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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29373 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Should the United States switch to an explicitly pay-to-play immigration model? The twin axioms of immigration seem to be:

  1. Elite human capital immigrants entering the country is good.

  2. Low human capital immigrants entering the country is bad.

Much ink has been spilled on attempts to determine which specific groups of immigrants are good or bad, but isn't the most elegant solution simply to charge money for the privilege of immigrating to the United States? People who have acheived success in their home countries are more likely to be high human capital, and needless to say the unwashed hordes would be kept out by sheer inability to pay.

Ideally this would be a complete replacement of the current immigration regime, not an augmentation. I cannot think of any nessesary exceptions off the top of my head. Anyone worth bringing into the country is worth paying for. Passport bros can still exploit economic inequality to snag a mail-order bride, but they will be the ones footing the bill.

I propose a flat rate of $100,000 per green card. Why wouldn't this work?

Because “elite human capital” is an incoherent category which mostly exists to sneer at neoliberals.

Let’s grant the premise, though, and assume immigration is a glorified job interview, strictly intended to find candidates who will benefit The Nation. You’d be looking for some combination of smart and hardworking, good culture fits, probably with few foreign ties. Would you hire employees by asking them to pay a flat fee?

You jest, but the correlation between the incompetent people I've had to fire and their inability to effectively manage their money is stunning.

If I could require proof that someone has $20k in their bank account before hiring them, I would.

I’m not actually sure why you can’t.

You can require a credit check for employment but states like Cali restrict what types of job you can do it for, and those don't show account sizes - just how much debt you have and income.

You can require that someone's an "Accredited Investor" which is a similar deal, but you generally only do that if they get Class-A shares in a company.

It correlates with protected class membership, like everything else.

bank account

*investment account(s)

Nope - at these salary levels, you should have a checking account with at least $10k, probably $20k. Your retirement should be maxed out, etc.

Financing a new HVAC unit at 9% interest is pathetic when you're making $175k a year.

Okay, "liquid investment account(s) from which cash can be withdrawn on a few days' notice".

Uhh, would you accept cash equivalents? No point in keeping the money in low-interest checking when I can throw it into treasuries.

I typically keep it in a HYSA, which is maybe a quarter point off of a money market? There are 4-5 different providers I can think of paying 5% out right now, and you can do 30 withdrawals a month, so it's a decent way to keep things sufficiently padded but earning interest.

My cash in/outflows range between $8-20k a month depending on when insurance is due, if I'm paying for vacation or holiday gifts, or replacing an HVAC system in a rental.

So it's a bit of a personal SWAG here, but the bottom line is: No 40-year-old man making $100k a year should be asking their employer for a pay advance, which I've seen before.

I do have a HYSA, but it's just a backstop to a T-bill ladder (4 sets of 4 week). My checking account is thus pretty small; paycheck goes in, bills go out, and if I get ahead (usually tax refund time; RSUs make taxes hard to predict) I add some T-bills. Chance of needing the cash in less than the time it would take to allow T-bills to mature is low, since so many things can go on credit cards (with a grace period of course). The T-bills are running around 5.25% and are state tax free, which is important in a high-tax state.

Worked for selecting British Army officers for a surprisingly long time.

Would you hire employees by asking them to pay a flat fee?

If I could get away with demanding $100K per worker when hiring them? Sure! Not only that, I'd become the single biggest job creator in the country, or die trying!

I think H1B green cards should be explicitly auctioned.

Currently they are assigned randomly by lottery to valid applicants. I've long argued that an easy first step is just sort them by salary and assign them that way.

Yes, but then it’d be too obvious to the people who think immigration isn’t only intended as a way to depress their wages (which would make them not support immigration). If you do it randomly, or if it is at least perceived as random, it has no signalling value in this way.

The problem is, immigration is useful for a range of things, and 100k is either far too low or far too high, depending on the cohort in question. If you're trying to attract middle aged successful white collar workers from China and Europe, the number needs to be north of 500k or you'll get overwhelmed. If you're trying to alleviate local low skill labor shortages like immigration from central America has historically, 10k might be too high.

It's just price discrimination in action - Apple would make less money if they only sold one model of iphone, and if they could get away with exponentially distributed prices they'd do it in a second.

Middle aged white collar workers from rich countries are among the least likely to want to immigrate.

All else equal, sure, but when certain industries have compensation 2x or 3x in America what they do in Europe, you can overcome those barriers pretty easily.

and if they could get away with exponentially distributed prices they'd do it in a second.

Can you elaborate?

Exponential distribution: most units sold at a low price, some sold at a moderate one, with a long tail of exorbitant prices.

I don’t think that it’s actually optimal, but it conveys the idea of price discrimination.

Exactly - there are consumers to whom $50k is perceptually the same as $1k to the average consumer - if Apple could sell them a model of iphone for $50k to take advantage of that without the inevitable backlash, they would.

And there are manufacturers that do sell phones in that price range and above, like Vertu. There are customers for whom for wealth signaling purposes the device can actually be objectively worse they would still pay more. Some of the most expensive Vertu phones are dumb phones; a less useful device than the phone your average african has in his pockets.

It's a bit like watches, a cheap quartz watch just plain makes for a more useful watch than an automatic. But for phones, I don't know, it's even more outrageous to me since unlike watches, a phone has a limited useful life, even if you could replace parts like batteries that wear off. Phones stop being able to give even the most basic services as providers sunset legacy protocols or require newer ones like VoLTE.

Proposing a flat correlation between willingness&ability to pay and human capital might seem attractive from the worldview of a right-wing American, but is it true? Anecdotally a part of the high-HC people who migrate to the US are far less desperate than your median Mexican - grad students who are willing to try it because it's the slightly more attractive option, businesspeople who are willing to give it a shot because they are frustrated with taxes and regulatory burden at home, et cetera. At 100k, you for sure would have priced out me and approximately everyone in my PhD cohort (most of us got offers in other countries too!), while if Mexicans can actually cough up 10k to pay a coyote (I would've already tipped towards the UK at that price point) then probably the difference to 100k can be made up by many by precommitting to do some crimes stateside.

(edited-in afterthought) Trying to get better-quality immigrants by imposing more on all immigrants is similar to those guys/girls who think that they can get high-quality partners by treating all their suitors terribly ("if you can't handle me at my worst..."). It might work to some extent if you can coordinate meanness with all your competitors (though even then it will breed resentment), but if you can't you will just attract the sort of people who can't do better or don't see anything wrong.

Why wouldn't this work?

Because there is still no no willingness in the U.S. to take the steps necessary to prevent smugglers from bringing millions of people either outright illegally or on various asylum claims of various (though mostly extremely dubious) merit.

And because one party has realized that pumping the number of immigrants of all stripes made citizens is beneficial for their electoral outlook.

I propose a flat rate of $100,000 per green card. Why wouldn't this work?

Why not auctions? Then you can fix the number of people (what a lot of people care about more), and get more money. 100,000 is too low, anyway.

I'm not sure, though, what I think of changing immigration to only be the wealthy—immigrants stereotypically do a lot of the landscaping and such currently.

I'm in favor of some sort of changes to our current system. Our current way, where companies game the lotteries, and where it's often better to come in illegally and then go for citizenship, is not ideal.

I always thought Singapore's approach here was at minimum interesting and very in character from what I've read about Lee Kuan Yew. (Quoting from https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-023-00946-5)

Singapore adopts a bifurcated, two-pronged foreign labour policy in which unskilled and low-skilled workers are subject to different labour schemes compared to higher-skilled workers, who are typically better educated and in managerial positions. Under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act (EFMA) that regulates the import of foreign labour into Singapore, unskilled and low-skilled workers (hereafter known as low-wage migrant workers) are employed under the Work Permit (WP) scheme while higher-skilled workers are employed under the Employment Pass (EP) scheme. The Work Permit scheme is a temporary foreign worker programme designed to employ low-wage migrant workers to fulfil labour shortages in Singapore. As such, workers admitted under the WP scheme are subject to stricter state control and differential protections under EFMA. The higher-skilled Employment Pass holders are entitled to minimum salaries (at least $5000 per month) with employment benefits such as paid annual leave and medical insurance. In addition, Employment Pass holders are also allowed to freely change jobs, bring dependents to Singapore and integrate into the community by applying for permanent residency in Singapore.

Migrant workers, employed under the Work Permit scheme, are bound to a restrictive sponsorship system known as “kafala” that prevents them from economic and social mobility unlike their higher skilled counterparts. Work Permit holders are tied to the employer, job type and sector they were hired for and are prohibited from changing their jobs or job sectors freely. Work Permit passes have a limited validity of 2 years, and employers have the power to terminate passes without consequence at any time. Additionally, low-wage migrant workers are not entitled to minimum wages, paid annual leave, or medical benefits and basic salary is determined by their skill level (i.e. median monthly salary of SGD 800. They are also disallowed from applying for permanent residency in Singapore or bringing their dependents to Singapore. As a result, low-wage workers are stuck in a cycle of job precarity and transience as they are prevented from establishing roots in Singapore.

Furthermore, while both Work Permit and Employment Pass holders are excluded from subsidized healthcare and social welfare in Singapore as foreigners, Work Permit holders face significant financial barriers to seeking healthcare due to low wages and job precarity.

I do wonder if the optics of being so open about treating people this differently would chafe too hard with the inclination towards some nebulous notion of equality that is almost instinctual for many Americans, including the politically moderate. We already do such things to some extent, but the people who are rejected entry and die in poverty or who break their backs for poverty wages under the table are largely out-of-sight-out-of-mind for American voters. I think being so obviously confronted with the image would make public support for such a scheme inviable.

Wouldn’t separating by education level (verified by testing) work better? If the problem is skill level, then measure the skills. Money might be a sort of proxy, but it can be gamed simply by borrowing or stealing from other family or friends or whoever.

The Kafala system of the UAE is somewhat analogous to the Singapore migrant worker system, but if anything the UAE has increased worker rights to match Singapores (not really high) migrant worker protection standards, so the negative valence of a loaded term like Kafala is employed more for affect than accuracy.

The most obvious benefit of a restricted work permit system is the explicit avoidance of bringing in dependants. The work permit system applies primarily to labourers, domestic helpers and prostitutes. These categories of workers can have their work visas revoked effectively at will, their home countries are bound by formal diplomatic agreements to take back visa breakers, and they are not entitled to any family benefits at all. If a prostitute or domestic worker gets pregnant their visas are revoked and the children are not automatically entitled to Singaporean citizenship even if the father is Singaporean. There is no civil partnership type of legal category here, so citizenship is not granted to fathers for children out of wedlock. Finally, work pass holders need permission from the Ministry Of Manpower to marry locally, citizen or not. There are a few domestic helpers that married local men, but the stereotype of these women being domestic helpers has made them relatively unattractive prospects for much of society. Quite unfortunate, given how fucking hot some of these girls can be. The most common foreign marriages here are local men marrying vietbu/siambu, who often are here on student visas or short term visit passes and not prostitute or domestic worker passes. (I know one edge case where because of covid a short term visit pass girls was able to appeal for permission to create a cleaning business to sustain herself while stuck here, and she got a bunch of whores to sign up as cleaners. Many awkward moments for some men in condos where their favorite whore rotated to do COVID cleaning theater in their condos). Because they did not come in under a migrant worker visa, they faced less restrictions on marriage (formally they are not allowed to be employer, but my previous post on Singapore prostitution makes clear how these girls can pay their way)

Another fact to consider is the lack of overall social benefits which limits the attractiveness in gaming the system to force permanent entry into Singapore. No one is entitled to medical benefits in Singapore to begin with, as entitlements are a taboo word in the local polity, but standard workplace practices like workmans compensation and sector specific insurance's do cover enough of a workers expected health outcomes to optimize output. With minimally adequate protections and little additional protections or entitlements by gaming the (difficult) system, players are disincentivized to try too hard.

Despite the ostensibly strict regulations on work pass holders being channeled into their specializations, I can attest that PLENTY of migrant workers are greymarket hustlers, and every bangla I meet gives me his QR code namecard so I can call him or whatever buddy he has for any manual work I need done - the big problem of this is that these shameless fucks them spin a sob story and ask to borrow money all the goddamn time, like all the prostitutes and hostesses who manage to snag your wechat.

The racialized differentiation also cleaves more starkly in the USA than in Singapore. The bangladeshis and indians are the migrant construction workers, yes, but their bosses and sponsors are local Singaporean Indians. White pit bosses commanding latino day laborers probably looks more uncomfortable to race sensitive americans as opposed to multiracial Singapore where everyone is openly lowkey racist to each other.

The racialized differentiation also cleaves more starkly in the USA than in Singapore. The bangladeshis and indians are the migrant construction workers, yes, but their bosses and sponsors are local Singaporean Indians. White pit bosses commanding latino day laborers probably looks more uncomfortable to race sensitive americans as opposed to multiracial Singapore where everyone is openly lowkey racist to each other.

Americans who would be uncomfortable with this dynamic are largely unaware of it. People who are aware of the ‘white bosses, centraco laborers’ phenomenon don’t care.

Fully agree. Americans will absolutely tolerate that Taylor Swift or Warren Buffett are totally unequal to them, but they will not tolerate a formal legal system that deems them so.

Why not? The legal system of special privileges for a different social class already exists in the USA. 'Two-tier policing' in the UK is catching on as a catchphrase to encapsulate the phenomenon of high-frequency criminals being underprosecuted, and it frankly applies to the USA as well. This is somewhat countering the prevailing meta of 'its racist to prosecute minorities more often' because minorities are in fact committing crimes at a much higher frequency than even their incarceration rates confirm, but the prevailing meta is still 'black people are being arrested unfairly'.

The law is unevenly applied, but it hews to observable patterns: rich fucks abuse the tax code, repeat offenders abuse legal protections for minorities or the incarcerated.

Yes, but even they are not permitted to make such policies explicit and legible.

An unevenly applied law that notionally applies to all is still better than different laws for me and thee.

Nor should they. Codifying the inequality means doubling down on it.

I think brain-draining the entire world to our advantage is monstrously immoral, so I'm as opposed to this as any other immigration scheme. I should think any morally consistent nationalist would feel the same.

No, that makes no sense. Making our nation better even though it makes your nation worse is something perfectly consistent with nationalism. Nationalists consider the well-being of their own nation to be of far higher importance than the well-being of any other nation.

In what sense? It helps the individuals in question, since they'll make far more money and have a bigger impact in America. Sure, the countries we drain from lose their best talent, but... we have no moral obligation to support other nations, if we perhaps a practical one.

I suppose I'm a nationalist in the sense that I'm an American patriot, but that doesn't mean I support the reification of the concept of the nation as some sort of moral entity in general, let alone that I think that some nebulous concept of the "rights of the polity of Bangladesh" should take precedence over the good of the best Bangladeshis who would be enormously benefited by becoming Americans instead.

Can you give some specifics on why you feel this way? Right now, this post is just "boo outgroup" paired with a "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy.

I am in favor of global brain drain for American benefit primarily from a national security perspective with a secondary concern / ambition that localized talent network effects could speed the development and introduction of truly game changing technology (provided de-regulation happens on an aggressive scale, particularly around nuclear and other energy sources).

That being said, I am 100% opposed to all illegal immigration, do not believe in amnesty regardless of duration of one's illegal stay, and don't see how a general humanitarian obligation to do what we can for the downtrodden of the world somehow extends all the way to "free guarantee of all privileges of American citizenship ... without actual citizenship."

Isn't this also true on the level of cities & states in the US? CA/NY/TX soak up the top talent, but even within each of the states, the directionality of it is pretty stark.

They at least still pay federal Tax.

I'm confused. /u/gilmore606 was claiming that skimming the top off the rest of the world is immoral for other reasons. Your response is seemingly unrelated.

And surely the Chinese or Indian Silicon Valley bro is paying a bare minimum of $80K in fed taxes. More if you count various CA/local taxes in there.

When cities skim the top talent from the countryside at least they're paying taxes in the same country, which isn't the case for immigrants.

But the people in those cities will still absolutely complain about "but we're subsidizing the countryside", and feel justified waging the culture war against those who they no longer consider their neighbors despite having grown up there.

Which, come to think of it, "brain drain generates a surplus that keeps countries that were escaped from in poverty" is probably a pretty good feels-y argument for first-world nations propping up third-world ones.

Not all nationalists care about the concert of nations. I think "me against the world, me and my family against the world, me and my nation against the world" is quite coherent nationalist ethics.

In any pay to win game, the whales are not the best players, they just stack abuse and ruin the game for anyone who isnt whaling as hard. This applies to immigration as well, because a skill ceiling is not the same as a funds ceiling. The difference between games and real life is that real life has plenty of other incentive structures that can be exploited beyond the confines of 'getting to the country', and it is these incentives which lead to the massive negative effects of immigration being inflicted on unwilling native populations.

Pay to win immigration in its current form - investment immigration or high-skill work visa sponsorship - does not necessarily attract the best people in skills or morals. The only thing it controls for is absolute numbers of the migrants and their web of newly eligible dependants, which can reduce the frequency of assholes within this diminished population interacting with the wider world and mitigate negative externalities.

For low value immigration right now the value capture of fund availability to immigrate to the west is by the smugglers, but the negative externality is still wholly borne by the west and the smuggler costs are miniscule compared to the long term economic damage of illegals. Andrew Tate is a loathsome gremlin spewing garbage from his food hole, but as far as the romanians are concerned its just a few women that end up suffering his predations, a calculus far less objectionable than one refugee bringing 8 relatives and spawning 6 kids on permanent welfare.

As it stands the negative consequences of immigration are largely from illegal immigration and asylum claimants, whether those negative consequences are a suppression of lower end wages or active criminal behavior, and the compounding effect of parallel existing policies is what amplifies these negative effects.

Society is an open-ended multiparty cooperative game with imperfect information. Whatever stable equilibria we enjoy in our current societies is due to a common understanding of payoffs for cooperation and defection with other players in the game. Some societies now have an exploitable meta of 'self declared victimization' which blocks consequences for defection, and society breaks in areas with those rulesets.

New entrants unfamiliar with the meta will inevitably choose defect eben by accident, and reveal that the game was lost to begin with. Unless the payoff matrices are formalized and commonly understood, it will not matter whether immigrants pay 100k to ICE or 10k to a coyote. Someone somewhere somewhen will end up defecting, and the game meta will continue breaking.

This is a good point, but I do wonder if, “one trillion dollars in fraud against the American people,” plays better on the campaign trail than, “ten million illegal aliens”.

I suspect the messaging will be interpreted differently by different people. Motivated reasoning causes progressives to automatically presume the quantifiable costs of illegal immigration is false, just like how conservatives will say the same about quantifiable benefits of immigration. As a political slogan, money spent by the government is too easily a figure fudged by creative definition assignment that everyone automatically slots stated figures into an existing worldview and the actual numbers are so far removed from our daily understanding that there is no way we can parse it - is one trillion really that much more affective than one billion?

The first problem of illegal immigration is that you can't easily return the illegal to their home country. Deporting someone needs their home country to accept them, and if a migrant burns their passport or claims their home country is unsafe they get to stay forever. Deportations at the border occur for the USA because you can definitively prove that they came from Mexico at that point. Once someone disappears into the US and burns their passport they are effectively permanent residents, unable to be shoved off anywhere to be someone elses problem.

I previously spoke about setting up anarchyisle as a nation with citizenship automatically granted to anyone in the world just so that western countries can deport literally anyone to Anarchyisle at will, allowing deportations to be conducted with sufficient political will.

The other solution is to have all illegal migrants exist in a lawless state, unprotected by any legal rights such as minimum wages, medical care, family reunification visas or police protection from vigilantes. Similarly, they should be free of tax obligations and diversity initiatives. I'm sure New Mexico can have a Free Zone where businessmen will put in sweatshops to manufacture cheap plastic garbage guarded by private security and staffed by grateful outlaws earning double the minimum wage of their home countries. If even that is economically unviable, then what the fuck are these migrants even doing in the USA to begin with.

I previously spoke about setting up anarchyisle as a nation with citizenship automatically granted to anyone in the world just so that western countries can deport literally anyone to Anarchyisle at will, allowing deportations to be conducted with sufficient political will.

G'day, Mate!

I propose a flat rate of $100,000 per green card. Why wouldn't this work?

That is....cheap. Even Portugal asks $300k for a golden visa.

I like something like $300k over-a-period-of-time ~= $100k down-payment + 10% extra annual tax based on your income for 5 years. The person can either naturalize at the 5 year point or keep the green-card without the extra tax. The $100k keeps the entry bar high enough, that anyone who gets it is likely to be conscientious. At the same time, it is low enough that anyone who is highly motivated can save that much over the 20s, to make the move before they're 30.

Personally, I would consider it.

It's worth noting that at least for the US, a program already exists with similar time terms, but the price is more like a million dollars and creating 10 jobs. There may be others I don't recall.

it is low enough that anyone who is highly motivated can save that much over the 20s, to make the move before they're 30.

This is delusional for even the 99th percentile of talent from most of Eastern Europe. Starting salaries in high value professions are just to low. The only people below 30 you'll get that way are people draining their entire family network of funds and a few lucky entrepreneurs, who might not be able to replicate their luck in the US.

Also, why wait till they are 30 (and thus, in many cultures, married with children)? Just take them young and tax them for 10 years. For the immigrant, this tax will not make a huge difference, because if they drained their family network dry before leaving, they will be expected to send large amounts of money back anyway.

Student visas (F1) are the dominant way for top professionals to arrive in the US. After school, you get 3 years extension to work in the US, in after which you're expected to get another visa or leave.

I am assuming that the individual studied in the US, got a job for 3 years, and saved up enough in that time for this $100k downpayment,

This is delusional for even the 99th percentile of talent from most of Eastern Europe. Starting salaries in high value professions are just to low

If they have to pay in cash, yes. But if they can borrow the money, $100,000 for a person with 99th percentile talent working in a high value profession in America is cheap. And if you're an American employer looking for such talent, $100,000 that actually has to be paid back even if the employee jumps ship is dirt cheap.

I like something like $300k over-a-period-of-time ~= $100k down-payment + 10% extra annual tax based on your income for 5 years.

I'd flip the sign on the tax: $100k down payment, and $40k - (10% of your taxes) per year. If you're paying $400k in tax, you get in for just the down payment. If your taxes are only $10k, then you pay an additional $39k per year.

You want to encourage (and select for) taxable work as much as possible.

In my experience, immigrants move from low-risk-guaranteed-income streams to riskier ventures once they get a Green Card. If a new green card holder is expected to pay $40k every year, it restores the golden handcuffs. This means they may pivot by moving cities, changing professions or trying to start a business. This may involve a serous amount of income insecurity.

A $40k fee adds fresh insecurity, that defeats the purpose of a green card. If a Green card can be revoked anytime, it is not a green card. It is a visa.

You also likely want to attract immigrants who are elite human capital but don't want to pay $100 000. It makes alternatives like Canada or Australia a lot more appealing for the most skilled workers if your proposal was a complete replacement instead of an augmentation.

But over all, yes, I think a pay-to-play model probably is a good idea. Maybe do it through an auction system too. Let the federal government set an exact number of immigrants it wants to let in each year, and let people bid for green cards.

The twin axioms of immigration seem to be:

Elite human capital immigrants entering the country is good.

Low human capital immigrants entering the country is bad.

I'd offer additional axioms which different groups of Americans hold on the topic of immigration:

  1. Importing labor is valuable to help utilize capital and reduce costs for farm goods and labor, particularly for seasonal labor.

  2. Current residents should be allowed to reunite with family.

  3. The efforts necessary to secure the border and to police the presence of illegal immigrants in the country now would require abrogations of civil liberties that would be totally unacceptable.

Buy-In Visas will not get the fruit picked and the turkeys slaughtered. And they don't solve the problem of how to enforce immigration law. I'd be all for them as an addition on top of whatever the current policy is.

I am however, all for putting a Jizya on all non-citizens, a flat tax somewhere between 2-10% of income. Set it at the profit maximizing point, to get the most out of the surplus immigrants obtain from the USA.

Current residents should be allowed to reunite with family.

They can reunite with them back home. Alternatively, they can register their family members as dependents and prove their wages can support them, including healthcare.

The efforts necessary to secure the border and to police the presence of illegal immigrants in the country now would require abrogations of civil liberties that would be totally unacceptable.

Eminent domain a 1 km-wide strip along the border and cover it with landmines. Border secured.

All you need to police existing illegal immigrants is a bloody mandatory national ID card.

... Do you genuinely think that either of those policies has a snowball's chance in hell in Congress?

Even a solid red one?

A solid red Congress has zero chance of passing national ID legislation that enforces punishing employers for employing illegal immigrants.

Well, then I guess the US is stuck with doing nothing about illegal immigration if neither party opposes it.

mandatory national ID card.

Will never, ever happen, for non-immigration related reasons, in the US.

Will never, ever happen, for non-immigration related reasons, in the US.

I don't think the resistance is as strong as you think. We're already moving that direction with REAL ID which originally faced stiff opposition for fear of it turning into a national ID card, including states passing laws preventing its implementation, but eventually everyone caved.

It was just too fucking perfect that it was preceded by another kind of Real ID controversy. Gaming is nothing if not ahead of the curve!

The efforts necessary to secure the border and to police the presence of illegal immigrants in the country now would require abrogations of civil liberties that would be totally unacceptable.

There's a lot of weight resting on the and conjunction in that sentence. The first conjunct seems doable without much harm to civil liberties, and it seems like it is relying entirely on the second conjunct to support it.

FWIW: I do think that importing low-skill labor is important and generally a good idea within some bounds (and, equivalently, a bad idea if executed poorly).

Not really. A large percentage of illegals come over legally then overstay a visa. To say nothing of those already present. Blocking one route increases the value of a different route.

That's true but if some percentage are coming over the border they must be doing so because it is easier than the visa-overstay method.

Moreover, anyone who overstays a visa has been processed & fingerprinted by USCIS on entry and so is at least partially a known quantity.

Australia has a backdoor pathway that is effectively this - essentially, you can get a student visa to study at one of our universities, and if you graduate with a useful degree like medicine or engineering you can get permanent residency. Of course, university fees are much higher for foreign students and this is a major revenue stream for them.

I don't have stats on hand but I think this is how the largest slice of our immigrants get in. So basically if you can scrounge up the money to pay for an Australian degree and are smart/conscientious enough to actually complete it, you're in.

For all the issues I have with the uni > PR pathway, it does seem to be a good mix of cash injection into the Australian economy with university as an IQ/conscientiousness screen. My big issue is the rubber stamping of international students through the kayfabe of 'group assignments' with native students which waters down the later screening.

An alternative to the 'golden visa' that is often used is a 'business investment' visa which gives you eventual PR for investing in the local economy. This has the downside of creating a whole subsidiary ecosystem of local companies that keep a bunch of businesses on their books to sell to prospective immigrants. How it works is that you go to a local agent who is fluent in your language of choice. They sell you a Chinese restaurant/grocery store. The business is not incredibly profitable, but doesn't always make a loss. After 3-5 years showing financial statements you get PR and then sell the business back to the agent to be recycled for the next immigrant. Business investment falls afoul of Goodhart's Law.

I’d prefer a random middle class Japanese immigrant than an Eastern European oligarch, though. It’s easy to make money through scamming and bullshitting. Who would want a Bankman-Fraud in their country? That one person can cancel out the work of hundreds of thousands.

Is the value really necessarily diluted by handing out more? I would think the value isn’t exclusively about exclusivity, it’s about who’s in the group.

I think it sort of exists, or at least it did a while ago. The price was just much higher at like $5 million. Basically there was a green card path via being a small business owner.

I like the idea, but I generally like immigration. I suspect the objections people will bring up will be about regression to the mean for the kids of these wealthy immigrants.

What about the third world kleptocrats looking to escape to greener pastures with their gains?

I read an essay somewhere talking about how suspicion and hatred of the rich was totally reasonable up until about the last 200 years. Rich people were noblemen (descended from those who conquered lands and secured rents) or schemers who'd found some way to secure the bag in a zero-sum universe. You didn't make money, you took money.

This is somewhat true in much of the less developed world. Does the US need an influx of Saudi royals? If you want high human capital, just make them pass a test to enter.

Plus you'd be bringing inflation and higher house prices. Australian and Canadian real estate has been rendered ludicrously expensive by rich Chinese buying it all.

Anyway, I disagree with 1. in that a country is more than an economic zone, there should be ties of blood and solidarity. When the chips are down, wouldn't elite human capital just leave for safer pastures? What incentive do they have to behave in a pro-social way, why should they behave honourably with people of a completely different race, culture and creed? In-group bias is part of the human condition, that's why we came up with the nation-state. Mass immigration reduces social trust and opens up all kinds of divisions and conflicts.

Australian and Canadian real estate has been rendered ludicrously expensive by Australians and Canadians making it difficult to build housing. There's no reasonable level of demand that can't be supplied by the market, when not constrained. (Not to say that I suggest their approach to immigration as an exemplar!)

It takes two to tango! Supply is obviously an issue but so is demand.

OECD population growth average is about 0.6% per annum, Australia is at 2% or higher.

Australia's net migration was 400-500K in the last couple of years, fertility is below replacement so all the pressure on housing comes from migration.

ludicrously expensive by Australians and Canadians making it difficult to build housing.

This is incorrect - it is in no way the costs of building housing that make Australian real estate so expensive. There's a huge variety of reasons, and I'd put negative gearing policies as a much bigger contributor. Throw in the vast amounts of immigration and the incentives created by almost every member of parliament being a landlord and I think that "making it difficult to build housing" doesn't even reach the top 5 for causes of the Australian property bubble.

I read an essay somewhere talking about how suspicion and hatred of the rich was totally reasonable up until about the last 200 years. Rich people were noblemen (descended from those who conquered lands and secured rents) or schemers who'd found some way to secure the bag in a zero-sum universe. You didn't make money, you took money.

This surely can't be entirely true. It would be quite surprising if there were zero or negative returns to ingenuity and assiduousness.

I could certainly believe that that was often the case, though.

This surely can't be entirely true. It would be quite surprising if there were zero or negative returns to ingenuity and assiduousness.

Of course you might be ingenious on your own little farm and do things smarter than the next guy. But beyond a certain size/scale, there is certainly a negative return because your success attracts some bellend to come and take it.

To some extent, this is a circular problem. There's little protection against expropriation, so lots of it happens. Most wealth is therefore expropriated (at least once) and hence there is little social support protecting wealth from expropriation.

Look at the chart of global GDP.

there is certainly a negative return because your success attracts some bellend to come and take it.

While I think this may often have been true, I don't know that that was always the case. Usually emperors wanted functioning empires, for example, which upholding property rights is helpful towards. But social pressure would have been common, of course.

Comparing wealth between times is hard to do with a consistent unit.

The emperor or his governors are the most likely culprits to decide they need some extra grain so their army can conquer/defend.

"In-group bias is part of the human condition, that's why we came up with the nation-state."

Except the "in group" here is highly path dependent. Prussians and Saxons are part of the same nation state, but Austrians are not, even though all three were part of the German confederation. it's incoherent to pretend that in-group bias explains why two of those are together and one is apart. Other examples abound similarly.

Does the US need an influx of Saudi royals?

"Need" is a strong word, but rich oil barrons would fit right in in Houston.

Plus you'd be bringing inflation and higher house prices. Australian and Canadian real estate has been rendered ludicrously expensive by rich Chinese buying it all.

My forex is a bit rusty. Wouldn't rich individuals trying to convert their foreign-denominated assets into dollars result in deflationary pressure on the dollar? My sense is that lots of the Chinese demand for real-estate is speculative in nature. Speculative demand will subside once supply catches up. America has much more developable land than Australia or Canada.

I’ve heard similar things about Chinese demand. That foreign real estate is a relatively safe way to store wealth compared to domestic, since it’s out of the reach of the CCP. But I don’t know how credible this theory is. It’s certainly a tidy way to disdain China, which suggests “too good to check.”

Anecdotally briefcases full of cash (which may or may not also get laundered through government-owned casinos) and empty condos are known elements of the real-estate scene in Vancouver. (Canada)

Wouldn't rich individuals trying to convert their foreign-denominated assets into dollars result in deflationary pressure on the dollar?

Increased demand for USD would, ceteris paribus, raise the equilibrium price of USD (that is, the value of USD relative to the foreign currency in question), assuming a free market in forex / floating exchange rates.

This does mean that holders of USD can purchase more units of the foreign currency per dollar, but it’s nonstandard to call that “deflationary”.

If that foreign currency can be exchanged for goods and services that are useful here, that part is deflationary.

In the case of the Saudis, they already denominate oil in USD and there's nothing else to buy with the riyal so yeah. But for Euro or Yen ...

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