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Comment by zingar | Hacker News Reader

"...(the only access to the islands) is to have a pre-arranged job contract with a company that has signed a form of bond taking responsibility for you"

That sounds like all British immigration rules. My employer had to apply for my visa and had to pay all my healthcare contributions for a year up front before I could move for a job in London. If I lose my job I have a few weeks to find a new employer (who will have to be willing to pay for a visa transfer) or I have to leave the country.

It's a bizarre system but it seems like this reporter doesn't know how normal it is. I doubt British people know how bizarre the policies that arose from their voting are either.

(Likewise for Europe and the US)

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It sounds perfectly reasonable.

Barring exceptional circumstances, presumably the employer takes the decision to recruit externally for cost-cutting reasons; it's important then that the hidden costs of healthcare etc are not passed on to the tax payer.

But both the employer and employee are tax payers! There's nothing uniquely expensive about taxpaying employees that happen to be born overseas.

I'm guessing the prepaid contribution refers to the "NHS surcharge": https://www.freemovement.org.uk/what-is-the-immigration-heal...

(while Americans are probably going "hey that looks cheap at £624 a year compared to my insurance", note that it's not insurance and you still have to pay it if you have private cover)

Without commenting on the policy I think you're missing the maths.

I can earn $x here or $(x - y) to be in the uk. In the UK I get healthcare on the NHS. I move. I quit / am fired / co goes (creatively?) broke. And I keep the healthcare on the NHS and have time to start a family before deportation etc.

Think about large values of y or indeed kickbacks. Does the firm really want /me/? Or do they just want cash which they get by paying very low (or taking a fee from me) as I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare without making the contribution, queue jumping better qualified, harder working, more civic minded people with greater compassionate grounds for being accepted? As ever there's a continuum. "Clearly this person is legitimately... ...then the unexpected thing happened." ends up being harder and quite expensive to identify and enforce fairly and equitably with a public service doing so.

I say nothing of the UK's policy here or its implementation as I'm ignorant. Assuming entrepreneurs won't spring up to arbitrage any system hole they can is naive. Immigration is super-emotive at the best of times especially arbitrarily unfair treatment and those who feel like they're losing from it (rightly or wrongly).

That's the general case being made. Immigration policy is super hard and you kind of have to willfully fortify your compassion as well. More than 700 million people on this planet have no safe drinking water and would want to migrate to any wealthy country under almost any circumstance. Plenty are literally dying to do it. How can we not feel for them? Being compassionate reduces to deciding how many people your country can take easily, with effort, or the level in which society collapses. 700m immigrating in a year will probably achieve collapse.

"What then must we do?"

I haven't got a good answer or indeed a better one than fight corruption everywhere and anywhere under all circumstances.

> queue jumping

There is no queue.

I mean that: there is no requirement for cases to be processed in any kind of order, if at all, and nor is there a quota (except in the minds of Home Office managers).

> I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare

Hardly anyone does this, or at least there's no evidence of this. If you have money which you wish to trade for healthcare, there are usually better ways than bribing a firm to give you a fake job in the UK?

> Plenty are literally dying to do it.

See Afghanistan.

It was, allegedly, important enough to invade and spend billions on, as well as a number of Westerner lives; however, it is also a policy preference that these people die rather than reach the UK, which puts a rather hard upper bound on what they should have expected from us. This is being played out in real time as the UK decides how many of the people who the Taliban will execute as our collaborators it should allow to be rescued.

(asylum and the refugee system is technically separate from immigration in international law, but this is a distinction few people seem to care about. And this is also separate as nobody should realistically expect an Afghan translator for the British Army to find £650 to save their life)

I wonder how many Afghans we could safely relocate to the Falklands?

> There is no queue.

Any country that has a number of people who would like to immigrate of whom it will not accept all and will chose who to reject has a queue. How that queue is implemented, orderly, disorderly, corruptly, unjustly, ridiculously, incompetently or at various times all of the above. Some get in, some don't, it's a queue. It may not be a fantasy of an orderly queue where everyone is served in order in good time and without knowing about it, it does not surprise me to hear you say it is emphatically not that. Think of a priority queue if you must with priority being given by a random number generator tempered with both nonsense and corruption. You jump places in the queue by being designated higher priority. Have you jumped forward enough to be accepted and if not what can you do about it - this is the only question for those trying to get in.

Who are you taking vs who are you rejecting? That's if you're already in. You can't take everyone. The world is a nasty place and this is one of the emotional sharp edge of it. You will reject people whose stories break your heart. You don't get a choice about that.

> priority queue if you must with priority being given by a random number generator tempered with both nonsense

You cannot sensibly call this a "queue". No programmer would accept "random order" when they expected "in order".

Moreover, decisions are independent. The number of people already accepted is not a factor in individual immigration decisions! Someone else getting accepted cannot affect the outcome of your own decision.

> You will reject people whose stories break your heart. You don't get a choice about that.

Why? Who is "you" here? Who's holding a gun to "your" head? You absolutely do get a choice, and moreover if you reject someone who is subsequently killed in the way they warned you about then you, personally - the immigration agent responsible for the decision - are an accomplice in their death.

It's just that this is more apparent when it's the people clearing the runway for the last C130 out of Kabul at gunpoint than when someone's doing it with a pen.

Obviously the priority is /meant/ to be sensibly arrived at. The rest was commentary on how sensible it is likely to actually be in practice, with a nod to your assertions about it which seem at least plausible. I simply don't believe decisions are entirely independent. I strongly doubt the public servants making those decisions have it in the power to increase the rate of immigration tenfold based on individuals meeting criteria without political support. The process is inherently a rate limiting thing.

>Why? Who is "you" here?

"You" is anyone putting themselves in the shoes of coming up with an immigration policy. Spare a thought for any decent human being who actually has to get their hands properly dirty and do it. I may not be a decent human because I think I would run from that opportunity without hesitation. I doubt I have the psychological strength to try for a least worse policy that will bring about misery. There is no stroke of my pen where I wouldn't be seeing millions of people dying any one of whom I could have saved with a different stroke. I'm not sure I can live with that. But I can't really absolve myself of the responsibility for what happens as a voting eligible person in a democracy. On that basis I have to at least consider what current policies are and competing ones that might be somehow a little less horrific. They will all be horrific on a personal level in people's lives. A large number of people.

There are 700 million people on this planet who do not have access to safe drinking water. One would think all of them would happily relocate to any wealthy country where their children have a better chance of a reasonable future. The number who would want to relocate to the UK is probably considerably north of that number as you don't have to be on the lowest rung on the ladder of this planet to see the wealth of the UK and think that's worth moving to. There are people with clean drinking water who are utterly desperate. Have any immigration policy at all - imagine your decree is law and implemented with resources and vigor. If the one decided on involves a scale of migration measured in hundreds of millions in a year societal collapse seems very likely. If one accepts that then one embraces the necessity of rejecting worthy people with heartbreaking stories. By the million.

Who to reject? How many to reject? There is no good answer in my opinion. What is your estimate of the number of people on the planet who will die if you reject them? Know they are being rejected. A tiny fraction of utterly desperate people on this planet will be accepted as immigrants in all the rich countries combined.

I say /nothing/ about Afghanistan and refugees. I say literally nothing because I don't know about it. I point out if the immigration policy arrived at is to take everyone from Afghanistan who wants to move and that policy works (hurrah!) and has manageable costs (again hurrah! and again I have no clue), it's not the end of it. There are literally hundreds of millions more people in dire straits for whom moving their family to any rich country would save them. It's f&^king horrible. Every bit as horrible as scenes being televised. This is not an argument I'm making for rejecting any refugees from any country including Afghanistan. As soon as anyone with any kind of heart starts looking at a rich countries immigration policy and its results it is heartbreaking and horrible with no good answers, only ones you hate and loathe slightly less than others. Again this is not an excuse for being as evil as possible or eschewing all compassion or anything of the sort.

"No more horrific than necessary" is a reasonable goal because immigration policy, any policy, whatever it is, will be horrific. It sucks.

> I strongly doubt the public servants making those decisions have it in the power to increase the rate of immigration tenfold based on individuals meeting criteria without political support.

It is clear that there is high political prioritization of rejecting as many applications as possible, despite what the criteria actually say and whether the criteria are met. Once people manage to appeal to the real courts, rather than the politically controlled asylum process, most of the decisions are overturned. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/03/inhumane-thr...

The number could be significantly increased by simply taking their own stated rules at face value rather than rejecting valid applications.

> You cannot sensibly call this a "queue". No programmer would accept "random order" when they expected "in order".

I see somebody never used the first iteration of AWS SQS.

> There is no queue.

> I mean that: there is no requirement for cases to be processed in any kind of order, if at all, and nor is there a quota (except in the minds of Home Office managers).

That's an if-I-close-my-eyes-the-room-will-be-empty way of looking at it. There's a backlog of cases waiting to be processed and a finite processing capacity, so adding more applications is necessarily going to, on average, delay existing (legitimate) applications.

> Hardly anyone does this, or at least there's no evidence of this. If you have money which you wish to trade for healthcare, there are usually better ways than bribing a firm to give you a fake job in the UK?

If there's a loophole that lets someone get NHS healthcare for significantly less than the market price of equivalent healthcare, it seems absurd on its face to imagine that no-one in the world would want to exploit it. Most people are honourable, but there are enough desperate people, and frankly if were that easy then I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the system.

> See Afghanistan.

> It was, allegedly, important enough to invade and spend billions on, as well as a number of Westerner lives

Pure whataboutism.

> 700m immigrating in a year will probably achieve collapse.

If they all go to the same destination, sure, but there’s no reason to even expect that collective behaviour and plenty of examples to doubt it (most people go short distances, e.g. 80% of the Syrian refugees went to the countries that share a land border with Syria).

Though I absolutely agree with the point that immigration is super-emotive even at the best of times, and likewise I don’t have a good answer to the troubles which cause a need for asylum (very separate in nature from other causes of migration but often blurred together politically) — best I’ve got is seeing that things are getting less bad, so more of what’s currently happening in aggregate is probably good even though we can clearly see specific examples of places and groups where that’s not good enough, like Afghanistan, Syria, Darfur, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, and the Yazidi.

I think the difference is that as a UK citizen, I have been paying into the social security and health system for my entire working life, as opposed to the brief time someone was here to work.

Though it is kind of dumb.

So you think 18 year olds shouldn't be allowed access to the NHS until they've worked for a year or paid a surcharge?

(Obviously not, that's nonsense, but that's the conclusion that would follow from the false premise of predicating healthcare on length of payments. It's pensions that are dependent on payins of National Insurance.)

Wouldn't parents pay in for those 18 years?

Is it bizarre? Sounds like similar rules to anywhere - no country wants to let in people who can't support themselves.

It feels like double-counting to me:

> pay all my healthcare contributions for a year up front

Is fine by itself, at least assuming you then get a discount on the PAYE taxes that you’re essentially pre-paying here.

> If I lose my job I have a few weeks to find a new employer (who will have to be willing to pay for a visa transfer) or I have to leave the country.

Paying to transfer the visa seems a bit strange to me (though I’m conscious of my own naïveté), but otherwise this is also fine by itself.

Both together? Not so much.

> Paying to transfer the visa seems a bit strange to me

There's a bureaucracy to support, so fees for everything they do.

Yes, imagine if the bureaucracy lost the visa paperwork and it was ‘free’. Paying for services rendered as described is certainly the standard expectation.

Not being an employee (for a while or forever) doesn't mean not being able to support yourself. Yes, super-rich enjoy this freedom (of movement and living where they please), but there are lots of people who are rich/sustainable enough to contribute positively to any economy but current immigration systems doesn't allow this in most countries.

No categorisation system is perfect, so there will always be cases that fall through the cracks, but most countries try to offer a spread of visas that cover most of the kinds of positive contributions to the country that they want to attract, without permitting too many who will be a drain instead. Work visas are by no means the only option, but if you're arguing that you're going to contribute positively to the economy then you need to be able to demonstrate that.

That's the problem, there is no way to demonstrate (apply) for many countries, including UK.

Went to the same visa process recently. It left me with the feeling that foreigners were viewed with suspicion.

> I doubt British people know how bizarre the policies that arose from their voting are either.

I assumed this actually was a consequence of their voting (seems in line with Brexit).

It does seem more or less in line with the Brexit votes, but it's worth remembering that the vote was pretty close and a large chunk of the country voted against Brexit. You'll find a wide variety of attitudes to immigration within the UK.

It hast nothing to do with Brexit, I suggest this is actually a kind of political bigotry.

Here's data showing national attitudes towards migrants [1], the UK has consistently one of, if not the most positive view in Europe towards migrants. It's always been a fairly pluralistic place relative to most places on the continent. The notion of reducing migration or having some control over it is fundamentally different that views of migrants themselves, much like there's a big distinction between regular migrants and undocumented migrants, which is sometimes conveniently ignored for political reasons.

The rules for migrants are varied in every country, they are similar on the Continent in many ways where they have their own bits of weirdness.

The Falkland Islands have a population of 3000, which is really, really small. Every 'small nation' especially the really tiny one's are going to have a really peculiar take on basically everything. There's either one person, or not even one person the kinds of jobs for which we take for granted.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/03/14/around-the-wor...

I felt like the detail that mattered there was that it is the only way to get through the British military air base at Mount Pleasant (the only access to the islands).

If you don't have to pass through a military base to get somewhere, there is a bit of wiggle room. You are supposed to do X, Y or Z but there end up being some exceptions.

In this case, the military base has a stranglehold on entry so you aren't likely to see folks bending the rules a tad.

I believe cruise ships provide access. There maybe access via other ships as well.

It's difficult to find due to Covid limits, but it looks like there are usually scheduled flights a couple of times a week to cities in Chile and Brazil.

That's still fairly restrictive. Even with airplanes, it's fairly restrictive.

Much easier if you have a land border for illegal immigrants to wander in, as the US can attest to with it's ridiculous scheme to "build a wall" to resolve the issue.

I am British and I moved to an EU country when Britain was still in the EU.

I was surprised because unless I went to the immigration office to prove to them that I either had 'enough' (never really defined) money to support myself, or had a permanent employment contract - I would not have any state coverage for anything (health etc). The UK would of course not support my health care in a different country on a permanent basis. This was within the EU, so free movement and that - so I was indeed surprised, that other countries did something similar within the EU.

What country is this? In Portugal you only need a declaration under penalty of perjury that 1) you are employed or self-employed (no need of a permanent contract), 2) that you have enough money to support yourself and your dependents and that you have health insurance, provided such requirement applies to Portuguese citizens in your country of origin (leaving asides the students here). In particular the national law that transposes directive 2004/38/EC (Lei n.º 37/2006) says in article 9, n. 4:

> [...] Without prejudice to the dispositions in chapter VII, Union citizens or their family shall never be removed in the following circumstances:

> a) [...]

> b) When the Union citizens entered Portugal to seek employment and they prove that they continue to keep seeking employment.

Chapter VII only says people who joined to country to look for employment are not entitled to social security even after 3 months (which applies across the board).

And when I registered in the Netherlands I don't remember having to provide proof of employment too, though they might have had that information on file. In any case, it was not a permanent contract.

This is Finland. That declaration is basically what they are checking but you are not trusted to declare it yourself.

I don't know how important the permanent thing is or if it is tbh. Here it is not possible to claim salary-linked unemployment benefits (which on paper are actually quite generous) unless you have worked for some period of time (6 months or so in some larger period) even if you are as Finnish as can be.

The thing is, there are many 'soft' things that rely on that registration going through, eg. bank account[1], even a local-priced transport pass.

[1]A Finnish bank account here is more than a place to stash money, it's proof of your ID online to any of the nice e-government services.

For unemployment benefits here you need to have worked 1 year in the past 2 years (possibly interpolated). This applies to nationals and union citizens alike. But the time you worked in other EU countries count towards that total as well. So there is not even indirect discrimination against Union citizens.

My American in laws did expat life in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, others in the region. They, and many other western expats, employed Filipino house keepers. They have to assume a lot of responsibility for their actions while in the country as well. The expats are there under-highly conditional work visas and employeeing low-wage expats to come into the country was like another level of liability they took on personally and could blow up their work visa status if something really went wrong. It was normal for the expats to take their worker's passport and the Filipino's were basically trapped, and they wouldn't always have a car or any mode of transportation. I recall their biggest fear was if she got pregnant while in their "care" it was almost like the child was their responsibility or if she had some relationship with a married guy it would be a big issue (paraphrased hearsay...). It sounded horrible, but in reality it mostly worked since the western expats were not exploitative but the opportunity is more than present. My understanding is the natives imported labor in a highly exploitive way (low wage labor camps, etc).

This reminds me of the article “My Family’s Slave”[1] which is both a powerful story and an interesting look at the cognitive dissonance of people who benefit from modern exploitative labor. Just because someone isn’t constantly and overtly cruel to their “imported labor” does not mean they aren’t exploitative.

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s...

> Just because someone isn’t constantly and overtly cruel to their “imported labor” does not mean they aren’t exploitative.

While true. What’s also interesting is “exploitative” is often through the modern western lens. It’s also a sliding scale where it is quite often seen as a good deal from labor’s perspective. In my previous example, the Filipino’s generally loved the arrangement. They got to travel and send a good deal of money home. It was a highly sought after position from their perspective. My experience is limited to about 10 days in the region and what I heard from American expats, but the hard labor forces also generally liked the arrangement. It offered opportunities that did not exist wherever they immigrated from. It was not without risks as no/low worker safety or OSHA concepts are in effect. Also just what we would consider fair labor practices, just didn’t exist. I’m sure slavery does exist as well because the opportunity is very present.

All of that region is a horror show in terms of exploitation. My opinion is contributing to their economies is effectively endorsing their policies. If you have an issue with the ethics of these countries and their exploitation of vulnerable labour, don't work there.

These are completely normal and typical immigration visa rules the world over. As always though - there are "better" visa's available but they have different sets of requirements and/or costs involved.

I’m from in the US and am naïve, but what is bizarre about that system?

The US is actually bizarre, anyone born in the US automatically gets US nationality. This leads to amusing birth tourism. Iirc it is the only country that does this.

It’s called Jus Soli and while not the most common thing, it isn’t exactly special to the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

The only other country with such liberal application of jus soli is New Zealand. In no other country I'm aware of can you show up, give birth and they will definitely give the child a passport unless the mother or father is a diplomat.

It is widely practiced in the Western Hemisphere. Which is why you can be Mexican or Panamanian and run for president of the US.

I thought US presidents need to be born on US?

No, they just have to be US citizens at birth: either born on American soil or to U.S. parents abroad. This is why Ted Cruz and George Romney could run for president despite being born outside the U.S.

John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone which was a US territory when he was born but was part of Panama by the time he ran for president.

> In no other country I'm aware of can you show up, give birth and they will definitely give the child a passport unless the mother or father is a diplomat.

If you are not aware, then you haven't looked very hard:

> Subsection 3(2) of the Citizenship Act states that Canadian citizenship by birth in Canada – including Canadian airspace and territorial waters – is granted to a child born in Canada even if neither parent was a Canadian citizen or permanent resident except if either parent was a diplomat, in service to a diplomat, or employed by an international agency of equal status to a diplomat. However, if neither parent was a diplomat, the nationality or immigration status of the parents do not matter.[28]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#Continental_North_Ame...

According to that Wikipedia link (and my own NZ knowledge) that is quite incorrect on NZ being either the only other country or even as liberal. Essentially the same as Australia and less permissive than dozens of other major, larger nations.

I think it's the same in France, we call it the "droit du sol".

Not quite.

Children born in France only get French citizenship from birth if at least one parent either is a French citizen or was born in France. Otherwise, there are various processes for them to acquire citizenship later in life if they spend enough of their childhood in France.

In contrast, almost any child born in the US, regardless of the nationality or immigration status of the parents, is a citizen automatically from birth. The only exceptions are children of foreign diplomats and (hypothetically) children of members of an invading army. Even if the parents are visiting as tourists and the child leaves two weeks after birth and never returns, it's still a citizen.

British law is somewhere in between the two- a child born in the UK is a citizen if at least one parent has "settled status" (in other words is a citizen, permanent resident, or otherwise has an unrestricted right to live in the UK).

Thanks for the correction!

You've just sparked a new form of gene propagation.

Imagine being a sperm donor, but in dozens of countries.

Now your progeny will have a large range of citizenship, and locations, from which they may thrive during disaster.

Better than sailors and ports, for one can travel, experience sunny and interesting destinations, make a deposit, and... success!

I see a new startup, which combines cruise ships and pre-arranged donation instructions / locations.

Looking for a co-founder...

Wouldn't it be cheaper to ship the semen? Less entertaining for the donor, of course.

Though, if the goal is to maximize the donor's entertainment, I don't see why we're using artificial insemination.

...

Have you ever seen a stud bull get shipped to a farm?

...

I feel this could end very badly. Like,

Form AirBnB.

...many years later...

All real estate is unaffordable.

Like, there'd be throngs of George Clooneys and Barack Obamas with weird recessive diseases.

And a bizarre fan-club in China of Vladimir Putin babymommas.

...

Didn't Stephen Colbert have a product like this? (I swear, if it had been real, some people would have bought and used it.)

...

We'd recreate that unexplained prehistoric situation, preserved in the genetic record, where a population bottleneck shows up only on the Y chromosome.

That isn't distinctly different from marriage fraud, or whatever the US government calls it now. As a US citizen, you can basically jump start the immigration process by just having a recognized marriage to a foreigner. It's pretty messed up in my opinion and encourages bad behavior on the part of both parties.

What's the alternative though? US citizens with non-American spouses would have to leave the US or live apart from their spouse. Assuming the spouse couldn't independently qualify for permanent residence or a work visa.

I was born in the US and I am the child of immigrants who came here for college 55 years ago. I think being born in the US and automatically becoming a citizen is one of the greatest things about this country.

It's not unique to the US at all. Almost all the countries in North and South America are like this. If you want to claim it's wrong that's another debate but everyone in the Americas came from somewhere else, borders are an ephemeral concept and what's bizarre to me is how strict Europe is with jus sanguinis when its borders have changed so many times in the last century and in the centuries leading up to it. I do believe in border controls and vetting immigrants in the sense of "how many people can fit on this life raft without sinking it, what is the max take-off weight of this airplane" but really everyone I know, even on the right, at some level feel there's an inherent unfairness to where you happen to spawn in this life.

Speaking of bizarre, why are there zero barriers for a Finnish person to move to Portugal, but major barriers for a Brazilian, culturally more proximate due Portuguese colonialism to do the same? Why are there zero barriers for a Greek or Estonian to live and work in Spain but tough immigration rules for the spawn of their 15+ latin american colonies, who speak the same language and have the same religion?

Modern states are to a large part insurance providers. Citizens pay premiums and get health care, pensions, disability care etc.

Insurance works when a large group of people pay premiums to protect against some condition that has not happened yet. If you could sign up for a fire insurance once your house is burning, the system would collapse.

For similar reasons, modern states need to keep poor people out since, on average, they will be a large net burden on their welfare systems.

> what's bizarre to me is how strict Europe is with jus sanguinis

Asian countries are also notoriously hard to get citizenship in.

> Why are there zero barriers for a Greek or Estonian to live and work in Spain but tough immigration rules for the spawn of their 15+ latin american colonies, who speak the same language and have the same religion?

Could be worth exploring for Spain and Portugal.

There's a "transitive property" issue, however. It'd be hard to do this without, effectively, adding the former Spanish and Portuguese empires to the EU.

This would also run into the Monroe Doctrine, if you carried it far enough.

But it is an interesting idea.

I think what curbs the immigration to Spain is its economic situation(15% unemployment rate), plus I wouldn't say that Spain has tough immigration rules. In 2020 11% of of people living in Spain were foreign nationals: https://www.ine.es/prensa/cp_e2020_p.pdf

Out of these 11% only a third were from EU (including Great Britain), 6.5% of the foreign nationals were from Latin America, taking 5 out of the 15 countries from which most Immigrants come from, and the biggest year to year increase in immigration is from Venezuela (39.8%), Colombia (31.3%) and Honduras (29.4%).

Note that in Spain most immigration comes from Latin America, and they can get the citizenship after only two years, so they disappear from the immigration statistics quite soon.

What are the policies in your home country btw?

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