The Ordeal of Immigrating Legally
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I trust there must be good reasons on a global scale... but in my local view this makes only limited sense.
(Btw., this is the J-1 visa home residency rule, for those who care. I need to live in my home country for at least two years before I can apply for an H-1b. Two years at home is just long enough to settle in and make moving _again_ not very attractive.)
The real barriers to foreigners coming to the US are all bureaucratic.
Sorry. But that really made me laugh out loud. Seriously. Where do you think that bureaucracy finds it's origin?
Should I take this in the natural way that a native speaker of English would take it, to mean that you have never personally been to rural America? Where else have you been, and what other countries' attitudes toward immigrants are you comparing to the United States, which has one of the highest rates of legal immigration in the world?
I should explain that I have spent much of my life in rural America (where my mother grew up, and where most of my aunts and uncles and cousins live). The rural Americans I know have been very accepting of my wife, a first-generation immigrant, and generally accepting of immigrants to the degree of often hiring immigrants as their various business ventures scale up.
I have also lived outside the United States, although only on one other continent, and in my years overseas I have met quite a few people from a variety of countries who report that their countries of course also limit immigration. Is there any country in the world today with no restrictions at all on immigration? Where is it? Who emigrates to settle there?
100% open immigration from Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and similar countries... could possibly work.
100% open immigration to anybody who speaks fluent English... could possibly work.
But opening up our borders completely to Eastern Europe, Asia, South America, Africa would create complete chaos.
As an immigrant to the US from the former Soviet Union I know how hard it is to really learn the language, the culture, and assimilate to the point where you're actually leading a decent life and being a productive member of society.
It took my family about 4 years to really get situated and both of my parents are highly educated with a very strong work ethic and we had previous family living here.
And we had to be supported by welfare and other government programs for 3 of those years.
Although obviously a net gain over time, it takes a lot of resources to bring an immigrant into the American fold and we don't have enough of those resources to open our doors to everybody right now.
And it wouldn't even be good for the immigrants. With a large influx of people from their country coming in, most would probably just settle somewhere together, assimilate much slower and possibly even turn to semi-criminal activity like many Russian immigrants I knew in New York.
No, we need to change our immigration policy, but not just by opening up the doors.
The more immigrants we get, the more channels will exist for assimilation. Many colleges and universities are having a tough time staying in business, and major cities like Detroit are falling into decay b/c nobody wants to live there.
When you consider how hard people have to work elsewhere even to get by, pretty much anyone with enough gumption to come to the US would eventually attain a middle class lifestyle, then many would exceed it.
And even if some remained very poor, it's probably better to be very poor in the US than in many developing nations.
I see where you're coming from (trying to avoid economic shock with abrupt policy changes), but since millions of Mexicans are already immigrating extra-legally, would it make a meaningful difference?
Where you say you were from a highly educated family with a strong work ethic, and took several years to be stable, I can point to reams of illegally immigrating Mexicans who are uneducated, the definition of dirt poor, by definition take limited gov't funding, and yet still make ends meet.
Yes, heavy immigration would be tough on some, and would require expansion of immigration services, but would be far from chaos. If there was still a requirement for a verified job, or some other method of supporting yourself, it would be a net boon. In addition, many of these immigrants would bring funds which would be spent while they established themselves.
America needs people. We're enormous, have a surplus of many natural resources (including food) and we're turning people away who are perfectly qualified. We're also far too insular for our own good, and need the exposure of mixing cultures to keep the melting pot working.
Those people may establish enclaves, but over time they integrate and enrich us simply due to edge interactions. Chinese, Irish, Russians - they've all formed enclaves at some point in America, and yet have still contributed to our society.
It's just plain osmosis. Open the borders, and people flow into the US until it reaches the point where living in the US is no longer any better than living... in whatever the current worst country in the world is.
Many of the people living in shanty towns are victims of failed institutions, corrupt leaders, and oppression. With this removed their resulting standard of living would likely be at least middle class. The lazy and unmotivated from those nations would stay there, and the motivated would arrive on US shores ready to improve things for themselves.
These institutions create many "ladders" for people to climb to improve their situation. We also have a mature highway system, lots of consumer credit infrastructure, thousands of community colleges and low end universities, etc.
It wouldn't be all that sudden, since with each wave of immigrants, services and structures would emerge to make it easier for subsequent waves.
You need only to know that "adding more programmers to a project makes it later" to understand that adding more people to the USA is not going to magically make things better for everyone.
For example, in a geopolitical view, the US is stable b/c it has lots of ocean shipping ports and good north/south waterways, plus abundant natural resources. Not because everyone happens to speak the same language -- though such easy transit encourages people to want to learn a common language.
So since we have lots of institutions that are functioning well and durable, they provide incentives to newcomers to interact with them in mutually beneficial ways.
Contrast this with mexico which has been destabilized by US drug policy which enriches the criminal gangs who produce drugs and profit from high black market prices. In that setting, the main "institutions" are criminal gangs and corrupt cops. There's not much incentive to undertake legal agriculture, so few try. There is not much incentive to build structures that would be toppled by the gangs and corruption.
So without getting too long winded, I'm arguing that institutions are an emergent property of geopolitical factors, and that the US has many strong institutions that would benefit from improved economies of scale if more people participated.... even if those people started out at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
http://reason.org/files/cb299f0134ca8bb75243c69caa92eea7.pdf