $5,000. They can easily make that up within a year.
No, they weren’t qualified due to things such as “being a high school dropout with the salesmanship skills of a half-brick” (much more common) or “having chosen to take a job with lower educational requirements than those the foreigners did have” (not as often).
And you can’t hire someone FOR an H1-B, they need to have been employees of that company abroad for at least two years.
Nope, that’s L-1B. H-1B is a whole different story. Of course, the past few years the entire H-1B quota has been used up by a factor of 3 within the first week that petitions can b filed in April for the fiscal year starting in October.
Oh yeah sorry, I did mix up my letters.
And those “past few years” go at least 20 years back.