Hacker News Reader

Comment by iwr | Hacker News Reader

In short: make life easy for skilled migrants and your economy will do good.

I'll say it's simpler than that: make sure immigrants get to sustain themselves through work rather than welfare. This creates a direct incentive for them to learn the language and actually integrate into the new society.

The great problem Europe has with migrants is not the inherent "poor imported stock", but the lean welfare rules and strict employment rules. This ensures a toxic proportion of new arrivals simply don't want to or can't integrate. It also means you get second-generation immigrants with no better prospects than their parents.

View on HN

This particular piece isn't so much dealing with skilled migrants as it is with migrants who are willing and able to work and can do something as they're seasonal workers who normally come to work in orchards etc.

New Zealand has a significant advantage in that case where the people coming in on this program are islanders with a strong cultural imperative to work hard and send money home to their families.

Your points are good ones, they just don't really mirror what's actually happening in this case.

If anything I would expect a highly skilled worker (doctor, programmer etc) to be taking an income loss coming here.

The same goes for Europe, at least for immigrant doctors, who are considered under-skilled and must go back to University at first to get an equivalent diploma...

Also, the medical profession has lost a lot of its prestige here (In Belgium, at least).

From what I heard from colleagues coming from less developed nations, they were more respected in their country of origin than local, established doctors are here.

Due to latent (or sometimes overt) racism, foreign doctor are even less considered, and have thus a harder time earning money.

Even if their net income increases, on a relative scale they lose a lot and happiness is a function of how rich you are relative to your peers.

Your point is almost the total opposite of what this article is about. It may or may not be true, but this article doesn't support it.

This article is about temporary, unskilled immigration for doing things like fruit picking. It's not arguing about any impact on the New Zealand economy - instead it shows benefits in the economy the immigrants come from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com