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There's a disconnect here no? If you are using a points based admission system to get the best qualified immigrants, they aren't going to be building houses. For that you want low skilled immigration (or work visas). You can't expect to only get the highest quality immigrants AND that they will do construction.
I think multiple lines of pro-immigrant rhetoric are being conflated here.
The points-based system was to bring in middle class people to compete with the Canadian middle class. It had some carveouts for certain jobs or underpopulated regions (was never sure how well this worked given so many people wanted to come to the same slice of the GTA and would legally be able to after PR), but the track sold to me was college-> skilled work experience-> PR-> citizenship and I was supposed to be typical. Back then Canadians bragged about the higher educational attainment of immigrants.
I think this was the main idea, and it probably worked (or was tolerated) because it was competition for the middle class, not the entire working class. I wasn't allowed to work in college cause I wasn't supposed to be competing with lower skilled Canadians, I was supposed to be keeping the universities afloat and aiming the email jobs. Jobs a Canadian high school graduate could do would yield no points.
After COVID both that sort of migration increased - and the standards were dropped to compensate - and temporary foreign workers were also bumped up massively. So now everyone was competing with the world. Young kids can't get jobs, everyone feels the crunch.
Since there's no country cap (genius move btw) you start getting scams allowing in a much larger percentage of lower skilled migrants combined with people pretending to be on the student track but "studying" at some strip mall college. Presumably all these people would be useful for things like building houses but then that's still an issue of local governments and zoning so it's probably just one of those things you say.
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Yes, I know. And yet somehow, "we need immigrants to build houses and take care of all our old people" seems to be the normie pro-immigration stance.
It didn't work for Canada, it didn't work for Australia, Germany, France, the UK, the US, etc... It never works.
In any case, high-skill immigration, like low-skill immigration, is fraught with challenges and is generally negative sum, unless the immigrants are truly elite. I think Musk's "15,000/year" is a pretty good ballpark estimate. But for countries already choking on surplus college educated baristas, adding even more midwit college grads is only going to make everyone poorer.
Considering that the upside of high skill immigration (e.g. Musk, Jensen Huang) is absolutely enormous, I'd be curious to see the math showing high skill immigration to be "negative sum".
Surely these geniuses would be included in the 15,000 year elite carveout. There's a vast difference between Jensen Huang and an H1B working for Cognizant or other low level grind factories.
We can quibble about the 15,000 and I'll admit it's just a number. Maybe double it, maybe triple it. But over 30 years, 15,000 a year amounts to nearly half a million. It's not nothing.
But I do think it's imperative that the system works to identify truly high skill people.
The family members that brought Jensen Huang to the US as a child would not have qualified under any kind of limited elite scheme. Nor would Musk, who entered the US on a student visa, and who was a nobody at the time he founded Zip2.
Was t he at MIT?
Edit: Penn
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I doubt it. Let's check, as they say, the Early Life.
Huang:
Would you have let Jensen or his dad into the country? Is there anything here that indicates either of them is a top 15k tier talent? If, against all odds, he was able to start NVidia in Taiwan, do you think he would move to the US, or keep running his company in Taiwan, as Morris Chang (who left the US due to frustrations in getting ahead at IBM) did?
Elon Musk:
Again, would you let this guy into the country? A Saskatchewan sawmill operator who overstayed his student visa? Is this what elite human capital looks like?
Okay, I'm stumped then. How do we allow top tier talent without just letting everyone in?
Musk and Huang wouldn't have been admitted under some sort of H1B/points scheme either. So the only way to get them is open borders? That seems like a bad bargain, even for geniuses of that caliber.
What would you do if you were the king of the United States?
Isn't it a fallacy of some sorts? Perhaps NVIDIA or Musk's companies would not exist exactly as they are if the immigration laws had been different and enforced differently. However, it is not like we can observe the counterfactual outcomes. Would not there be GPU companies in the US without the single individual Huang? According to Wikipedia article concerning NVIDIA founding, there were 70 graphics computing start-ups in the US in the 1990's. The market environment would have been similar without NVIDIA.
Musk's enterprises appear more singular and his interests idiosyncratic, so imagining alternative paths is more difficult. Some of the alternative paths could have seen less technological development and slightly more enshittified world today. However, it is not certain the alternatives would have been worse. Perhaps, with overall more stringent US immigration there would have been another innovative tech scene (or several) somewhere else and he would have migrated there. Stronger competition between the SV and other hypothetical scenes would perhaps have produced even greater technological innovation and varied, better outcomes for everyone. Or if there was no alternative to SV, they could have collected the points under the alternative immigration system at another life stage. (Or perhaps the people who would have prospered under a different legislation would have been more stellar and exceptional.)
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Allow essentially unlimited immigration for groups like Taiwanese and white South Africans who have a track record of making countries better, but not allow Indians without a Nobel prize on their application?
There was also a post on Marginal Revolution the other day referencing Hanania and calling for more US immigration based on the outcomes of Musk and Huang.
Maybe that's what's motivating some of the comments in this thread. Yet, I suspect if one proposed to—while keeping all else the same—increase the number of Taiwanese and white South African immigrants by 10x, much less infinity, the reaction from many mass-US-immigration enthusiasts would be along the lines of "no, not like that!"
Sure, my preferred immigration system would be something like ‘open borders following a background check for groups I like, no immigration for groups I don’t’. That’s what everyone prefers. Conventional immigration advocates simply like different groups.
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There's a reason that we're in this situation, and it's because it's not an easy problem.
I think the thing that sets Musk and Huang apart from the average H1B is the entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps there could be a way to admit people like that selectively for them to start businesses bere, but note that Huang's success is at least partly thanks to the guys he met at his second job.
It's entirely possible that you have to either err on the side of letting in too many or too few, although there may be some obvious gains by cutting down on clueless imported cognizant employees. At least, I am not aware of any cognizant H1Bs that went on to do great things.
That makes sense to me. I wish you would post more top level content here. As much as I hate you needling my comments, I think you are a clear thinker.
There's no way to measure this in a person. Furthermore, I think this is much more about culture at a local and national level. Stated differently a lot of "entrepreneurialism" is simply the American Way. A really obvious example of this is the fact that Europe's tech sector is approximately zero even though they have more than enough elite human capital. In fact, not only do the best European engineers come to the U.S., the best Canadian one's do (Waterloo is the Stanford of Canada).
Although your analysis quite good, I think the Jensen and Elon arguments fall into the "Great Man" fallacy. That without this one, specific human, we don't get the rise of GPUs (nVidia) or SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter revamp etc. I don't believe this. I think the major technological progress arc of history is mostly about the collective increase in human knowledge (and ways of sharing it) combined with ever more excess wealth and capital to finance the implementation of that knowledge. This goes back quite a ways - didn't both Leibniz and Newton independently invent equivalent theories of calculus?
So, maybe the hard-scrabble Jensen Huang isn't let it. Maybe Elon the Lumberjack stays in Canada. I don't think that's bad in the specific. I'd assume we get Eensen Muang and Jelon Husk instead - maybe two Math Olympiad champions, or obvious super STEM graduates from prestigious foreign universities. I seriously doubt we somehow fail to create trillions of dollars of value because these two people, in specific, aren't admitted to the U.S.
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Got through an Ivy League university with 2 degrees (economics and physics) in 5 years? Yeah, he definitely seems worth considering. I'm not the immigration restrictionist some are, but there's a big difference between someone who can do that and the average body-shop grind.
If you think that every ivy league (or more?) diploma should come with a green card we can discuss that.
I agree that your average Cognizant H1B holder is probably not worth admitting into the country, however I don't think it's true that you can figure out who is a top talent a priori, before they've done something world changing (after they've done it they probably wouldn't want to emigrate unless they really hate their country).
The other important point is that top talent should be allowed to start their own ventures (as Musk did illegally) and they will probably not reach their full potential working for the man. This is another shortcoming of the H1B system.
I didn't say that. I noted that Musk's undergraduate achievement was far above the ordinary run of H-1Bs. Though if Ivy League degrees hadn't gotten queered by the culture war, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing.
This is true, but it's not cause to admit all the Cognizant H-1Bs in the hopes of picking some of the top talent out from among them.
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I'm pretty sure the US DOES have immigrants building houses and taking care of old people.
Those immigrants will themselves need houses and taking care of. When you run the numbers, you’ll see that immigration has a trivial effect on median age. Are we really willing to permanently change the demographics of the country to buy ourselves 6 months of additional elder care runway?
I don't think the demographics of the United States are sacrosanct. We should be a lot more selective than we are, and we should be far less accommodating of foreign cultures and put more pressure to assimilate, but demographics (meaning race) per se I don't care about. As an HBD believer I figure being more selective means there will be racial effects, which I'm fine with.
As for elder care, it's actually possible another 6 years would be sufficient (as the Boomers are reduced) to avoid problems, also.
I think we largely agree, but I just want to note that for once I am the bigger black pill. I think I should get some sort of badge.
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In the long run, sure. But in the short term it is going to make a few very rich people much richer, and those people will then trickle down some of their wealth to the politicians who helped them out. This might seem like a minor quibble but I feel like it is important to point out that there are people who profit substantially from all of these policies.
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