I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come.
Immigration is the US‘s main sources of national strength, yet we waste it.
Canada is probably about due for a major wage correction though - the PSAC strikes are a pretty good indicator that it's time to either seriously consider 32/hr weeks or starting to claw back corporate excess... that's sort of an international issue though.
And not everyone wants to make as much money as they can, while dealing with uncertainty.
Source: I’m an immigrant. I ended up in Canada for unrelated reasons, but the system in Canada is much better. Tough, but fair, mostly transparent, and even kind in some ways. In the US it’s so byzantine by comparison.
Which is what the person you are replying to meant anyway.
I am an immigrant myself (not in the US), the only paper I needed was a work contract. After a year of working I got permanent residence with no further requirements attached, it's no longer tied to having a work contract.
From my limited knowledge Canada and Germany have much more rational immigration systems.
Japan also had the second largest economy for decades and a very tight immigration system. China will overtake the US on economy soon if it hasn't already and they have very tight immigration also.
We also overproduce PhDs right now and elite-overproduction is something that seems to be very destabilizing.
The current system is a drain on the US workforce and intentionally dehumanizing
However, I got screwed on the H-1B lottery these last 3 years (when over 50% of the applications are fraud, what else can you say). I wake up every day to face the rather realistic prospect of leaving everything behind - my family, my girlfriend of 3-4 years (who happens to be from a different country herself), my pet dog, my entire social network, my professional career/network.
I know I'm not entitled to being here, but I'm frightened at the prospect of returning to a country where I cannot speak the local language or understand the local working culture. I just don't know any other place in the world better than I know the United States.
I love this country from the bottom of my heart for everything it's given me in my life, and it hurts to see that nothing has changed, and seems like nothing will. I've paid my taxes dutifully, and I'll be willing to give back in any way, shape or form. But I don't get to make that choice :')
FWIW, I support those programs, but wish it included both legal and illegal immigrants.
Other than people banned from entry for personal reasons rather than numerical caps (crime, etc.), I agree, thet should have a free choice to come.
Regulate quantity to mitigate impact via fees in place of caps (for the visa categories that currently have caps), with a share of the fees going to states and localities in proportion to the resident alien population settled there, with lower fees in the “higher preference” categories.
And have a catch-all immigrant visa category (lowest preference/highest fee) for anyone not banned but not in any other immigrant category.
(I’d probably also eliminate H-1B and several other visa categories entirely, because they would no longer be necessary.)
High skilled labor who’s not allowed to work for months while here indefinitely legally.
How do you get a number for that based on some version of reality though, and not an arbitrary, magic round number picked by some congressional committee?
Make sure your infrastructure can handle it.
Make sure there's enough housing and regulations to handle it.
> Hoovervilles served as a common ground for many different nationalities and ethnicities. Economic disparity in the United States during the 1930s was not limited to American born individuals. Migrant workers and immigrants greatly suffered from the lack of work and made up a large portion of the Hoovervilles across the country
Modern immigration controls grew out of racist impulse. That's not all they are today. But many of them fail the Chesterton's fence test.
Now high skilled labor, that's OK. The salaries are already sufficiently high that down-pressure because of immigrants isn't an issue - it's skilled labor so you should be upleveling your skills such that you're not competing with "common" skills that are shared by more people.
This isn't the story of Hoovervilles! There was enough housing. People couldn't afford anything because there wasn't work. (I agree with your take on skilled and unskilled labour, broadly, though with significant caveats, given how little we understand about those labor markets. Skyrocketing housing is an explicit American policy choice. We could change it any time, but we prefer to be wealthier and the "feel" of our neighborhoods.)
Again. I’m not trying to say that immigration will cause Hoovervilles or that it’ll cause a similar situation. You’re correct - the Great Depression was a very different situation. I’m just trying to bring an analogy of a situation with some of the same structural similarities. It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s meant to highlight the risk of laissez faire immigration (which I’m generally more in favor of) coupled with poor planning / bad policies on the infrastructure side. I think we’re in agreement that there are structural risks at opening up the border in certain ways at the same time as we have a clearly bad housing situation and matching political crises.
The local, state, and federal tax in 1910 was $380 per capita (adjusted for inflation!) compared to >$20,000 per capita today.
Government revenue has increased from 7% of 500B in 1910, to 35% of 20 trillion in 2020 in inflation adjusted dollars. This means that real, inflation adjusted taxes have increased ~200X.
Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.
One could interpret those as checks that someone could "work, and pay taxes in the US." They were cruel. But brief and unconstrained with respect to housing, infrastructure and regulation.
I'm not arguing for a return to Ellis Island. Just that our fine control of immigration is a modern phenomenon without a strong argument for existing.
That's completely wrong. As phd514's comment accurately alludes, every single person who came through Ellis Island
* was a legal immigrant
* had passed a medical inspection
* had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same
* was turned away if failing any of the above tests, with no possibility of appeal
I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US.
PS - One more thing: Every single person who came through Ellis Island was coming to a country with an enormous demand for unskilled labor. This is no longer true.
Why aren't other countries as desirable to immigrate as European countries, USA, Canada, and Australia?
Like what's the common denominator with those countries that makes them so desirable to immigrate to?
The same thing applies to neighborhoods which are sort of a microcosm of countries.
GDP? Imperialism which raided the rest of the globe's wealth?
Or did they show up and teach stone age countries how to use their resources??
Like they're still doing to this day.