[1] https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/alerts/uscis-issues-guidance-...
If you want fairness, start from the top and don’t punch down. I’m not against any definitions of immigration but generally most definitions aren’t reasonable. They are just downstream and issues of an upstream systems problem.
If we look at it from the other direction, we are artificially increasing quality of life by taking advantage of foreigners who have no better option than to work for little pay. Getting rid of this seems positive?
I'm not saying that exploiting immigrants for labor is necessarily good, but the free hand of the labor market doesn't usually achieve policy goals.
Farm labor is not very regulated, but until about 10 minutes ago it was flooded with cheap foreign labor which seriously distorted the pricing mechanism for labor. And, that distortion helped to paper over some serious money supply expansion, i.e. the foreign labor helped food not get as much more expensive over time as it otherwise would have. If we keep things steady for several years we will see the market stabilize and rebalance, albeit now at a higher level (due to past money supply expansion finally being realized in prices).
*Note that I don’t really support the haphazard way this has been done, and I’m not confident that things actually will be held steady given the political environment, I’m just stating what theoretically would happen if they were.
The proposed requirements in Japan require earnings to exceed Japan's average and also for them to have an equivalent of 30 years of pension payouts saved up.
The US requirements are not as specific, but for comparison one of the numbers is that that families need to have an income requirement 25% higher than federal poverty guidelines, which very low compared to average US incomes.
> Applicants will also be required to have a pension pot equivalent to 30 years of payouts.
If there's a better article to read, I'd appreciate a link.
Google Translate:
> Draft Revisions to the Guidelines for Permission for Permanent Residence (Summary)
...
> Regarding the positioning of the "Permanent Resident" status of residence:
> ・ Explicitly stated for the first time that, as it is "the most stable legal status—entailing no restrictions on activities or duration of stay and presupposing a lifetime spent in Japan"—there is a "need for particularly careful screening."
...
> Regarding "2. Requirement for Independent Livelihood"
> ・ Underlying Principle: Explicitly requires an economic status equal to or better than that of Japanese nationals, both currently and in the future.
> ・ Income: Whether income consistently meets or exceeds the average income level of Japanese households based on household size (raising the standard).
> ・ Pension: Whether the projected future pension benefit amount reaches the level corresponding to 30 years of enrollment in the Employees' Pension Insurance at the aforementioned annual income level (newly added requirement; however, financial assets that can cover any shortfall will also be taken into account).
The U.S. was founded as a nation of immigrants, and has a cultural history of being exceptionally immigrant-friendly (compared to other nations), especially with regard to immigrants without much means.
I don't believe other nations have any obligation to follow this example. On the contrary, they should be able to set whatever immigration policies make sense for them. But this model of letting in poor immigrants, letting them do the work that nobody else wants to do, and letting their kids become net contributors, does seem to have benefited the U.S. greatly over the past few centuries.
Roosevelt's 1915 Americanism address also reveals this:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68152/68152-h/68152-h.htm
He says americanism "is a matter of the spirit and of the soul". In the very next paragraph, the so called "hyphenated americans" are condemned. This is perfectly reasonable.
However, note the examples used:
German-Americans
Irish-Americans
English-Americans
French-Americans
Scandinavian-Americans
Italian-Americans
There is even legal precedent for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_...
In 1923, the supreme court decided an indian was not eligible for citizenship because he was not white.
So arguably the US was a white ethnoatate from the very beginning. This stuff only really went away after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, just over half a century ago.
I do imagine original white people were perhaps more keenly aware of the fact that this land was not originally theirs, and that other people should be let in and given a fair shot, even if they're poor.
I was merely making the argument that U.S. immigration policy has historically not been very classist (even if it was immensely racist), and not caring about the wealth of the incoming immigrants has worked out immensely well for the country over its lifespan.
* 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
Shipping liner companies were charged to return ineligible passengers to their origin (the same is true with airlines today), so they had every incentive to verify ahead of time that they could enter the destination country. The "only 2% of immigrants were rejected at Ellis Island" statistic often bandied-about by the pro-open borders side elides the restrictions that caused the rate to be so low in the first place.
I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US.
https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-still-use-much-less-wel...
> Native-born Americans use an average of ... $3,638 in means-tested benefits in 2023. By comparison, immigrants used ... $3,370 in means-tested benefits.
The article also ignores state provided benefits, and thus the disparity between documented and undocumented migrant populations. The article 's "much less" headline is not really supported by the evidence provided.
I looked up the source for these numbers.
It's the Center for Immigration Studies, and they are notorious for being a right-wing think tank used to dress up up anti-immigration policy using misleading statistics.
How notorious are they? Well, they are listed as a hate group with the Southern Poverty Law Center[1].
The numbers you're citing aren't 'welfare,' the biggest thing is using the education system. The thing that, long term, makes they into productive taxpayers. CIS doesn't figure the long-term benefits into their numbers because that would destroy their thesis.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/center-i...
In any case, none of this amounts to immigrants using less welfare than native born residents, which is what I was asking sources for.
Looking at CBO numbers, CBO reports that recent immigration into United States is drain, in particular, at state and local level since that's generally budget that gets impacted the most by people. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61464
Depending on what gets counted, "public assistance" stats like this usually include medicare and social security. (Social security gets debated because of how it's paid-in, but I'm not here to argue that. The fact is, it gets included in these stats). Those two make up the dominant consumption of public assistance to the point that things we hear about in the media like food stamps are kind of a rounding error.
Medicare and social security are collected primarily by older people. Foreign born populations have much lower numbers of people in that age bracket than the general popualtion.
Combine those two facts and it's not surprising that when you look at charts of foreign born vs native born, the foreign born population uses less public assistance.
It's a statistic that is more about age distribution than anything. Like when you one of those bad maps trying to prove a point but really just showing population density of big cities.
FWIW, social security and Medicare taxes are noticeably higher in the US than Canada. Pay more get more.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...
Switzerland has a per capita GDP exceeding the US while pursuing isolationist foreign policy. They are the world's most popular country in opinion polls.
All those European countries get to invest in those nice social programs and isolationism because the US has at least up until now acted as world police and handled their foreign affairs for the most part.
Less vindictively, the only economic interest the US has in the Middle East is oil. Relying on oil for your energy needs is, in 2026, a choice and not a requirement. Wind, solar, and the batteries you need to store them are continuously getting cheaper. And for the people who are net consumers of energy - primarily the US, Europe, and China - renewables are better for everything, but especially they're better for energy independence!
The only things that require oil are airplanes, plastics, and industrial chemical processes (like we make asphalt out of oil and certain inks out of naphtha). Eliminating most of the energy demand for oil would mean a significantly reduced dependence on foreign oil, and more specifically, the political dependence on low gas prices. America rebuilt all its cities in the image of the car and, as a result, made gasoline/petrol a necessary ingredient of urban mobility. This was, again, a choice - we absolutely could have retained and grown our dense urban cores and we can still rebuild what was destroyed.
But this requires an entire governing body at every level that is not a corpse paraded by the ghosts of Tammany Hall, Standard Oil, and Hitler. The primary crisis in America that is driving these wars is a fundamental lack of political will for alternatives.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=oil&met...
Translation - we bomb people for money. well thanks for being frank anyways. otherwise it is sick to hear all that moralizing about "us being a good guys"
Technically true, extremely misleading. The law placed vastly fewer restrictions on who was a legal immigrant for much of that period. Of course, it is true starting in 1921, and 1924, legislation was put in place to limit immigration by "undesirables" such as Asians, Italians and Slavs.
Curious...which one of those regimes do you want to bring back?
Also you do realize that your preferred migration policy will lead to microaggressions (and possibly macroaggressions) against immigrants? If people don't have democratic means to keep out disliked foreigners, they may be tempted to try alternatives. The ballot box is ultimately an alternative to violence.
And no, we don't negotiate with terrorists. If people try violence, they go to prison. We don't want antisocial people in our society.
This is how you fuel the far-right.
I guess you must be pretty happy about illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank? Immigrants causing existing residents to leave, right? Woohoo!
1) Only 12 million immigrants came through Ellis Island in 60 years.
2) 30-40% returned home
3) The U.S. strictly restricted immigration for more than 40 years to assimilate the immigrants.
4) Even after all that, the U.S. paid a heavy price. It took until the 1980s to clean up the Italian mafia in New York. And immigrant political machines were the origin of the corrupt political structures in cities like New York and Chicago today.
About ten and a half million of those in 15 years, from 1900 to 1914. Against a 1900 US population of about 76 million.
> The U.S. strictly restricted immigration for more than 40 years to assimilate the immigrants.
Or, you know, because the political wind changed.
> Even after all that, the U.S. paid a heavy price. It took until the 1980s to clean up the Italian mafia in New York.
Right. Because nobody else would've filled that niche.
> And immigrant political machines were the origin of the corrupt political structures in cities like New York
The Tammany Hall machine was founded in 1789, was basically running New York by the 1850s, and was in the thick of New York corruption well past the relevance of Ellis Island.
> and Chicago today.
Chicago Democrats were immigrants around the relevant time. Chicago Republicans were from older stock. Both were corrupt.
Assimilation was the effect of immigration restriction, whether or not that was the motivation. It broke up the chains of migration that facilitated maintenance of separate cultural enclaves.
> Right. Because nobody else would've filled that niche.
Canada and Australia never had a similar problem.
> The Tammany Hall machine was founded in 1789, was basically running New York by the 1850s, and was in the thick of New York corruption well past the relevance of Ellis Island.
Tammany Hall was not a political machine in 1789. According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall ("Following the 1854 mayoral election and the resulting mayoralty of Fernando Wood, Tammany Hall controlled Democratic Party nominations and political patronage in Manhattan for over a century through its organized network of loyal, well-rewarded, and largely Irish Catholic district and precinct leaders.").
To be clear, the point isn't that they were Irish. As far as I can tell, Ireland isn't more corrupt than other western european countries. It was the political dynamics that arose from the presence of a large culturally distinct immigrant population.
> and Chicago today.
Irish domination of Chicago's political machine long outlasted the Ellis Island era, well into the 1970s: https://www.thelastward.org/p/what-happened-to-chicagos-iris....
Greetings from Canada. I live in Montreal. We have more of a Mafia problem nowadays than New York (no RICO here), and we were comparable in the 1930s. Bootleggers, remember? Where do you think they were running the booze from? Same "market", same mob. Yeah, they managed to dominate everybody else. That's what I mean about "niches". In fact they did it worldwide, and according to Wikipedia they're prominent in Australia, too. These are transnational groups. The Mafia is also big in Sicily. Are you going to say that's because of (checks notes) Sicilian immigration? Specifically because of a huge wave around 1900?
We also have Hell's Angels here. Ethnically "white". No immigrant identification whatsoever, totally acculturated... although I assume some of them moved here from the US. Pretty racist and anti-immigrant, actually. Cool fact: I used to live two houses away from Sonny Barger in beautiful Oakland, California. OK, it wasn't actually that cool. Those guys were really noisy. But I assure you they did not come through Ellis Island.
Apparently Winnipeg has First Nations gangs (Indians to you). Kinda the opposite of immigrants.
... plus a grab bag of others, some of them organized by immigrants. Yes, organized crime tends to segregate itself ethnically, so if one group gets the upper hand, you're likely to see its ethnicity as the face of the problem. But all ethnicities get to play, and they will expand into any available vacuum. If you hadn't had the Italian Mafia (worldwide), you'd have had something else (at least regionally).
And it's not always ethnic. Apparently there's a gang in BC that actually calls itself the United Nations.
> Tammany Hall was not a political machine in 1789.
It sure was by 1854, eh, according to your own quote? That was 38 years before Ellis Island opened. Before the specific wave of immigration that you're claiming caused the problem. Goalposts. You are moving them.
> Irish domination of Chicago's political machine long outlasted the Ellis Island era
... and preceded it. Your own link says "Of the 28 most influential Chicago aldermen of the 1890s, 24 were Irish.". I don't think they teleported from Ellis Island and took over in under 8 years.
As to Ellis Island—I was using it as a label to refer to the pre-1920s wave of immigration generally. It was opened in the 1890s in response to waves of immigration that started in the 1830s. The film “Gangs of New York” is set from 1846-1863.
... as determined by an on-the-spot interview. Which was admittedly done in a very bigoted way.
> had passed a medical inspection
... which took about one minute to check for red flags. If you had red flags, they diverted you to quarantine. They were mostly looking for TB and some eye disease.
> had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same
... by which they meant having as much as $25 on hand (call it $1000 in 2026, though that's a bit high), and convincing the interviewer that you could probably get a job. That convincing step did include claiming, in a way the interviewer found credible, to have skills beyond the "day laborer" level. But only just beyond.
> I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US.
Good news: the medical requirements now are equivalent, the financial/self-support requirements are now much, much higher, and the vetting is vastly more thorough.