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> Current U.S. immigration law limits the number of green cards issued per country, and people from populous countries like India and China are disproportionate

• shadowgovt 4y ago
  Never accuse American immigration policy of either intelligence or foresight.
  • KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Oh, it's plenty intelligent enough. Farming, construction, landscaping, etc all need undocumented labor over 'legal' labor, all around the country, but especially in farm country. Do you really believe that they honestly do not want migrant labor coming over the borders? No payroll taxes/benefits, and undocumented workers are much easier to exploit. They are highly unlikely to go to the cops about anything criminal that happens on the job, or to OSHA about any workplace safety violations, or to the district attorney about wage theft, and so on. They fear getting deported or tossed in jail. They're also socially isolated by various barriers - language, racial prejudice, and so on...so word of shady stuff going on is a lot less likely to make its way out. Don't want anyone to find out about your toxic waste dumping? Have your migrant workers do it. Also, migrant workers will do a lot of shit jobs that a lot of Americans just don't want to do, or at least not at fair market value labor rates that the business would be "sustainable" at. Meanwhile, politicians shout about how that migrant worker is stealing your job and so on. So they get the $$$ from the people who want exploitable labor, and the votes from the Pickup Truck Petes who think those "illegals" are "stealin' our jobs" and so on. It's not far off from why education is so poorly funded and constantly under various attacks in the US. There's a lot of wealthy people who want easily manipulated, uneducated, trapped-in-poverty workers to exploit. This is also why abortion is under constant attack; access to family planning is a huge factor to people escaping poverty.
    • jacobriis 4y ago
      Farming doesn't actually depend on illegal migrants. The H2A visa program provided for 213,394 temporary workers for agriculture in 2020 (93% from Mexico).
      • mschuster91 4y ago
        It absolutely does, about half the agricultural workforce of the US is considered "undocumented" [1]. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-half-us-farmworkers-undocumented-ending-illegal-immigration-could-devastate-economy-1585202 https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-half-us-farmworkers-undocume...
        • masonic 4y ago
          >about half the agricultural workforce of the US is considered "undocumented" That's not need, that's choice. They could pay higher wages and provide better working conditions. For the most part, right now that money is going toward automating everything possible, including fruit and vegetable picking, replacing those jobs altogether in the long term.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      > There's a lot of wealthy people who want easily manipulated, uneducated, trapped-in-poverty workers to exploit. I think it's a lot less wealthy people are evil and a lot more they just don't want to pay for these things. Very few people benefit from a poorly educated society. But the top 1% pay for 38.8% of Federal taxes. It's more about not wanting to pay $100k+ in taxes and less about being evil and wanting your countrymen to be dumb and poor so you can exploit them. Sure, some wealthy people are literally villains. Most of them aren't. Even the ones who vote for said policies. It's more greed than evil.
      • deleted 4y ago
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      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
• runarberg 4y ago
  > I get that we can't open the flood gates Serious question, has this ever been shown to be a concern. If we would open for free migration, is there seriously any reason to think that migration would be so intense that the country wouldn't be able to handle it? I ask because I seriously doubt it. Historically migration has been pretty liberal, and there are place which offer free movements of people (e.g. the EU) where opening up the borders (or the flood gates if you will) has turned out to be a great success.
  • historia_novae 4y ago
    Fell free to ask any Native American to get an insightful answer to this question.
    • solveit 4y ago
      While this is a technically correct answer, I can't help but think the US isn't at particular risk of being colonised by a militarily overwhelming foreign force that also has smallpox. Indeed, if this were a concern, mere immigration law would hardly help!
      • sgjohnson 4y ago
        Technically speaking, the US is the overwhelming military force that also has smallpox (in a BSL-4 lab somewhere), so perhaps his warning was for other countries, just in case? But the point about the immigration law probably not helping much in this scenario still stands.
      • masonic 4y ago
        >that also has smallpox. Are you seriously unaware that that's "not a thing"? No US government entity, military or otherwise, has ever deliberately infected a native population with smallpox. You're reduced to making shit up?
        • runarberg 4y ago
          I don’t see your parent implying that anyone deliberately infected other populations with smallpox.
• Swizec 4y ago
  > I get that we can't open the flood gates There is no flood of immigrants waiting for the gates to open. American net migration is trending down. Soon there will be more people leaving than coming. Besides, leaving your country is hard and a large majority of people aren’t actually that interested. Especially not for a place like USA when other, nicer, places have strong economies too. https://econofact.org/the-decline-in-u-s-net-migration https://econofact.org/the-decline-in-u-s-net-migration Personally I moved here for the tech industry. But there’s really not much else the US has going for it.
  • usrn 4y ago
    People leaving would ease asset price inflation relative to wages, especially housing which has been a crisis here for a while.
  • sbelskie 4y ago
    The decrease in net migration has everything to do with COVID + and embarrassing inability to process green card and other immigration related backlogs and almost nothing to do with there not being enough people willing to migrate here. At worst there are tens of millions of people who would migrate here; upper estimates are around 750 million, though that is only based on stated intention AFAIK and the real number would likely be lower.
    • Swizec 4y ago
      The decline started in 2016 so it can’t be covid. But it makes sense that it’s due to whatever policies and hurdles Trump’s government put in place.
    • deleted 4y ago
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  • 1270018080 4y ago
    There IS a flood of immigrants waiting for the gates to open. That bar chart in the article is the floodgates being closed. That being said, there is no point in moving to this country unless you're an SWE, or smart enough to get into med school etc., so you can make your money and get out ASAP. I would leave if the salaries weren't so good.
• mschuster91 4y ago
  > I get that we can't open the flood gates. Actually: why not? This is how the US has operated for centuries after all, not to mention that treating immigrants as a natural disaster ("flood") is a talking point established by the anti-immigrant far-right. It's disturbing to see how the far right has managed to pervert the core of the identity of the US and the core values on which the EU was founded. Both the US and the EU are now, first and foremost, militarized borders to ward off the poor (that are mostly migrating due to the consequences of decades of our very own politics).
  • grapeskin 4y ago
    Saying being against completely free and open immigration is a far right talking point just normalizes the far right. Most people are against completely open immigration. I’d rather people not think that it’s okay to be far right because anything else is pro-unlimited immigration. I don’t think imposing strict per-country quotas is really the solution, but I do think per-case scrutiny is a good idea. People bring their own culture and even their country’s problems with them when moving to another country. In modest numbers, people adapt to the home country and become indistinguishable from the locals after a few years. If it’s not limited to some extent, you end up with some unwilling to adapt in any way because they have a social bubble. With that, the problems many people sought to escape start becoming endemic in their new country. Before there’s some tirade about me being racist or “far right”, I’m neither. I’m an immigrant myself. I often avoid people from my home country because of the reasons described above.
    • bradlys 4y ago
      > In modest numbers, people adapt to the home country and become indistinguishable from the locals after a few years. We must be in huge numbers territory then because definitely not the case in Bay Area or quite a few places I’ve been in the US. You can tell a local from non-local easily here… There’s almost no interest in assimilation - this cascades down even into the children who identify more with their parent’s home country and less with the country they were raised in. I’ve seen this attitude transcend multiple continents and generations - ones born in Africa from Asian parents migrate to Europe and then raise their own children in the USA but those kids still identify more heavily with their grandparents asian home country.
• lettergram 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • immigrantz 4y ago
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > California went extremely socialist (not claiming that’s a bad thing) in the past 50 years and it’s due to immigration. Extemely socialist would be: the state directly gets involved in construction, knocks down old buildings disregarding all cultural heritage to make space for giant butt-ugly apartmenment blocks to house everyone, public toilets, etc. that's what USSR/China/etc. did Instead there seems to be streets filled with tents and teams of people hired to pick up human excrement. It does not look like any kinds of socialism any real socialist would recognise. > Using race as a proxy for culture it’s gone from ~90% white to 60% white in 50 years (2 generations). That’s astounding. Most likely the reasons are economic -> half the jobs anywhere are service jobs and lower-end jobs. In California and megacities like London the ratio of rent to wage in such job is >100%, so you can't have a life. Why would anyone with any other options or privilge put up with this exploitation? > freeze 100% of immigration for at least a generation (perhaps two) to stabilize the country You must also consider that it would destabilise the economy - all these people grew up abroad, someone else paid for their education and childcare, they pay for their own tuition. The undocumented workers, on the other hand, are being exploited so that the corn syrop can be $0.01 cheaper per tonne. All of that will have to adjust.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• robocat 4y ago
  > But it _does_ make a bit of sense to retain the top % of immigrants based on education in scarce fields Retain people with ability, sure. Retain people based on educational credentials only, maybe not.
  • bagacrap 4y ago
    H1bs are a lottery. There's no attempt to filter by quality, except that someone must want to employ/sponsor the candidate. The US does give ability based visas such as O1 but it's pretty difficult to prove/judge ability. (My wife just went through this process.) One decent indicator of ability is getting into and graduating from a top school. But even if a few less talented people slip through, is that really such a big deal? It's still a higher hurdle than "be born here", and besides, we get plenty of illegal/unqualified immigrants from the South who don't seem to be ruining the country. To me, it seems like a no-brainer to say: • come pay a US institution a ton of money • if you manage to pass their standards, we'll let you stay and contribute your high powered brain/education to our GDP
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      > To me, it seems like a no-brainer to say Create the power to mint US green cards in exchange for dollars and then turn that power over to a private institution and hope they use it wisely. Make US citizens interested in going to college out-bid the entire world that is trying to get a green card. Why do we have a college affordability crisis again?
    • lostmsu 4y ago
      The requirement to have somebody sponsor is just delegating ability check. That is unlike O1, which is purely credentials based AFAIK.
• hemreldop 4y ago