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As mentioned above, keep in mind the US has a higher total population precisely because it has had higher historical levels of immigration. Suppose the US had

by geebee 10y ago

As mentioned above, keep in mind the US has a higher total population precisely because it has had higher historical levels of immigration. Suppose the US had a total population of 500 million and NZ only 2 million. Would that mean NZ is looking even better? How about a billion? By your way of measuring, the more a country grows through immigration, the more immigrants it is required to take in to meet a per-capita measurement.

vacri 10y ago
...? Per-capita measurements are the way you look at these things. Putting 1M people per year into a country with the infrastructure and resources to handle 310M people is nothing. Putting 1M people per year into a country with the infrastructure and resources to handle 4M is crippling, to the point of destroying the country's social cohesion. Bridges, housing, agriculture, hospitals... none of these things are brought with immigrants when they move in. Or we can look at resources - the US has 10M square kilometers of land, 16% of which is arable (1.6M sq km), compared to NZ's 250k sq km, 2% of which is arable. (5k sq km). The US is a ridiculously wealthy place and likes to emit lots of bluster about its 'melting pot', and yet it does not match up to its contemporaries when it comes to taking in immigrants. Many decades ago it did, but in recent times it's lost the right to brag about it. Arguing the absolute numbers totally free of any context is the wrong way to go about it.
- geebee 10y ago
  To be clear, I absolutely agree with you that percentages are a factor. Our disagreement with you is whether they are the only factor. To take in a comparable percentage of immigrants, by your calculation, the US would need to take in 3,750,000 immigrants a year. Now, there are certainly 50,000 well educated engineers, scientists and other high skill workers who would might be willing to move somewhere else. But are there 3,750,000 such people? The nature of the immigration is different. That's not to say the US shouldn't be taking in 3,750,000 people per year, just that the challenges of doing so could be dramatically different from what New Zealand experiences with 50,000. This is where sheer scale comes in. I don't think you can extrapolate from a simple linear projection. When you hit a certain scale, new challenges emerge. This is especially the case where it comes to population - after all, a high population density can indicate that a region is less able to take in more immigrants, not more! Perhaps your numbers could just as easily lead to the conclusion that New Zealand has a lot of catching up to do? I do want to be clear about something here - I'm not (necessarily) arguing for policy one way or the other. My point is more narrow, which is that that using the "percentages" argument to praise New Zealand as an immigrant friendly place because it takes 50,000 immigrants a year, and the US as a xenophobic one because it only takes in about 1,200,000 a year misses a large number of critical factors. For instance, New Zealand has a population density of 15/km_sq. The US has 84. This may reflect a much higher level of historical immigration. The way you calculate it, the US is considered a less hospitable country to immigration because it has had so much of it that the per capita numbers are lower! And, of course, population density itself poses problems (after all, Australia has a large, hot, and dry interior, and Canada certainly has a lot of frozen land). In short, I'm not saying your factors are unimportant, I'm saying that you've over relied on a single metric that leaves out far too much to reach these conclusions.

by geebee 10y ago

vacri 10y ago

...? Per-capita measurements are the way you look at these things. Putting 1M people per year into a country with the infrastructure and resources to handle 310M people is nothing. Putting 1M people per year into a country with the infrastructure and resources to handle 4M is crippling, to the point of destroying the country's social cohesion. Bridges, housing, agriculture, hospitals... none of these things are brought with immigrants when they move in. Or we can look at resources - the US has 10M square kilometers of land, 16% of which is arable (1.6M sq km), compared to NZ's 250k sq km, 2% of which is arable. (5k sq km). The US is a ridiculously wealthy place and likes to emit lots of bluster about its 'melting pot', and yet it does not match up to its contemporaries when it comes to taking in immigrants. Many decades ago it did, but in recent times it's lost the right to brag about it. Arguing the absolute numbers totally free of any context is the wrong way to go about it.

geebee 10y ago
To be clear, I absolutely agree with you that percentages are a factor. Our disagreement with you is whether they are the only factor. To take in a comparable percentage of immigrants, by your calculation, the US would need to take in 3,750,000 immigrants a year. Now, there are certainly 50,000 well educated engineers, scientists and other high skill workers who would might be willing to move somewhere else. But are there 3,750,000 such people? The nature of the immigration is different. That's not to say the US shouldn't be taking in 3,750,000 people per year, just that the challenges of doing so could be dramatically different from what New Zealand experiences with 50,000. This is where sheer scale comes in. I don't think you can extrapolate from a simple linear projection. When you hit a certain scale, new challenges emerge. This is especially the case where it comes to population - after all, a high population density can indicate that a region is less able to take in more immigrants, not more! Perhaps your numbers could just as easily lead to the conclusion that New Zealand has a lot of catching up to do? I do want to be clear about something here - I'm not (necessarily) arguing for policy one way or the other. My point is more narrow, which is that that using the "percentages" argument to praise New Zealand as an immigrant friendly place because it takes 50,000 immigrants a year, and the US as a xenophobic one because it only takes in about 1,200,000 a year misses a large number of critical factors. For instance, New Zealand has a population density of 15/km_sq. The US has 84. This may reflect a much higher level of historical immigration. The way you calculate it, the US is considered a less hospitable country to immigration because it has had so much of it that the per capita numbers are lower! And, of course, population density itself poses problems (after all, Australia has a large, hot, and dry interior, and Canada certainly has a lot of frozen land). In short, I'm not saying your factors are unimportant, I'm saying that you've over relied on a single metric that leaves out far too much to reach these conclusions.