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As a recent immigrant myself -- I got my green card last week, after a 5-year application process, and I'm one of the lucky ones -- I'm a huge fan of immigratio

by seldo 14y ago

As a recent immigrant myself -- I got my green card last week, after a 5-year application process, and I'm one of the lucky ones -- I'm a huge fan of immigration reform. However, this is not the bill to do it. The 55,000 diversity visas are an essential part of how immigration should work: there should be more of them, not less. While we need more STEM educated immigrants, it should not be at the expense of other visa types.

GuiA 14y ago
I'm unfamiliar with diversity visas- who are they for, and what "good" are they supposed to provide?
- sharkweek 14y ago
  lottery system for immigration, focused heavily on bringing in immigrants from countries that have lower immigration rates to the US -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa
- seldo 14y ago
  They are Visas available to anybody, for any reason, from any country. They are good because immigration is good. But let me explain a bit further. Most American visas are related to a specific job, or a family connection, or education. You can't just turn up and stay -- you have to have a reason, and a ton of documentation. But that's not how immigration has, historically, worked: the original American colonists and those that followed them through the 1700s and 1800s didn't arrive knowing where they'd live and what job they'd have. They arrived hoping to make a better life for their children, with no clear plan of how. That's what these visas are for. The situation is complicated slightly further because these are restricted to low-immigration-rate countries. Basically, there are a billion Indians and more than a billion Chinese: even a very small percentage of them applying for a visa lottery would mean that 99% of visas went to people from those countries. Therefore, to get immigrants from a broader range of countries, visas for people from countries that send a lot of applications every year are handled separately, under their own quotas. The remaining countries are all lumped together and given a group quota: these are the "diversity" visas. If you would like a more fundamental answer to why immigration is good, I'm happy to oblige, just ask :-)
  - sthatipamala 14y ago
    Could you tell me why you claim immigration is fundamentally good? Interested in hearing more.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - incognitoMex1 14y ago
      Prevents inbreeding of ideas. Some of those immigrants may be a heretic monkey. This passage from the anime "Irresponsible Captain Tylor" [1] explains it better. "Do you know about monkey tribes? Monkey tribes are very organized, with a leader at the top. Now, once every few years without fail, a renegade monkey leaves his tribe and tries to join another one. The members of the new tribe greet the renegade monkey by beating it to a bloody pulp. And yet those renegade monkeys, those heretic monkeys if you will, are a providence from nature. Why? Because they keep the bloodlines from becoming too thick, from too much inbreeding within the tribe. So, you could say that those heretics are essential for survival. Heretics are essential for survival." [1] http://greybeta.dreamwidth.org/179747.html http://greybeta.dreamwidth.org/179747.html
    - seldo 14y ago
      Fundamentally, immigration is a market response. Demand for labor inside of a country exceeds supply -- or, more accurately, the demand for labor in the receiving country exceeds the demand in the sending country. This trade in labor is good for all the same reasons that any other trade is good: the commodity (labor) goes for the best price to the supplier to those who will most benefit from it, as indicated by their being willing to pay the most. Both parties benefit, it's a clear win-win, no problem. Right? It gets a little more complicated in the case of immigration, for a bunch of reasons. Firstly: are the suppliers and sellers in this transaction nations, or individuals? You can look at it both ways: If the parties in the trade are nations, then the benefit is rather lopsided to the receiving country: they get a new, productive worker, and any money they give that worker is mostly spent inside the receiving country, boosting that economy further. The sending country gets nothing -- even though it spent money educating that worker, providing them with healthcare, etc.. In practice, however, many immigrants send money back to family in their home country, a substantial flow of money known as remittances. If the parties in the trade are individuals, the win-win nature is also obvious: the company gets a worker that they would otherwise have been unable to afford, the worker gets a better-paying job than they would have got in their home country. But there's a third way of looking at it, and this is where things get tricky. I could also have phrased the above as "for cheaper than a local worker". In practice, that's not usually how it works. Hiring an immigrant is generally more expensive and inconvenient than a native -- if a company could find a native worker to do the same work for the same price, they would rationally do so. However, the ability to hire immigrant workers at that price does prevent the company from raising the price it's willing to pay. More simply: while the company wins, and the immigrant wins, a third party worker in the receiving country has, in one sense, lost: they could have got the job if they were willing to work for the same price as the immigrant, but not if they wanted more. Immigration holds down labor prices, and this is where the trouble starts, because the connection between lower labor prices and greater prosperity for all is indirect and poorly understood. When labor is cheaper, the goods those workers make can be sold for less (and, in a competitive market, will be). This means anybody buying those products is directly better off -- immigration has saved them money. They will then take that money and spend it on other things, and those sellers will spend it again on yet more things, until eventually somebody gets around to buying the goods being made by the third-party worker. He sells more of those goods, and so makes more money than before. So any individual third-party worker is worse off because of immigration -- instead, everybody in the country shares a little bit of the benefit, and the total value created is greater than if the immigrant had never arrived, because there are two workers instead of one. Resistance to immigration is, fundamentally, an acknowledgement of the selfish impulse to be personally better off, rather than making the whole nation richer. That makes it a big good economically, and a tough sell politically.

by seldo 14y ago

GuiA 14y ago

I'm unfamiliar with diversity visas- who are they for, and what "good" are they supposed to provide?

sharkweek 14y ago
lottery system for immigration, focused heavily on bringing in immigrants from countries that have lower immigration rates to the US -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa
seldo 14y ago
They are Visas available to anybody, for any reason, from any country. They are good because immigration is good. But let me explain a bit further. Most American visas are related to a specific job, or a family connection, or education. You can't just turn up and stay -- you have to have a reason, and a ton of documentation. But that's not how immigration has, historically, worked: the original American colonists and those that followed them through the 1700s and 1800s didn't arrive knowing where they'd live and what job they'd have. They arrived hoping to make a better life for their children, with no clear plan of how. That's what these visas are for. The situation is complicated slightly further because these are restricted to low-immigration-rate countries. Basically, there are a billion Indians and more than a billion Chinese: even a very small percentage of them applying for a visa lottery would mean that 99% of visas went to people from those countries. Therefore, to get immigrants from a broader range of countries, visas for people from countries that send a lot of applications every year are handled separately, under their own quotas. The remaining countries are all lumped together and given a group quota: these are the "diversity" visas. If you would like a more fundamental answer to why immigration is good, I'm happy to oblige, just ask :-)
- sthatipamala 14y ago
  Could you tell me why you claim immigration is fundamentally good? Interested in hearing more.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - incognitoMex1 14y ago
    Prevents inbreeding of ideas. Some of those immigrants may be a heretic monkey. This passage from the anime "Irresponsible Captain Tylor" [1] explains it better. "Do you know about monkey tribes? Monkey tribes are very organized, with a leader at the top. Now, once every few years without fail, a renegade monkey leaves his tribe and tries to join another one. The members of the new tribe greet the renegade monkey by beating it to a bloody pulp. And yet those renegade monkeys, those heretic monkeys if you will, are a providence from nature. Why? Because they keep the bloodlines from becoming too thick, from too much inbreeding within the tribe. So, you could say that those heretics are essential for survival. Heretics are essential for survival." [1] http://greybeta.dreamwidth.org/179747.html http://greybeta.dreamwidth.org/179747.html
  - seldo 14y ago
    Fundamentally, immigration is a market response. Demand for labor inside of a country exceeds supply -- or, more accurately, the demand for labor in the receiving country exceeds the demand in the sending country. This trade in labor is good for all the same reasons that any other trade is good: the commodity (labor) goes for the best price to the supplier to those who will most benefit from it, as indicated by their being willing to pay the most. Both parties benefit, it's a clear win-win, no problem. Right? It gets a little more complicated in the case of immigration, for a bunch of reasons. Firstly: are the suppliers and sellers in this transaction nations, or individuals? You can look at it both ways: If the parties in the trade are nations, then the benefit is rather lopsided to the receiving country: they get a new, productive worker, and any money they give that worker is mostly spent inside the receiving country, boosting that economy further. The sending country gets nothing -- even though it spent money educating that worker, providing them with healthcare, etc.. In practice, however, many immigrants send money back to family in their home country, a substantial flow of money known as remittances. If the parties in the trade are individuals, the win-win nature is also obvious: the company gets a worker that they would otherwise have been unable to afford, the worker gets a better-paying job than they would have got in their home country. But there's a third way of looking at it, and this is where things get tricky. I could also have phrased the above as "for cheaper than a local worker". In practice, that's not usually how it works. Hiring an immigrant is generally more expensive and inconvenient than a native -- if a company could find a native worker to do the same work for the same price, they would rationally do so. However, the ability to hire immigrant workers at that price does prevent the company from raising the price it's willing to pay. More simply: while the company wins, and the immigrant wins, a third party worker in the receiving country has, in one sense, lost: they could have got the job if they were willing to work for the same price as the immigrant, but not if they wanted more. Immigration holds down labor prices, and this is where the trouble starts, because the connection between lower labor prices and greater prosperity for all is indirect and poorly understood. When labor is cheaper, the goods those workers make can be sold for less (and, in a competitive market, will be). This means anybody buying those products is directly better off -- immigration has saved them money. They will then take that money and spend it on other things, and those sellers will spend it again on yet more things, until eventually somebody gets around to buying the goods being made by the third-party worker. He sells more of those goods, and so makes more money than before. So any individual third-party worker is worse off because of immigration -- instead, everybody in the country shares a little bit of the benefit, and the total value created is greater than if the immigrant had never arrived, because there are two workers instead of one. Resistance to immigration is, fundamentally, an acknowledgement of the selfish impulse to be personally better off, rather than making the whole nation richer. That makes it a big good economically, and a tough sell politically.