Absolutely nothing. It's central planning for something that doesn't require it: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
As for why it's imperative to Americanize immigrants. Look at how much trouble the U.S. has had cultivating democracy in places like Iraq. Most people acknowledge that the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy. Do you think they would be any more ready for democracy if you moved them en masse to Minnesota?
Well that's an easily defined metric, isn't it...
There's nothing that says you must let immigrants become citizens right away, or give them all the same privileges citizens are entitled to. For instance, it wouldn't be at all unfair to kick people out for certain classes of crime.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that codifying exactly what those are and if someone is going to be able to accept them in X months/years is not going to be an easy task.
[1] I'm cognizant of the fact that it can be dangerous in some Americam communities too. Alas, we're stuck with that. But there is no need to make the task of progress and civilization harder than it already is.
Perhaps the problem is that he is the son of an immigrant?
Historically, "people not like us" has been used for far more bad than it has for good.
As an immigrant myself I'm really thankful for our melting pot policies. Life will be better for my daughter growing up surrounded by American attitudes. Had our family immigranted en masse with a million other Bangladeshi families, she might very well have been deprived of that.
I'm pretty much ok with anyone who accepts the rules and laws even if they don't think like me. I'd like them to integrate to some extent prior to gaining citizenship, but that's different than a work visa.
There's nothing that says you must let immigrants come.
Fixed that for you.
Do you realize how much of the tech world was built be people from all over? HTTP, Linux, Google, Java, C++ and so on.
Israel has had a strict immigration policy, far more restrictive than the post-1965 US policy. They don't seem perturbed by your claimed economic requirement of not "exclud[ing] everyone who wasn't smart enough to be born there" (while you've already shown you really mean open borders).
The US prospered with very restricted immigration for decades.
> Keep them out, and they'll concentrate in other places.
Let them concentrate, especially those from the Third World, so their countries have a chance to benefit from their talent and develop. I don't understand why you are against their home countries prospering.
Xenophobia-at-a-distance has no place in modern civilization.
Israel's "lot of immigration" has been those very people that their government wants to make up the demographics: Jews. Your "lot of immigration" bears no resemblance to what you advocate for the US.
http://www.oecd.org/migration/internationalmigrationoutlook2...
Permanent migration to Israel - almost all "ethnic" by Jews and their families - was particularly high in the early 1990s.
Israel has seen a lot of deportation and arrests. Deportation, not amnesty, is normal practice there.
Why do you deny that the US citizens have as much right and duty to protect their country for themselves as Israel does? Perhaps the US immigration authorities should look at open borders advocates' motives towards the US and their fitness for residence, in the manner that Israeli authorities do.
Israel, in one month, deports what would be the equivalent of 277,000 US illegal immigrants:
Report: Migrants leaving Israel being sent to Rwanda, Uganda
http://www.jpost.com/International/Report-Migrants-leaving-I...
The state’s policy, including placing new illegal migrants in closed detention for up to one year, but also allows placing up to 4,000 (so far) already in Israel in open detention for an indefinite period, was initiated in mid-December 2013 under pressure from a mid-September 2013 High Court ruling striking down the old policy as unconstitutional.
Since the new policy’s initiation, 3,988 migrants have left the country, including 1,510 in March alone.
Crackdown Begins: 400 Illegal Entrants Arrested
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132548
The special police unit “Oz” has begun a large-scale operation aimed at cracking down on illegal entry to Israel. Over the past three weeks, members of the unit have checked the documents of more than 4,000 workers.
Of those 4,000, 600 were detained for questioning. Four hundred were arrested after police discovered that they had entered the country illegally.
Israel’s Chilly Reception for African Asylum Seekers
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/31/opinion/sunday...
In May, I attended a graduation party in Tel Aviv for Taj Jemy, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan… The celebration was interrupted by the Israeli police, who burst into the room, scattering the crowd. The partygoers recalling their skills of hiding, ducking and fleeing, spilled onto the street to find it barricaded and surrounded by horses. Seven people were arrested that night for not having their visas with them.
Israel’s policy toward African asylum seekers is to pressure them to self-deport or, as the former interior minister Eli Yishai put it, to “make their lives miserable” until they give up and let the government deport them.
As of Friday, Infiltrators Can't Export Money
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/275652
Interior Minister Gid`on Saar signed regulations, Monday, that make it illegal for someone who illegally infiltrated the country to send money out of the country. The goal of the measures are to make the infiltrators leave with what they accumulated instead of regularly sending it out to their countries of origin.
Milestone: No illegal African migrants enter Israel in August
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=11...
Population and Immigration Authority says August is the first month in which no illegal infiltrators entered Israel through Egyptian border
168 migrants from Sudan and Eritrea leave Israel voluntarily
Interior minister: We are progressing day by day.
You already have a process of green card + a bunch of time leading to eligibility. Isn't that good enough?
> For instance, it wouldn't be at all unfair to kick people out for certain classes of crime.
you mean prior to them getting citizenship right?
This is a really contentious statement that you just drop in both as fact and as the basis of your entire argument.
No, I would not say that 'the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy' is a true statement. I also wouldn't say that what 'most people [in the US]' think about the Iraqi people's readiness for democracy [in Iraq] is really relevant to the question of whether they are ready for democracy [in Iraq]. I also wouldn't say that the question of whether they (as a group) are 'ready' for democracy in Iraq is relevant to answering the question of whether individual Iraqi people are 'ready' for democracy in Minnesota (whatever that means).
> Look at how much trouble the U.S. has had cultivating democracy in places like Iraq.
It also doesn't help that we have a long history of doing the exact opposite of 'cultivating democracy' in the Middle East (ie, going in and deposing democratically-elected leaders so that we can install dictators that are friendly to the US).
The US has had trouble cultivating democratically elected regimes that are friendly towards us in countries like Iraq. In the US, we tend to conflate 'democratic government' with 'government that shares our objectives and goals'.
And we're not talking about whether individual Iraqis in Minnesota are ready for democracy. We are talking about the link posted earlier in the thread, which suggested that the optimal number of immigrants in the U.S. would be two billion. That's not encouraging immigration of selected individuals, it's endorsing wholesale migration of huge populations.
It suggested no such thing. Please reread it:
"What is the optimal number of imported tomatoes? Soviet central planners tried to figure things out this way. Americans shouldn’t. We should decide on the optimal terms on which tomatoes can be imported, and then let the market decide the number."
Once you remove the "indentured" part from H1-B's, we'll never hit the cap again.
It is good for a laborer when there is more available work than there is labor - they can command better rates and generally have a better quality of life (see: almost everyone in the tech industry right now). It is good for someone with lots of capital to have as much excess labor as possible (assuming there's still people that can afford to buy that person's products). When a person with capital can make cheaper products because the labor is cheap, it doesn't necessarily mean that all products become cheaper. You end up with the walmart economy where you have the people who own and manage in their mansions and everyone else unable to generate any meaningful wealth.
Ability to switch jobs at will, can bring up the paid salary and it puts the onus on employer to ensure employee is treat equal to other other employees in US. If employee is not treated/paid well enough, employee can move to another company in US.
Also, unless you cap it in a per industry basis (which makes the whole thing very inflexible to changes in the economy) you just created an insurmountable problem for those firms that want to hire, say, a Catalan interpreter. Required skill uncommon in the U.S.? Check. Easy to get a foreign worker with that skill? Check. But now you need to pay them a software engineer salary or higher.
As a matter of fact, given how small the cap is, you could conceive that the only software engineering jobs that would be hiring internationally would be in high frequency trading and other such areas of the industry that pay higher salaries. Or, software engineering, but just in the bay area (other places pay less because of adjusting for the cost of living). No matter the rest of the considerations associated with why someone chooses a particular job.
Other than that, you're absolutely right. This would mostly benefit software companies in the Bay or NYC, and the ones that pay way above average at that. I'd argue it'd be better than current situation though. Indian employees are effectively tied to their employer due to the Green Card backlog. It's significantly less true for the H-1B holders hired by Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like.
And there are other skills-specific visa categories. For example, a professional hockey player on a North American roster from wherever is never denied a visa because of any other visa quota (H-1 variants, L variants, etc.)
American electorate is somehow more placated by having a random number generator yield winners in a green card lottery.
If I get a job, and my company NEEDS me, and I'm GOOD at what I'm doing, I should get IN; period. There should be no crap involved. How the hell is it good for a company to be told that it can't grow because it happened to petition the 65,001st person out of 65,000 that year? How the hell is it good for the prospective employee to have to try again later? And in extremely-fast-moving industries such as tech, even the arbitrary time frame of "one year" is an insanely long time.
The only limit that kind of makes sense is a thorough investigation of the type of person you're bringing in (e.g. university degrees or other background, some indication of what they're bringing to the country as a whole). It may make sense to force companies to prove that no U.S. citizen can do the job but this system has been gamed for years, as companies produce vague job descriptions just like they post vague patent descriptions.
They are trying to protect US citizens from losing their jobs (or getting wages cut) due to a sudden availability of cheap labor. A government is rightfully concerned with making sure its own citizens are gainfully employed. Citizens vote, foreigners don't. Every person within those borders who does not have a job puts a drain on the rest of the country. Someone without a job outside of those borders does not. So bringing someone across those borders while an unemployed person is within them is a net economic negative.
Look at the biggest H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx It's all low quality outsourcing shops like Infosys and Cognizant.
These laws/protections are intended to prevent a race to the bottom. If the public subsidizes the operation of a company through security, education, and infrastructure, the community that makes that investment is entitled to ensure that the fruits of that investment go to other members of the community.
First, are you willing to pay $500 more for every product, and $10 more for every meal? Companies have to compete, and they are responding to what is necessary to survive. If a company employs 5,000 U.S. citizens and can't compete, it may stumble and lay off 1,000 U.S. citizens, or fail entirely and shed 5,000 U.S. jobs, all because it wasn't allowed to bring in a few immigrants to grow a little.
Entire companies (and successful companies, like Google) have been started by immigrants, creating potentially thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens. There is no reason to automatically fear immigrants; many of them are brilliant people.
A lack of a paid job does not make you a "drain" on society, either! What about children? What about volunteer work in communities? For that matter, I have met some astoundingly lax and irresponsible people over the years that have paying jobs, to the point where I almost thought of them as a net negative to the company.
You're playing fast and loose with the facts. $500 for every product and $10 for every meal? That doesn't seem like an intellectually honest scenario. Where is that based in reality? Skilled immigration and non-skilled immigration are totally different. No one here is begrudging the immigrants picking fruits and doing farm labor. The issue is when companies lie/cheat/commit fraud to outsource jobs that Americans do want and are qualified/willing to do, all for the sake of driving down wages.
Not to mention most of those 'products' are manufactured in China already so there isn't going to be much price increasing there. Second, what a ridiculous scenario where a company has to choose between hiring 'a few' immigrants to save 'thousands' of US workers. Again, where are you drawing these examples from? Clearly not reality.
You didn't acknowledge what I said and again shifted the goal posts to another issue entirely. This is a pointless conversation if you can't even listen to the other side.
And while his numbers are invented, the concept is spot on: producing some things is expensive in the US, perhaps too much so to be competitive.
Ask an Indian entrepreneur how easy it is to hire an US national with origins in Pakistan.
I assure you and anyone reading this, your skills are not unique nor is you talent unmatched. And even if they were, there is no way it could be discovered in our broken hiring processes. The chief attraction in these 65000 cases, so long as some vaguely plausible skill exist, is price I'm afraid.
I mean, in the absence of open borders, we have a limited number of spots available. Why should someone who wants to open a sandwich shop have lower priority than a programmer? Why should we skew things to accomodate Disney's desire to fire middle aged programmers? I think it's pretty clear we aren't talking about best and brightest here.
While I don't love the idea, I would concede that focusing on skilled immigration does make a certain amount of sense. But even then, I see no reason to give corporations the power to micromanage who gets in and who doesn't. They are, of course, free to hire any of the immigrants who come here - in fact, it would be very illegal, and rightly so, to discriminate against immigrants.