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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

It is funny to me how illegal immigration keeps getting the spotlight while legal immigration is left in the dust.

It is a long and arduous process to get a green card in the US if one is trying to do it by the book. Even a US-educated PhD who has been working and paying taxes in the US for a decade would still have problem getting recognized. Meanwhile, half of the US citizens can't do basic math.

Funny how things work.

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Wealthy countries almost universally depend on immigrants in the low end of the job market. On the average, the people able and willing to migrate to another country are cheaper, better motivated, and more talented than the low end of the domestic labor pool. Without immigrants, the society would not work nearly as well and many things would be more expensive. While the US has not created sufficient legal pathways for immigration, everyone is willing to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, as long as it doesn't get too disruptive.

Skilled and educated immigrants, on the other hand, are not essential. Their presence may be beneficial to the economy, but things won't fall apart without them. At worst, the economy will be a bit less competitive.

Looking at Canada, though, doesn't it get easier to immigrate the better skilled and educated you are?

Japan and Korea are wealthy and they don't do that. Austria and Switzerland probably don't either.

Japan and Korea are the main exceptions. In Austria and Switzerland, over 26% and over 37% of the population are first or second generation immigrants. Switzerland also has plenty of foreign workers who live on the other side of the border.

I got curious about Switzerland, so I looked on Wikipedia, which says, "As of 2023, resident foreigners made up 26.3% of Switzerland's population. Most of these (83%) were from European countries. Italy provided the largest single group of foreigners, providing 14.7% of total foreign population, followed closely by Germany (14.0%) . . ."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Immigration

So, they have a lot of immigrants, but they're clearly giving preference to immigrants from cultural backgrounds very similar to them.

Italy and Germany (and France) are also neighboring countries with a common language (IT less so than DE and FR).

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