The only proven method of stopping immigration to your country: make your country such a shit hole nobody wants to move to it.
If you look at the charts, it seems that if the US is a shithole, then Canada is twice the shit hole, and France and Germany are twice that.
In fact, it doesn’t appear that there are any non-shitholes using this metric.
I think the US should facilitate immigration by probably expanding the H1B 10x and reducing the period for a green card and also overturn Euclid v Amber and NEPA (with state level CEQA style to follow) but the reality is that even an immigration-resistant US administration is far more popular than any other country as a destination; and that’s probably simply due to the fact that it’s the one Western economy that is still dynamic despite everything.
One of the worst ideas I've ever seen, and completely out of touch with American workers.
As someone who worked in US and left it long time back, last year was the first time I could hear ambivalent views on US from my friends who work there. They are still in US as they make a lot of money but have started to consider the alternatives.
How are people with that mentality--here for the money, but don't buy into the underlying concepts--going to affect the civic structure of the U.S.?
The countries most immigrants come from have both liberals and conservatives. Immigration can’t change the long-term political balance. What it does instead is change what kind of left or right wing candidate is viable. The Bush/Romney GOP would have been wiped out in a landslide under 2024’s demographics. But Trump was able to win Nevada and rack up the margin in diverse states like Texas and Florida with stupid policies like “no taxes on tips.” Theatrics, handouts, and patronage is how politics works in most countries immigrants come from. Trump can play that game, the old Anglo GOP couldn’t.
Over time, American politics will more begin to resemble the politics of the places the immigrants are coming from, with guys like Mamdani instead of Carter and Trump instead of Reagan.
Here in Canada, before all this went down, the "work as a professional in the US, earn $$$$$, retire back in Canada or go back to a Canadian job with your pockets bursting with cash" was a fairly popular strategy in tech. I don't know how many people pulled it off in reality, but workers from either of our countries have/had some of the easiest pathways to working in the other one. I don't think either one is going to be very outraged at their neighbors coming over to work here.
For reference, I've for many years (35) lived in and around NYC/Brooklyn/New Jersey, LA, Las Vegas and Miami proper. Europe, I've been to Berlin, London, Paris, Strasbourg, Munich, and some I forget. It's a night and day difference and it baffles me that someone from there would want to live here. Cheers.
If you take a good SWE salary in Munich (example 80k), and compare it to an average/solid software shop in the states that gives 200k. Expenses can comparatively quadruple and you will still have much more at the end of the month to do with as you please. You can live in so many places in the states where this salary is realistic. But only a handful of places in Europe even have salaries that could come close as a concept. Switzerland that could get you there has even higher expenses and even there only FAANG offers such salaries.
And outside of software, doctors in the states make many multiples compared to European ones. Most blue collar workers make multiples, lawyers make multiples, pretty much any job you take you can make much more. I agree that life is better in Europe and I'd choose to live here 9/10 times, but that's down to mentality and the fact there's a reason we're less productive than you.
Many jobs pay really well in the US, but many more pay poorly. The top 10% are responsible for ~50% of consumer spending, and the typical American is not that well off.
Germany, like many other European countries, relies more on exports and less on domestic demand than the US. As a natural consequence, its immigration policy favors skilled immigration to keep top wages down. If the wages grow too quickly, your exports become more expensive than those of your competitors, and the entire economy suffers. And when the economy grows, it's better to use the surplus to raise typical wages than top wages.
Or at least that's how I am interpreting the parent post...
From the graphs, it seems that knowledge of our non-dairy pavement is filtering through to other countries. But a longer term graph would be nice; I'd like to see how the indicator reacted over more economic cycles, but I know some visa categories that had been oversubscribed on opening day for years started staying open for most of the year when the mortgage crisis hit, and I'd love to see data from previous downturns, too.