Immigration Policies an Ongoing Concern to AI Researchers

I am talking about the employment based greencard backlog. I’m not familiar with the situation with other categories.

There were relatively many immigrants in America at times, and relatively few at other times. However, overall, there were too few immigrants to say that the America was “made” by them, as opposed to being made by people who were born here. At best, you could argue that it was made by people who were descendants of immigrants, but then this is true about most nations of the world, as most nations comprise of people who are descendants to immigrants.

Cultural homogeneity has upsides and downsides. Some of the most successful countries in the world (Japan, the Scandinavian countries, etc., are culturally homogenous). For example, Tokyo wouldn’t work if it was culturally heterogenous. Culturally heterogenous cities all end up kind of looking like Toronto, London, New York, etc. Interesting and vibrant, but not exactly orderly and organized.

> Your example doesn't strike me as one which I recognise as a problem. Even if neither your dad nor your wife are willing to give an inch in accepting the other may have a point, is this not better than neither of them having been exposed to that point in the first place?

Except at the end of the day they both vote and have to live under the kinds of governments picked by the other. For example during COVID, my dad was completely unable to relate to why some people had civil liberties objections to lockdown orders. (Not just concluding, on the balance, that lockdowns outweighed the impact on civil liberties, but completely unable to understand there was even a balancing process at issue.) He welcomes the centralization of power in DC, the idea that a well-credentialed bureaucracy will tell the backwaters of the country what to do. (One of the things we forget is that elite immigrants are often elite in their home countries. My family is from the same educated, ideologically forward thinking tiny minority of people who decided it would be tenable to impose secularism in the 1972 Bangladesh constitution, on a country that’s overwhelmingly Muslim.) Of course this drives my wife nuts—her family kept moving west to get as far away from the government as physically possible.

Now to some extent this parallels cultural conflicts that already exist in America. But large scale immigration certainly changes the balance. When I was growing up, Northern Virginia was what I’d call “traditional American elitist.” Where there is an elite, but being elite is considered somewhat unseemly, so even the elites pay homage to the “common man.” With the large scale Asian immigration to Northern Virginia over the last 30 years, the culture has changed quite dramatically. What used to be an “under the breath” hostility to the “rest of Virginia” has become an open one.

We can debate about the merits of these views—but that’s not my point here. My point is that this cultural disconnect exists even with educated, high-income immigrants. And it’s entirely reasonable for folks who are already in the US to see that as a reason to oppose large scale immigration. Certainly, if the shoe were in the other foot, and Americans were streaming into Dhaka bringing with them their hedonistic individualism, there would be outrage among Bangladeshis.

And? A basic criterion for higher level political thinking is being able to distinguish between what benefits you personally and what’s good policy in general.

> 1) while 1st gen immigrants may hold different values, their kids turn out mostly to hold Americanized values and

It’s not a one way process, especially at the high rates of immigration we’re seeing now. The share of the population that’s foreign born has tripled since 1970, to almost 15%. That degree of immigration changes American culture even as American culture changes the immigrants.

> 2) the fact that they don’t fit in culturally is good, we want people with different perspectives.

I don’t think that applies when you’re talking about a Democratic polity. In fact I think the opposite is true. A basic precept of international law is that different groups have the right to self-determination and cultivation of their own cultures under their own governments, when possible: https://unpo.org/article/4957. Bangladesh, where I’m from, exists because Pakistanis and Bangladeshis didn’t want to be part of the same body politic.

My wife’s family hunted wild game as their primary source of protein up to her grandparents’ generation. This is totally alien to my dad, who comes from a country where there has been no “frontier” for a thousand years. They don’t see eye-to-eye on say gun control, and they don’t even really have a cultural context in common that would allow them to meaningfully debate the issues.

Now, maybe other factors outweigh these disadvantages. But as far as I can tell, that cultural disconnect is a political challenge to be overcome, not something that’s good in and of itself. I mean, it’s not like we don’t have enough problems in this country with people not seeing eye-to-eye as it is.

Our (US) immigration policy and process is an expensive, painful, broken mess. That fellow residents welcome you after all the legal expense, time-wasted, and plain old stress, if besides the point.

Hyperboles don't help neither

And "within 2%" is a disingenuous response: why not say "below"? And why compare the percentages by absolute difference? A 2% difference when we're talking about proportions around the 15% level is significant.

Is this part of the failed hostile environment policy from a few years back?

But now I understand where my math is wrong - I got the UK tax brackets wrong. For Germany I took ~42% (actually 39%) as what the state will take from a 58k€ salary but in the UK the state will take 25% of the £50k salary (most of the income in the 20% bracket). That is indeed significantly less.