Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

As an immigrant myself, this seems like a vastly superior system compared to most others in the world.

Pretty mcuh every country's immigration system falls into one of the following buckets:

1) Market based. Companies "bid" on foreign workers, either directly by paying for the visa, or indirectly using the worker's wage. Some form of quote exists, and the highest bidders win.

2) Lottery. Set a minimum qualifications, which is pretty lenient, and a quota that is significantly lower than the number of qualified applicants. Use a lottery system to decide who gets in and who doesn't.

3) Central planning. Some government agency decides which professions and industries are most important to the country, and need foreign workers the most. Politics, special interests lobbying and/or government incompetence in judging market needs, all figure prominently.

4) Some government bureaucrat, who reads through your life story, and spends 30 minutes meeting with you, gets to arbitrarily decide who stays and who doesn't.

4 scares the hell out of me. 2 is just stupid. I don't have any trust in the government's ability to effectively conduct 3. 1 is the least of all evils unfortunately.

The US does have different enlightenment-era founding principles from countries that are based on ethnicity, religion, or even a shared history according to its founding documents. The priority for individual dignities may conflict with ideas about social safety nets that have become the norm, but it is compatible with sympathy for people who are oppressed and who are undermined.

While immigration is critical to the vitality of the US economy, that is not its only goal. Furthermore, an attempt to optimize immigration for the predicted economic output of immigrants won't necessarily have the most favorable economic outcome. I think Silicon Valley itself serves as a perfect example. There is a significant number of second generation immigrants whose parents escaped abuse somewhere else in the world, then worked hard at a menial job to raise children that went on to do something great.

Whether or not there are problems with the interview processes, making the world a better place by getting people and their families out of terrible situations is a good goal on its own merits. There are a lot of loud anti-immigration people in the US who claim to be proud of selfishness and potentially undermining the economy, but the actual experience for immigrants is better than elsewhere according to friends who have worked around the world.

> immigration is critical to the vitality of the US economy

How is that? I think it was hugely true in the previous century, which was built on manufacturing industries, plentiful labor was directly connected. Unskilled labor has less buying power now than ever, so there will be more burden if they are not employed. This will be more likely after giving away our manufacturing, what's left for them to do?

I think it has more to do with our ability to keep current and polinate the necessary skills that we need to keep our economy vital. Several of my most skilled and intelligent coworkers are immigrants. Having that diversity of background and opinion is an incredible asset for a team.

Despite what both parties are saying, it's not dead. There's still plenty of people who want to come to America the dreams of our forefathers. We need to be willing and capable of accepting them, and flourishing with their help. Hard work should still be an American value, and it won't be if we turn isolationist.

Bear in mind that the existing system is better than what's being proposed. Except for the minor difficulty that it lets people into the country that the UK needs, which is against government policy.

There is a survivor's bias here that concerns me. Currently the world values the tech sector because we're perceived as potentially making people a lot of money. Once it catches on that we spend most of our days cutting through the red tape of entrenched spaghetti code and making pixels blink, this could all change.

It may swing back to valuing farming/construction/industry or shift to even higher speculation (space exploration etc) and we could find ourselves ostracized. I would prefer that we had more open immigration policies and worked towards solving the root cause of mass migration, which is hundreds of years of colonialism and capitalist imperialism that led to global warfare and suffering. The people have a better shot at accomplishing this than either the market or authoritarian governments.

(Side note: I don't think slavs, goths, vandals, huns, greeks, etruscs, arabs, phoenicians, etc. were affected of any imperialism ideas back in the days when they invaded Europe.)

The issue with the current migration is it encourages the migrants to overtake the largest cities and the proposed legislation with the minimum salary encourages this: you can earn such amount only if you live in the top 3 city. Are you a builder, carpenter, electrician, teacher? Good luck to earn such money as an employee outside the metropolitan areas. Yet the need for these professions is higher than ever.

If the migration would be more balanced, restricting the freedom of move, there would be less side-effects, at least no more ghettos.

I am immigrant and I like the idea too. Ted Cruz's call for a very high minimum salary for H-1Bs is also the only thing I will probably ever agree with him.

I think that this is a special case. In this case a COMPANY is importing a worker to do a job. If they really need to import a worker they should probably be paying that worker at LEAST 150% of the MEDIAN pay for work in that field.

Instead of setting a high minimum salary, sort the offers by descending order of salary and give the visa to the top N.

The biggest excuse for H-1B visa is that the company can't find qualified workers. Pay enough, and you will find someone qualified sooner or later.

Thus ensuring that Silicon Valley gets to eat up all the H-1Bs.

Not if SV has qualified locals that will work for less than the H1-B bid amount? Why would they pay above market rate?

(Maybe I have absolutely no idea what salaries are like in SV, I'll grant you that... Western/Rochester NY local.)

The government should not be in the business of setting salaries.

I thought it was a pretty clever way to kill off the H-1B visa program. The downside is that the end result is probably just more companies outsourcing entire departments instead.

I know this won't be popular here at all for a couple reasons, one being that there are many who are like you immigrants or want to become immigrants; but thing is, beyond the individual interests and advantages of immigrating to a better place, there are massive impacts on a macro level that people don't quite consider in their pursuit of those self interests. What immigration really does, among other things, is drain capacity and even capital from countries that not only may have funded the education, but also are then losing intellectual and technical capacity. It is really not only a detriment to source countries, it is also a detriment to destination countries like the USA where immigrants like you are used as tools to ratchet salaries downward and also detracts and defuses pressures to improve the education system to supply the supposed missing supply.

I get that many people don't quite get it, and it's difficult to wrap ones mind around something one has a self-interest in not acknowledging or seeing through the propaganda that the wealthy use to fool the majority to go along with things that are counter to their own interests in favor of the interest of the wealthy and powerful. Reality though is that immigration is really a rather nasty neo-colonialist ruse that is really just a huge wealth concentration mechanism.

The people who are or plan to be migrant were usually fed with your ideas like yours. "The situation is suck here, but your kids will live in a better place." Then the kids and grandkids still live in the same suck country with a suck elite.

History of Europe and US is all about migration. This situation has pros and cons.

Maybe the linked article doesn't make it clear, but the system in the UK is all of these points put together to some extent.

It's mostly pointless in reducing net migration levels, because the quota for Tier 2 visas to non Europeans was capped at 20,000 for the last 5-6 years, and last year was the first time the cap was hit.

Why is 2 stupider than 1?

The justification for allowing immigration is the shortage of skills. If you use a random process then you won't get the skills you need.

Not that I agree with this, right now we need nurses and programmers, in a couple of years the situation will be completely different.

I thought the justification for allowing immigration was that it is a human right.

I think that is the justification for allowing in refugees and asylum seekers (i.e. protecting them from human rights abuses), but not usually used for economic migrants.

If that was the justification, then a lottery doesn't achieve that. Nothing short of completely open borders achieves that.

No. If western countries let in 'everyone' who wants to come, they'd be horribly, horribly over-populated and huge swaths of the world would never develop.

The problem is (if you like game theory), that it's in everyone's personal interest to migrate somewhere richer. However, if everyone does that, wherever they came from experiences such massive drain that it'll be worse off. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, unlimited immigration is a poor 'equilibrium' for all involved. 'Developing' nations will never develop, and developed nations will face massive over-crowding.

The reason the west currently allows immigration in the numbers we do is because it's an easy way to get skilled, motivated labour - at once allowing for economic growth as well as driving down the relative cost of labour.

Freedom to travel/migrate should be a human right, however there are many problems with that, considering the current state of the world.

Which is why all of America lives in Atherton and New Haven and nobody is left in Mississippi or Alabama.

I know you're being sarcastic, but California and NY combined have nearly 20% of the population of the US.

In the US, the most prosperous states are definitely also the most populous.

Because a lottery gives you the people for whom a small chance of getting in is worth going for. If someone's awesome enough to have lots of awesome opportunities in many places, then they wouldn't commit to a lottery-based opportunity. Thus you lose the top in addition to getting people who barely meet the criteria coming in.

The US has an even dumber version:

5) Nepotism. If you are related to or sleeping with a citizen, you have a very good chance at getting in.

Almost every country has that. What, do you want to split up families and loved ones?

Plus, the US actually does something less-dumb, and expands citizenship to people born in the country, regardless of their parents' status or race. ("Jus soli")

Why is promoting birth tourism/anchor babies less dumb? I.e., what makes the child of a wealthy chinese woman who visits CA to give birth more deserving of citizenship than peasant who worked very hard to attend college and jump through our citizenship hoops?

The original motivation for this rule was to prevent disenfranchisement of former slaves. That goal was achieved, and is no longer relevant since all former slaves are dead.

Pregnant women are screened out during the visa interview process to prevent this from occurring. It's not perfect, in the case of individuals receiving multi-year visas, but those are only provided to individuals who have spent significant time in the US, or have family members who are citizens. Also, a baby born in the US to a non-US citizen parent does not automatically confer the parent with citizenship or permanent residency rights. In the case of "anchor babies", the child usually will not have the right to sponsor his parents for residency until they are 18.

What makes the parents of an anchor baby more deserving of citizenship than a person who worked hard, went to school and developed skills useful to the US? Why do we consider this more beneficial to the US than instead importing the highly skilled person who goes through the system rather than subverting it?

(Again, working within the normative framework suggesting immigration should be restricted, which is not my view.)

It's not really about the parent so much as the child. The child deserves to have parents that are present in its life.

The parents can raise the child in their home country if that's an important concern. As far as I know, no country will deprive a child of citizenship simply because he was born while the parents were on vacation.

Right, there's no chance of that being impractical or harmful to the child.

Of course it's harmful to the child. But there are millions of children born in various parts of the world who would suffer the same harms. Why should we protect a Mexican child who's parents crept across the border to give birth, but not an Indian child who's parents applied for immigration but were rejected?

I feel like you are implicitly appealing to a very extreme version of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...

The question isn't who we should protect, but who the US government should protect in the course of implementing its immigration policy. The Indian child is not a US citizen.

If you scroll up you'll see that we are discussing whether current policy is good, not what current policy actually is. "Is" != "aught".

Yes, I know. I think that it is legitimate for the US government to prioritize the interests of US citizens in implementing and defining its immigration policy. After all, if it did not, the US would simply have open borders, and there is not much point in discussing that hypothetical.

>What makes the parents of an anchor baby more deserving of citizenship than a person who worked hard, went to school and developed skills useful to the US?

I can't say, as I didn't write the laws. My guess is that US immigration law is designed to limit skilled immigration because educated Americans in white collar jobs can raise a bigger stink politically about H1B competition in high-wage industries than working class Americans can.

As a foreign student who completed his undergrad education in the US, my student visa interview required me to show evidence that I would not try to use the F1 student visa to transition to H1B or a different visa class that can be linked to a green card application down the line. This is standard policy, as my friends who're also US-educated had the same questions during their interview.

It's also difficult to enforce because once you're in the country and have completed your education, you can be recruited by a company who will sponsor your H1B, at which point the ICE will evaluate it as they would any other H1B application. So the whole rigmarole seems pointless to me, but that is bureaucracy for you.

Pregnancy tourism is rampant. There are businesses in L.A. that advertise it on the web, even.

There are many methods, one common one being to lie about how many weeks pregnant the woman is (note, for example, the woman who gave birth en route on a flight that had to be diverted to Alaska last October).

No, I favor open borders.

But if we are going to have limited immigration, we should do it on the basis of choosing the most valuable immigrants. At the moment, fully 74% of immigration [1] to the US is based solely on nepotism.

Also, it's silly to suggest that I favor splitting up families - I oppose preventing immigrants from going back home to be with their family. We aren't a slave state. (For much the same reason I oppose our various penalties for Americans renouncing their citizenship.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_reunification#Family_re...

>I oppose preventing immigrants from going back home to be with their familU.

You're not making any sense. I'm British and met my husband when working in Canada. One of us has to immigrate somewhere in order for us to be together.

I think he's saying that someone here illegally should be able to return to country of origin and then re-enter illegally at will, protected from repatriation. This puts a premium on entering the country by whatever means and at whatever risk.

He was saying that being married to a US citizen should not enable a person to enter the US legally. (He said "sleeping with", but in fact the US does not generally grant dependant visas to unmarried partners.)

Not quite, I'm saying that from a utilitarian perspective, importing wives for US citizens is not better for the country than importing high skilled workers.

I'm also saying that from a justice perspective, banging an American and getting him pony up for marriage doesn't make a person intrinsically more deserving of citizenship than working hard and creating (potential) value for the US.

Again - I'm generally an open borders proponent. What I say we should do is stop using violence to prevent peaceful people from entering the US and engaging in trade here. (And we should make whatever economic adjustments are necessary to prevent an increase in state-induced violence/threats of violence, e.g. eliminate the welfare state.)

But if I accept the logic behind restricted borders (e.g. "we can't handle too many more" and "immigration should benefit natives"), that logic doesn't really support nepotism based immigration.

You appear to be very cynical about marriage and relationships in general. Visas are granted to the spouses of US citizens because the US recognizes the right of these citizens to have a family life. It is not only the spouse who is harmed if the visa is denied but also the US citizen in question, whose rights the US government is obliged to recognize. Utilitarian considerations are largely irrelevant. As far as justice is concerned, I don't see why you think it would be unjust to grant visas to spouses. Of course spouses of US citizens are not the only people who should be granted visas, but no-one suggested that was the case.

> No, I favor open borders.

I once thought that way too. However I was advised to consider a country as a body, as a cell, tissue, or organ. Then one thing became clearer, the need to police boundaries. Not necessarily in a militant manner, or with belligerence. nature. But that boundaries are a good thing.

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