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26 pointssarvesh22 comments

I know the article is sort of toungue in cheek, but Thomas Friedman actually said roughly the same thing (minus the eugenics) recently:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/opinion/11friedman.html?_r...

From the article:

"Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

'All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,' said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. 'We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.'"

Sounds perfect lets do it.

This is/was already done to some degree. I don't have all the details but relatives on both sides of my family had to prove "their value" when applying to enter the United States (from China). The application process is a long (on the order of years) and tedious one with no guarantees.

A bit off-topic: Some of you may recall the hoopla in California a couple years ago regarding granting amnesty/citizenship to illegal immigrants who had been in the country long enough. One angle the media did little reporting on is how upset those who played by the rules and went/were going through the actual immigration process were that they were being bumped by those who broke the rules and entered the country illegally. It's not all that different from how financially-responsible people are upset today that the irresponsible receiving bailouts.

This is (mostly) how the Australian immigration system works. It's a point system which is weighted towards the young, healthy and skilled. People with certain in-demand professions (eg doctors) can get in relatively easily.

Perhaps, but isn't Australia generally very racist? That would definitely be something that would hamper immigration.

Not generally no. There is certainly some racism in Australia and some areas that you'd roughly compare to parts of the American "Deep South" in terms of backward attitudes, but overall Australians are pretty tolerant.

I don't really get why people would want to come to the US. Your taxes buy you nearly nothing; you are own your own for education and healthcare. There is no public transportation.

(But oh yeah, there's a tax break for buying a new car, but not one for using your bicycle every damn day. God bless America!)

Anyway, I would appreciate it if Europe made it easier to migrate there.

I don't really get why people would want to come to the US.

Because there is more money here. In Russia, a biologist with half a century of experience working at Moscow State University (best university in the country, arguably Europe) makes about $120/month?

Why the US and not Europe, though?

Actually, my family lived in Germany for three years before moving to the US. The decision to move was mostly because of funding - my dad made a lot more money in the US, with more opportunities to advance, and more leeway in what he got to research than he did in Germany.

This isn't to say that the US is the only place to do good research - there is tons of great work being done at top universities around the world. However, the US seems like the single country with the most research opportunities. In the end, I'd imagine it's about money - I don't have time to find specific figures, but I imagine in the US more money is spent on basic research than other countries.

Even with all the problems with immigrating to the US, it still is one of very few countries that is welcoming to the immigrants in general. People in the US, a lot of them, have always put aside everything about where a person is from and look at him as a individual. This doesn't happen in a lot of places. Europe for most parts has been, so far, protectionist. When I decided to move to the US there weren't really a lot of options for me, Europe would have been a lot tougher.

Yeah, I've noticed that Europe and Japan are almost impossible to move to. I think this is kind of dumb... if I am going to pay taxes in a country, who cares where I was born?

> Yeah, I've noticed that Europe and Japan are almost impossible to move to.

Why do you say that? I've moved here 4 years ago, it was a bit of a hassle to get the work permit, but it wasn't that bad.

Basically if you can earn the equivalent of more than about ~45k usd/year, or are a student (and one of a few specific professions- like artists and musicians) it's not that hard to get into the EU.

And coming here with a tourist visa and staying until you manage to get a work permit is much easier than in the US - even getting a tourist visa can be quite difficult in the US, where as as long as you are from a 1st world country you don't even need to apply for one to come to the EU.

Becker and Posner have somewhat more to say:

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/02/selling_i...

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/02/what_if_a...

IQ tests are considered racist because the results are not perfectly uniform when you collate with racial demographics. since IQ is the best measure we have for future success we are handicapping ourselves.

Immigration policy by the US is, and has been for the past 200 years, determined by populist racial attitudes.

http://www.npg.org/facts/us_imm_decade.htm [<--illegals are not included]

Around 1900 most of the immigrants came from Europe. Increasingly, this was Eastern and Southern Europe. Resistance started increasing, at one extreme by the KKK, but in a general sense throughout the population. Policies changed, the depression hit, and it dropped. 1965 came and the closet Marxists were in charge. Ted Kennedy sponsored new legislation:

"Out of deference to the critics, I want to comment on … what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S.500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. Thirdly, the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious disease or serious mental illness. As I noted a moment ago, no immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge … the charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage."(Senate Part 1, Book 1, pp. 1-3)

If a Senator mentioned the importance of ethnic mix today, he'd be strung up by his balls. But even Teddy did it in 1965--things have changed utterly. At any rate, every single word was a total falsehood. The above quote has the greatest concentration of mendacity that I've ever read.

Look at the numbers in the link above. The United States is being turned into a different country, a Latin American country, an Asian country, an African country all at once, many, many times faster than it turned European after 1492.

Obviously, some people have reason to be happy about this, but drop the bullshit. Policy is not guided by "populist racial attitudes". If it was, the immigration level would be NEGATIVE six million/decade. Numbers don't lie.

"Look at the numbers in the link above. The United States is being turned into a different country, a Latin American country, an Asian country, an African country all at once, many, many times faster than it turned European after 1492."

I think the appropriate metric for measuring becoming a different country where different is defined as dissimilar along arbitrarily racial lines is to use percentage change in ethnic mix due to immigration per year.

In other word, if you deflate the raw numbers in your table by the total population of the United States at the time, you get really low numbers for the last sixty years relative to their historical averages. Basically think "what's the chance my neighbor is a first generation American?" and you get much lower probabilities today than you would through most of American history. Some people have reason to be happy about this.

In other words, by simply ignoring out of existence the non-white population of the US before 1965 (which is what white people loved to do back then), you can make it look like the country went through a rapid transformation and is rapidly being taken over, when in fact the minority population has always been there.

Look at the numbers in the link above. The United States is being turned into a different country

You do realize that's happened before right? More then once in fact.

Obviously there was the Indian to English transition. Then the Irish.

And at one point so many Germans immigrated that the majority of Americans changed from being of English descent, to being of German descent. Towns in the American heartland were German speaking well into the 1950s.

So yeah, the Unit States just keeps turning into a different country, again, and again.

Since when does the color and provenance of the people define the United States as a country? I thought it was our freedoms and ideals... silly me.

> some people have reason to be happy about this

Obviously not you, LOL.

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