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I'm someone that generally sees the two parties as pretty close to each other in actual policy positions. Even if they loudly scream about how different they are.
Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.
Lots of people here like to complain about the Democrats being in favor of open borders, but as someone who is actually in favor of open borders I mostly see the Democrats as ok with the current immigration situation, but not interested in opening up things any further.
If you think we have open borders right now .. I think we disagree on too much of base reality and we won't get very far talking with each other.
All of that to say, I would not be surprised if the bill looks semi strict on immigration but basically lacks any real teeth.
The MVT binds for IRV with compulsory voting (as is the case in Australia, where indeed there is little difference between the two biggest parties' policies). It binds here because the base can't defect. In optional plurality voting, the base can defect, either by futilely voting third-party or by staying home, so being a micron closer to your base than the other guy is is not necessarily enough to win their votes and, thus, the MVT is not valid - base turnout depends on your policies, and tends to counterbalance swing voters, so taking the maximally-moderate position is not a dominant choice.
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There are two thoughts on how to win a FPTP:
Win the median voter and everyone to such voters left or right, OR
GOTV by appealing to your base.
If trying to appeal to the median voter kills GOTV amongst your base, then you lose the election. The really successful politician can do both.
I think one strategy is to pursue mainstream policy while also convincing your base that your opponent would totally end democracy.
Another strategy is to pursue extreme policy while also convincing the moderate voters that your opponent would totally end democracy.
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In some ways what we have now is the worst of both worlds. We have open borders for criminals and for low-skilled workers who are willing to work for low wages off the books, but we have tightly restricted immigration for highly skilled workers.
The US would be well served by adopting the Australian method: A relatively easy points based system to get in if you're a skilled worker plus a guarantee you'll be detained offshore and never be allowed into the US ever again if you arrive illegally.
This doesn't suffice to limit the liabilities of diversity. It's very hard to overstate how much self-inflicted damage the United States has accepted in the name of refusing to discriminate between migrant populations on the basis of their cultural backgrounds. People are obviously aware of major incidents like 9/11, but dealing with petty intrusions like not being able to check a backpack at a race because an Islamic extremist bombed the Boston Marathon are just everywhere. We also get the low-level annoyances of antisemitic losers on college campuses and women in beekeeper outfits. There is no plausible case that the benefits of Muslim immigration have outstripped the costs.
Huh? Tsarnaev senior was admitted to the country as an asylee. Wiki says he was on welfare, and worked as a "backyard mechanic."
Tamerlan is a college dropout who tried to compete in boxing and was otherwise a piece of shit with no steady employment listed on his wiki page.
Dzhokar was still in college at the time of the bombing but had a 1.09 GPA.
I don't see how any of these people come to the country on a points based system.
On the other hand, I've worked with many talented and pleasant Iranian immigrants who are definitely assets for this country.
I'd add that getting and holding a professional job for a couple years is itself a strong assimilatory force; I can't think of any H1B who aided or carried out a terrorist attack. Which isn't to say H1Bs don't bring their own issues (preferential hiring of their in-group being a major one), but the biggest offenders there aren't people from Muslim-majority countries.
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I don't understand the focus on skilled immigration. A lot of what we need is unskilled work. Since the pandemic we've seen reduced hours and increased wages for service jobs that they still can't seem to staff. I suspect part of the reason for the price increases everywhere is that they have to pay 15 bucks an hour for someone to push a cash register, not because of change in the law but because they can't find anyone for less than that, and they're still having trouble staffing these places. US Steel is having trouble finding laborers for mills because even at 80k/year no one wants to work rotating shifts doing manual labor in a dusty environment.
$15/hr for a cashier was already on the way just due to general price inflation. Preexisting cashier wages were already a premium over other unskilled labor because you need someone who can count, make change, be nice to customers, and not look fucked up, and even without the labor crunch we would've seen it.
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The focus on immigration types is itself unnecessary. Let the market decide. The key is that migrants and their children should have no recourse to US citizenship (by naturalization or birthright), ever. Perhaps for the richest we can allow them to buy in for $5m per (immediate) family, paid in cash to the treasury dept. Everyone else can go home to retire or when the job is done. They can pay to school their children in public schools, and can’t bring over family unless they can financially demonstrate they can support them.
All we need is the Kuwaiti/Emirati system. These are countries where 80% of the population are immigrants, and yet the natives are still in charge because naturalization doesn’t exist.
At the moment, the US attracts people who see their country of origin going nowhere and are willing to emigrate to secure a better future for themselves and their kids. Due to an oversupply of such people, the US can -- in principle -- filter for the best and the brightest of them.
What you are offering is instead is an oil rig job -- hard work, hostile environment, with the only motivation being able to spend the shittons of money you made after you come back to civilization.
Now I am sure that you would find takers for that deal, global income disparities being what they are, plenty of people would jump at the chances to pick up dog turds for minimum wages which will allow their extended families to live comfortable lives. I mean, it is not like the Arab oil dynasties have problems finding wage slaves either. Put in the hours, go back home, live a better life.
But the top of the cream will likely look elsewhere. Why would anyone take a professorship in a country which has made it plain that they would kick them out as soon as they retire when they could go to Canada instead? Likewise, there is certainly the trope of immigrants who are working hard so they can fulfill their dream of some day owning a Kwik-E-Mart.
The lower class of US citizens will not much like the outcome of your proposal either. Suddenly they have to compete against people who are completely beholden to their employers for continued residency and may come from cultures in which unions are not a thing, while also willing to work for much lower wages because they do not have to feed a family in the US from them. If you think Facebook's preference for H-1Bs over citizens was bad, wait until Amazon gets to staff all their warehouses with people who have much worse visa conditions than H-1B.
I also have some moral objections to your proposal. Leaving aside the question if indentured servitude a la UAE is really the path the US should follow, I also believe that people should generally be the citizen of the country they have lived in for generations. Your proposal would create a permanent caste of people who are non-citizens. Given the TFR, it seems entirely possible that at some point a significant fraction of the population will be excluded from democratic participation. At some point you in effect have an aristocracy. This feels deeply un-american to me.
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If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.
America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence). But it is fair for a settler country to decide that permanent settlement is finished. That involves no contradiction or hypocrisy. Manifest destiny is over. The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.
This seems wildly arbitrary. Why can't Duluth be the size of Chicago, Wilmington the size of Manhattan, Portland (Maine) at least as large as Boston? Not to mention the density of many major American cities such as Boston, DC, St. Louis, etc. is a fraction of what it could be. Immigrants aren't coming to America to buy a plot of land and do subsistence farming anymore, they'd be coming for manufacturing and service jobs.
And it is the right of a nation to make such arbitrary decisions.
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Not except for the natives; the ancestors of the modern tribes (the Clovis people) killed and/or drove out an earlier wave of settlement.
Even ignoring the pre-Clovis peoples, native American tribes regularly warred with each other: the successful ones expanded, and the losers fled to more marginal lands, had their women integrated into the replacing tribe, or were killed.
1492 wasn't at some equilibrium state where everyone was where their ancestors had been for thousands of years. Even post-exchange, this process continued: who does Mount Rushmore belong to? The Lakota, who were dominated by the US? Or the Cheyenne, who were dominated by the Lakota? Or whatever group preceded the Cheyenne before somehow being erased from the historical record?
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who were they?
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And if you go back far enough, every human outside Africa is an immigrant from Africa.
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True, and they all immigrated over the land bridge at some time. The point is that though nationhood is to some extent arbitrary, that doesn’t make it less real. You can close the doors at any time just because you want to.
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That doesn't account for the electoral voting system, as well as how polarization affects races down the ticket that might depend on simple majority rule.
That might be true, in the fact that Democrats created the current situation. But they created the current situation by opening things up far more than they were before.
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From my Fox and Trumpist sources, it has clauses which allow bureaucrats to give American citizenship to swaths of people and restrict the President from using his existing and Constitutionally granted powers to do anything about border crossings until certain thresholds are met. Whatever else is in the bill, those two are poison pills for the voting base of the GOP, so their Congresspeople dare not vote for it.
As I said last time we discussed this, “give American citizenship” is irrelevant when all their children become citizens anyway from the literal moment of birth. At most it slightly brings the problem forward by like half a generation.
When "bringing the problem forward" means "Democratic supermajority now" instead of "Democratic Supermajority later", it's a damn big difference. (because maybe the horse will learn to sing)
Exactly. When one party can simply import third world socialists (including religiously socialist Muslims) and make them voters, the other party has to either become a competing socialist party or stand on principle and expire.
Or flip the table and resort to non-democratic methods.
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