I'll concede that this statistic is cold comfort if you fall into that 5% category, but the point is that work visa almost always means non-immigrant.
Employment based green cards are mostly granted inside the U.S. via adjustment of status without state dept involvement.
Why do you wonder if it's economic instead of the Trump administration's announced policies of stopping immigration, including unconstitutionally removing birthright citizenship?
Every economic analysis I have ever seen shows that there's economic surplus from immigrants entering a local economy; more jobs and more wealth is created, per person, than if those people had not come. In particular I'm thinking of some studies of local economy in Miami when there have been bursts of immigration.
That was study about Cuban immigrants into Miami, a city with large Cuban population and thus existing infrastructure to absorb. I wouldn't draw that study into anything broader.
As someone in Local Politics, the issue generally is, immigration, esp of unskilled kind decimates local budgets since they are generally directly tied to number of people. Here is CBO report on it. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61464
Now, type of immigration that mostly impacts this study is not type of immigration that is impacted by visa application processing halting but acting like "Yea, this current system is working GREAT!" is false. This is what so annoying about this issue, it's in clear need of change but Congress refuses to do it and Trump doesn't have leadership to get it done.
Costs $2500 AND payment of all student debts.
This place (USA) is literally a fucking company town.
you have a kid like billions of other people in the world, nothing special tbh besides it is "your" kid
you just want a subscription pass to a country, and i think people like that are useless freeloader people who want none of the stakes and all of the benefits
cool you can code and get hired by some company, or maybe you start a company. so what?
Regarding your concerns, I don’t see why it is unreasonable to simply renounce citizenship later or just simply double check your travel itinerary during the late stages of a pregnancy. This seems like at best an unfounded concern.
However being a dual citizen isn't necessarily all upside. Citizenship comes with requirements, particularly in some countries military service is mandatory and so if you're a citizen - even though you are a permanent resident of somewhere else, you must either go do your service or maybe pay a fine depending on the country.
You also get treated differently if things go wrong. Foreigners are entitled in most cases to diplomatic assistance from the representatives of their country. Your country can't necessarily do much for you, but typically you will get that phone call home to let loved ones know what happened, they can find a lawyer who speaks your language (but you'll need to find a way to pay them), if there's some paperwork snafu they might be able to help (often for a fee). It's at least nice, if you're jailed or in hospital after surprise food poisoning or whatever, to hear somebody who speaks your language.
None of this applies to dual citizens. You're "home" from their point of view, so no need to contact your diplomatic representative, maybe you have never been there since the day you were born and can't speak a word of the language but too bad.
Not treated differently. Treated the same.
You are required by law to enter your country of citizenship using that country's passport (this is true for every country). Not doing so can result in fines or jail time. This is precisely to stop idiots from playing the "foreigner" card to try to, for example get out of paying a speeding ticket or parking fines.
The first because a lower supply of labor is going to create breathing space for an entire working population who will see tremendous job upheaval due to AI automation. A lower aggregate demand on houses, services will also be welcome to take the fuel out of inflation, and maybe we'll regain some of that experience of true affluence, where scarce things (e.g. access to cabin in the woods, a rowhome in a walkable city, ...) are in abundance. There is also the import of an idle, criminal element that has very clearly reduced quality of life and safety in many places.
Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.
I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.
If it were really part of a coherent anti-inflation, pro-housing strategy, then, well, a lot of other policies would be different... (Including signing the ROAD act, not starting trade wars, or driving up the price of oil)
The change would require 2/3 of all states to approve a constitutional amendment. It won't ever pass. Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
My family came here in the early 1700s and fought in the revolution. It would be a disgrace for me to do anything other than support immigrants.
"my ancestors came here as immigrants in search of a better life 300 years ago. I honor that by helping those doing the same today."
Being American, especially back in 1776 (250 years ago!), was not about ethnicity, but about an ideal - a group of men on the North American continent decided that " that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." [0], and then literally put their lives on the line to protect that ideal.
America is, and has always been, a nation of immigrants. What unites it are the common values - in theory, the idea that everyone there has the right to live free and pursue their happiness, as opposed to the idea that everyone should serve the king because that is the will of God, which was the dominant idea in Europe in the 1700s.
With that view, I can see that supporting people who come to the US so they can be free as continuing what the original poster's ancestors started 300 years ago.
[0] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...
Have you gone through and read the quotes from the well known figures that contradict the story? There are a lot.
The standard explanation is that they had some weepy romantic morality deep at heart which they tragically were unable to live in their flawed time.
Sure, that’s one possibility. Another possibility is that they did not anticipate people in the future so drastically taking what they said out of context, and so they weren’t sufficiently precise as to represent themselves in a way that made it through to today’s context with its meaning intact.
To me, the latter just seems like it probably happens all the time in history and so why not here?
And, to be clear, in this case what they would have meant in modern context is - all men are created equal does not refer to literally all humans on earth, it means that the born aristocrats are no better than anyone else and they shouldn’t get special privileges for it. That’s it. The duke’s son is no more deserving of government enforced privilege than the commoner’s son, because the commoner’s son may be more capable. That’s it. Not that all the races of the earth are the same. They just didn’t think that, men in the 1700s did not think that way. People in 1910 didn’t even think that way! The founders didn’t think they had to qualify “men”, they were just referring to the “men” of their group, one “man” of their group is not born higher than another “man” of their group, and this aligns with what we now know about population genetics, which is why it actually works better in some ways (I.e. if take a high performer, his sons are more likely to be high performers than the population, but you can only extend that so far, it doesn’t reliably persist past a couple generations and in some cases you get unlucky right away in the first generation).
And I haven’t seen this framing refuted, despite it being so, so much less of a just so story than the mainstream framing, and being successfully non-contradictory with the other extremely racist by today’s standards views and actions of the founders and their contemporaries, unlike the mainstream framing.
One big example of contradictory views that is not from the founding fathers era but is a good starting point. Did you know that Lincoln wanted to send them back? He didn’t want to free them and have them later integrate into our society. He wanted them gone, relocated, good luck see you later. He didn’t think that Africans and Europeans could live together, he didn’t think it could possibly work because they are too different by nature. But oddly that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the school curriculum. Lincoln is a hero, the man who freed the slaves. Well of course he was flawed, etc, but he had a good heart and he worked towards the good. Except what is good is defined by the current moral regime, which was entirely different from the one at that time. Lincoln would probably be shocked and appalled at how he is portrayed today. If he could only see what has become of New York City or Philadelphia, we could power the nation with his grave-spinning, which would surely be hypersonic in its rotational velocity.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't feed poor black people, you just can't pat yourself on the back for honoring your ancestor at the same time.
I don't really understand the disagreement. If you are performing an act which, if your ancestor were somehow magically in the room with you, they would respond to with horror and disgust, then you aren't honoring them. Performing your own present morality does not necessarily honor your ancestors, if they had a different morality.
And we can amend constitutional rights. It most definitely will happen in our lifetimes.
> Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
And?
You think the world in 2026 is exactly the same as in 1776?
What about slavery? Good idea in 1776 therefore good idea in 2026?
This understates the situation. All of us who are not naturalized citizens are citizens only because of the birthright clause in the Constitution. The US does not have any other way for a person born here to become a citizen.
If the birthright clause of the Constitution stops being enforced, Congress (or more likely in our current iteration, the President) will have to create a brand-new set of rules determining which of us natural-born citizens get to retain our citizenship and which do not. There is no existing law to guide them, so they can make it up out of whole cloth.
More plainly: if we choose to eliminate birthright citizenship, whoever is running the country at that time gets to determine whether you are still a citizen.
I have seen a lot of freakouts about birth tourism since the recent SCOTUS ruling and I haven’t seen anyone give even the most cursory overview of the actual scale of the supposed problem. It’s purely an emotional reaction.
Or if they do, surely there are ways wealthy "real Americans" could hide their money just as easily and defraud welfare, so this isn't really a problem specific to birth tourism.
It appears your argument is that foreigners are greedy, lazy, fraudulent, exploitative, and shameless, but Real Americans never stoop that low. Again, do you have statistics on this, or is just kind of a feeling?
If your answer is dual citizenship giving them access to banks abroad, a wealthy American can buy another citizenship.
There is nothing to stop them from just not owning a mortgage or house, since that is the thing you say will catch them.
very consistent correlations between migrants being net positive economic providers, more law abiding then native citizens, and just straight up regurgitating racist myths
mass deportations won’t solve anything economic when it’s the same admin hamstringing prices and rates with tariffs, war, and defacto support of the oligopoly
i really wish basement dwellers like you though of something original now and then
Not to mention how unsustainable it is anyways, what happens a few years down the line when the immigrants stop having kids? There isn't an infinite ocean of people you can import on a whim, and definitely not forever.
So the immigrants end up with the same birth rate and then we have to bring in more immigrants. So there would have to be a constant source of excess people somewhere else for this to be sustainable. So it gets to a point where I wonder if this is really the plan.
You're assuming the birthrate can be "fixed". Japan has an even worse demographic problem. They've tried "fixing" it and nothing much works. Similar for South Korea. Japan would certainly benefit from opening up to more immigration. Countries that can attract more immigration are going to benefit economically as the birthrates continue to decline globally. Why not be attractive to immigrants instead of wanting to repel them?
It worked with Romania in the 1960s and 1970s. Mind you, it caused a bunch of other problems to crop up, but Romania did solve their low birth rate problem.
Both @account42 and myself agree this isn’t a particularly good solution, and I’m not worried about the fertility collapse myself: It is an issue which will last for only one generation.
I think he’s implying he has some pretty, shall we say, interesting views on the matter. As someone who has been in an interracial marriage and multiple interracial relationships, I probably don’t agree with those particular views.
It would be nice to know what he’s advocating for, but he’s gotten pretty mum after I pointed out it could be done, but only with Orwellian levels of suppression.
Primarily, because : https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/
It worked: The birth rate exceeded the rate of deaths until Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989. There was some level of circumvention in the 1970s and 1980s, but birth rates continued to outpace death rates up until the day Ceausescu was overthrown and Decree 770 was made null and void. (If you have a different definition of “work” than “it increased fertility”, please let me know what that definition is)
Mind you, as I said before, there were a lot of undesirable, shall we say, side effects because of this decree, but it did solve the fertility problem.
{Snark tag: Obviously, I do not endorse doing something as Orwellian as having a government like the Romania of the 1960s and 1970s, and the unwanted kids caused a huge amount of intergenerational trauma. To get back to the issue of fertility collapse, fertility collapse is an issue which will last only one generation: The people who have kids will have worldviews which encourage having more children}
It’s probably a bad prediction of the future, but having an exaggerated dystopian view of the future is a classic trick used in golden age science fiction (e.g. Decision at Doona from 1969 had a grossly overpopulated Earth) so one I was able to accept while reading the story.
It definitely has a bias; it doesn’t mention the stories of women regretting abortions at all, except (minor spoiler) mentioning that Asenath Smith didn’t want an abortion. As someone who has had multiple women confide their abortion stories to me, it’s quite common for women to deeply regret having them. I understand why a story as political as this one doesn’t want to get in to the nuance of the trauma abortion can cause, because it’s written in the same year Roe vs. Wade was overturn, so it’s a story of how much women need access to pregnancy tests and to abortion. [1]
[1] I personally believe in the right to an abortion, for the simple reason that, when a woman has a miscarriage or a baby which just isn’t viable, the medical treatment she gets should be a decision doctors make, not a decision people with guns and cages make.
It did not change the overall trend because radical anti-abortion measures like that do not change people's desire to have kids.
For people in the peanut gallery, here is the chart we’re looking at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Birth-death_RO.svg Unfortunately, the data for this chart is not sourced.
As one can see, births were at or above pre-decree levels after Decree 770 was passed, and only went below pre-decree levels when the decree was dismantled in 1989. The 1970s downward slope is much less steep than the 1960s pre-decree downward slope. In the 1980s, there was no downward slope whatsoever. Fertility stayed at roughly pre-decree levels before plummeting once the decree was ended. At no point while Decree 770 was in effect did we have a birthrate that “very clearly returned to it's [sic] previous trajectory”.
Now, let’s go back to what I was replying to when I brought up Decree 770. “Our birthrate has been below replacement” said one poster, and in a reply “You're assuming the birthrate can be "fixed"”. Decree 770 fixed the issue I was replying to: Birthrate being below replacement. Pre-decree, Romania’s birthrate was on a downward path, and would had been below death rates by the early 1970s. Because of the decree, the birth rate stayed above replacement rates until it was repealed in 1989.
Decree 770 increased fertility. It kept fertility above death rates. I have already posted elsewhere why Decree 770 was a very bad idea.
This will be my final reply to @mrguyorama. They do not come off as someone willing to admit when they are wrong about something.
https://decreechronicles.com/guardians-of-the-decree-the-hid...
I mention fertility rates remained constant in the 1980s. Now I know why fertility rates didn’t go down back in that era.
In the year 1984, Romania took a page from Orwell’s 1984: All medical units were put under surveillance to minimize the number of illegal abortions. There was now a secret “Thought Police” in 1984 monitoring all doctors and nurses to make sure no abortions slipped through the cracks. The number of abortion related convictions in 1986 doubled compared to 1985. Just like 1984, not only did a hidden thought police find these people doing illegal abortions, but people would report on their neighbors.
Romania was able to stop the 1970s fertility decline (which, again, was a good deal less steep than the fertility decline when abortions were legal) in the 1980s by going full Orwell and clamping down the screws.
https://archive.ph/AEfUQ - https://x.com/Schtal2/status/2069217060803035485
As an aside, the notion that 80% of the women sleep with 20% of the men is a complete fabrication:
Many immigrants come to America to work and start businesses. That creates jobs. Even the day-laborers buy food, clothing, tools. If we cracked down on businesses that used illegally immigrated workers, that would be a much more targeted way to fight wage suppression.
How could inflation come from illegal immigration? Are the immigrants bringing in crazy amounts of money? Does the existence of more workers competing for an open position drive up the going wage?
If we want to reduce the price of housing, we need to build more houses. That's the key. The trouble is how to tackle the financial and regulatory hurdles that discourage building houses. Clamping down on immigration from poorer countries hurts the construction industry, which employs a lot of immigrants.
>Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.
If we cared about people with foreign allegiances participating in our politics, we'd ban dual citizenship. If we cared enough about welfare costs to do unpopular things, we'd ban smoking and high-sugar foods. That would save a lot more in welfare costs, and our citizens would be healthier. On my list of priorities for reducing welfare costs, taking money from poor people who don't actually qualify ranks low. It's a mistake or crime that feeds people and gets money circulating in local economies. Not efficient, but not world-ending and probably not common. If you really want to find people receiving benefits despite not actually qualifying, look for senior citizens hiding their wealth as cash in their house.
>I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.
Trump stated immigrants poison the blood of our nation. I'm going to accept that as his actual belief and reasoning.
But since you asked, here you go: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/microsoft-...
> Recently[1] Microsoft laid off several thousand domestic employees while simultaneously hiring a couple thousand employer-sponsored-Visa workers. > > [1]https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-2026-xbox-h1b-vis...
Occam's razor. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. Nativism is possibly the only stable and coherent political ideology this admin holds. Everything else is negotiable, but not this one.