1) Rich, educated countries have low population growth, but we need a growing population to grow economically (we need to grow economically for our current debt/prosperity scheme to function) 2) People in poor or war torn places want to come to places with more opportunity and less risk of random murder.
Cue the SpongeBob meme “take the people who want to come here and work and put them over with the people who want people to work for them.”
Didn’t the US drastically reduce their H1B visa count recently for no real reason? Wouldn’t we be better off increasing and expanding that sort of program rather that reducing it?
How many asylum seekers are trained in medicine, engineering, dentistry, carpentry or any of a dozen occupations in short supply? Heck, if we wanted we could pick while cohorts of refugees with complementary skills, plop them down in depressed midwestern towns and have thriving communities immediately.
I’ve know software engineers with master’s degrees from Scandinavian universities who had to leave the country because their visas couldn’t be transferred or renewed in a reasonable time. I know a Korean asylum seeker who has had a pending case for literally years. she’d be thrilled to take any job. She’s an educated, capable white collar worker. She can’t work because her case will be another couple years churning through a system that could literally be replaced with 20 lines of if else statements.
There are plenty of skilled, capable, interested people just waiting for permission to come solve the problem. All we have to do is stop blocking them.