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Race cannot be gamed (except for edge cases). The whole point of race is its inherence. Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.
Why is having had British colonial masters a marker of cultural compatibility?
Why "cursory"? Because you want it to be gameable? Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.
That said, I think racial profiling is indeed unfair if it goes beyond defining vague priors. It's desirable to filter immigrants for their comprehensive human capital.
It's just… Suppose you were not allowed into the world's richest country on grounds of your character, which was found wanting not through stereotyping you based on race, but through, de facto, systematic measurement and determination of your similarity to your predominant racial type and dissimilarity from natives.
Of course, this can be couched (and even understood by practitioners) in entirely non-racial terminology, like Harvard does – they would just have a holistic psychometric definition of a desirable immigrant, derived, say, from anonymous surveys of natives' evaluation of character and assimilation success.
Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?
Is this supposed to be a trap? I would definitely recognize any accurate judgement like this as fair! Race can't mean you refuse to judge people as bad in certain ways the exact same way it can't mean you refuse to judge people as good in certain ways. Now, the way the human brain works, there's a very strong bias towards seeing more of a stereotypical negative trait in a member of another racial group than actually exists. Therefore, for this judgement to actually be accurate, some care needs to taken to account for this bias in the exact same way you account for any other cognitive bias if you actually want to be right about the world.
Goodhart's law isn't an overwhelming force that overwhelms everything else. We still accept legible measures in deciding who gets positions in every other aspect of life and, while obviously not perfect since nothing is in the real world, they work far better than just deciding based on race. Your argument here seems to be a generalized counterargument to any kind of meritocracy at all. Even if you accept some worst-case, all-powerful Goodhart, you can just change the measure when you notice it's turned into something harmful---make it a moving target to keep ahead of Goodhart.
You really can't resist the personal attacks can you.... This one I'm completely confused by, are you mixing me up with someone else? I'm very curious to hear what possibly gave you the impression that I'm particularly good at manipulating bureaucracies. Is this just your "vague prior" based on perceived race?
I think this can also be interpreted as a general "you", somewhat awkwardly phrased. At least it didn't occur to me to be a personal attack until you wrote your reply, and as you observed, it would only make sense in a context where you'd be known as a beaurocratically savvy type.
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