5 ms·

Yep. There was also a proliferation of Indian restaurants in the major cities, for the same basic reason. (Though I have to say that seems like a much harder ro

by timr 4mo ago

Yep. There was also a proliferation of Indian restaurants in the major cities, for the same basic reason. (Though I have to say that seems like a much harder road than operating a guesthouse for people from your own country, which is what I presume was the Chinese approach.) Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. There have been stories in the Japanese press about long-time restauranteurs being shut down by the new rules.

rayiner 4mo ago
> Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. The New York Times did a good podcast on how uncapped family reunification ended up being a loophole that totally overturned all the limits and compromises in the 1965 immigration reform laws in the U.S.: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/election-immigration.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
- modo_mario 4mo ago
  Same in belgium. It's almost if not the biggest source of migration.
- timr 4mo ago
  > Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. I don’t know if I’d go that far. I tend to think it’s kind of cruel to separate families indefinitely in the name of labor, but I do see that restrictions are necessary to prevent abuse. There’s an entire spectrum of reasonable debate here.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    It's not about "abuse." It's that family reunification undermines the filters that are at the heart of every immigration law. My dad came over from Bangladesh on an H1 and he's the guy you put on the brochure when you market skilled visa programs to voters. He's a public health expert who had a job in-hand in the U.S. And he moved his kids to a neighborhood without any other Bangladeshis and raised us without any foreign attachments or sympathies. Because that's the kind of person who self-selects into leaving everything behind to undertake an arduous immigration process. But none of those filters apply to family reunification. You don't need skills, you don't need a job. You're making much less of a sacrifice in terms of leaving your family behind, since by definition you already have family in the U.S. You can move into an enclave with people from your country and live your life and raise your kids the same way you were doing back home. You just enjoy the benefits of living in a richer country. The result of all that is you end up with this bizarre system where you apply intensive screening to select 65,000 H1Bs, 19,000 O-1s, etc. But then you hand out hundreds of thousands of greencards to people who meet no criteria other than having family who is already here.
    - fc417fc802 4mo ago
      Is that really so bizarre? You're framing it as some sort of fundamental policy failure but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business? Sure, you could propose an alternative regime where that isn't permitted. But that's a competing proposal for how to structure things and has (I think) legitimate tradeoffs. While there might well be practical problems with any given implementation I don't think there's any fundamental issue with handling immigration on the level of the nuclear family.
      - rayiner 4mo ago
        > but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business? That assumes we couldn’t get the number of skilled workers we want without allowing them to bring over their parents, siblings, etc. I don’t think that’s true, especially these days. I bet you could easily fill the 65,000 H1B seats just with unmarried foreign students studying in American colleges. I don’t think the system was ever designed with the idea that we need to allow in all these additional family members to get the skilled immigrants we want. I think it’s just an accident of history. And the result is a law that simply makes no sense on its own terms. Why go to all the trouble of heavily scrutinizing less than 100,000 skilled immigrants while you allow in several times that with no filtering? At that point, you might as well just assign half a million spots by lottery, or auction them to the highest bidder.
        fc417fc802 4mo ago
        Your reasoning only works if you place zero value on family or only want students or similar. I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong - I'm sure a cohesive position that includes that could be argued - but it's far from being a default assumption. To illustrate the point lets extend your line of reasoning to the absurd by imagining a policy that doesn't permit for one's spouse to immigrate. After all, if we're heavily scrutinizing 100k skilled slots then permitting an additional 100k unscrutinized individuals by association reduces the efficiency to 50%, right? Presumably we won't get many married individuals applying at that point but hey, there's plenty of unmarried students and young professionals so that's fine. My personal view is that ideally any policy should be humane and should work for well rounded people. I don't think we should disregard the well being of the participants in an attempt to maximize a metric that we see as beneficial. I also personally think that the nuclear family is a much more sensible unit of immigration than the individual is. I think we'd be better off with a system where each application is for a family as opposed to an individual and the applications are scored on an aggregate basis (ie multiple highly skilled family members should be viewed favorably, young children should be viewed favorably, things like that).
- hylaride 4mo ago
  It's a contentious issue in Canada, too. There are legit reasons families may want to bring in certain extended family members (grandparents for childcare, etc), but it becomes a chain. Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services. IMO it should be immediate family (spouse and children) and then maybe one should be able to sponsor 2 others on long term VISAs. But there would still be fraud (there always will be I suppose).
  - nicbou 4mo ago
    > Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services. In Germany, the benefits are tied to contributions, and after 45 years old, having some sort of pension is a requirement for getting a residence permit. That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train. It's getting a good deal, but it's not getting a free meal. Those workers will have demands too.
    - hylaride 4mo ago
      I'm not complaining myself, but the system has broken down due to abuse (and outright fraud) of student visas, where the "students" then started working front-line retail and delivery jobs. We stopped getting the skilled workers and got a lot of fraudulent ones, and there was a path to permanent residency/citizenship, which then became a pipeline for their families. There's been a crackdown as of late, but it's significantly impacted the perceived benefits of immigration here (and significantly increased south-asian racism). I know this problem wasn't unique to Canada (AU/NZ/UK all had similar issues) as many countries felt it was better to get these immigrants educated here where their credentials could be recognized, but they underestimated the demand via diploma mills.
    - rayiner 4mo ago
      > That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train. It's getting a good deal, but it's not getting a free meal. Canada’s moribund GDP per capita suggests they’re not getting a good deal. One big problem is that foreign education is worth very little because the standards are so much lower. Half my extended family in my parents' cohort moved to the U.S./Australia/Canada. They all had college degrees from Bangladesh, which was very favorable under the point-based immigration in Australia and Canada. Out of a dozen people, only my dad got a college-required job without further education. My uncle became a doctor after redoing medical school. And two cousins went to college in Australia and got professional jobs. That was it--everybody else got permanent residency based on paper credentials then took non-college jobs. And they lived in subsidized housing, and got a lot of support from the government. I would be curious to see the statistics for what fraction of Canadian/Australian skilled immigrants actually get a job that requires their skills and credentials. I suspect that there's a high percentage of people who get permanent residency based on paper credentials, but who can't actually get a job. The American system of tying the visa to a specific job solves at least that problem. I suspect the rate of return for the Canadian/Australian system is poor outside of medicine + people who immigrate to attend college in Canada/Australia.
- nicbou 4mo ago
  I wouldn't call it a loophole but a compromise. If you want to attract skilled labour, you must allow them to bring their dependents. They come as a unit.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    It’s not just dependents. It includes parents and siblings of both the skilled immigrant and their spouse. And, transitively, cousins, etc.
    - nicbou 4mo ago
      I assume we're talking about different countries.
    - jmyeet 4mo ago
      Just speaking for the US: - Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only; - Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently; - Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth; - Spouses of green card holders and unmarried children under 21 of green card holders have a wait of 1-2 years generally; - Married children of US citizens have a wait of 10-25 years; Additionally, the president has broad powers to limit giving visas (nonimmigrant or immigrant) for consular processing thanks to Trump v. Hawaii [1] that mostly cannot be challenged in court. There are various bans on this for 19, 39 and 75 countries. It is unlikely many of these people will not be able to get a visa at all at least until Trump leaves office. Immigration has become a political scapegoat for many things from housing prices to crime to unemployment. There's no evidence of any of this. Housing is particularly funny. Migrants (undocumented or documented) aren't the reason your rent is through the roof. Also, migrants of any type commit fewer crimes on a per-capita rate than US citizens [2]. If you want to look at actual immigration abuse, I'll give you two examples: 1. There are credible allegations Elon Musk was out-of-status after leaving Stanford [3]. This matters because, if true, it makes him ineligible to adjust to an employment-based green card and, by extension, it means he can be denaturalized. USCIS under this administration is more aggressively pursuing denaturalization. Do you think that includes Elon Musk? Yeah, me neither; 2. Melania Trump, a model from Slovakia, came to the US on a tourist visa in 1996 and allegedly worked on that visa, which is unauthorized. She later got an EB-1 green card in 2001 [4], colloquially known as an "Einstein visa". Again, unauthorized work here would make her ineligible to adjust status and could be grounds for denaturalization as well. Do you think USCIS will pursue that? No, me neither. Also, she engaged in the Republican sin of "chain migration" by sponsoring her parents in 2006. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii [2]: https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigra... [3]: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/11/11/elon-musk-stanford-work-status/ https://stanforddaily.com/2024/11/11/elon-musk-stanford-work... [4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318
- mmooss 4mo ago
  > Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. It's a huge benefit, giving more people the benefits of freedom, bringing the country benefits of more free people (including economic growth), and bringing families together. As there is little documented downside, it's a huge win. I want people to have freedom and families to be together. What's the downside?
mitthrowaway2 4mo ago
I have to say though, the abundant authentic, high-quality and low-cost Indian and Nepalese restaurants across the country was a real quality of life benefit for people living in Japan.
- timr 4mo ago
  I tend to be pretty sympathetic to anyone who does the insanely hard work of operating an actual restaurant.
alephnerd 4mo ago
Those "Indian" restaurants are primarily run by Nepali nationals.
- timr 4mo ago
  Yeah, I’ve heard that. Also Bangladeshi. I think it’s a southeast asian mix, really.
alper 4mo ago
> much harder road Given that we have 2+ in each high street in Berlin, it seems it's not that difficult.

by timr 4mo ago

rayiner 4mo ago

> Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. The New York Times did a good podcast on how uncapped family reunification ended up being a loophole that totally overturned all the limits and compromises in the 1965 immigration reform laws in the U.S.: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/election-immigration.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...

modo_mario 4mo ago
Same in belgium. It's almost if not the biggest source of migration.
timr 4mo ago
> Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. I don’t know if I’d go that far. I tend to think it’s kind of cruel to separate families indefinitely in the name of labor, but I do see that restrictions are necessary to prevent abuse. There’s an entire spectrum of reasonable debate here.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  It's not about "abuse." It's that family reunification undermines the filters that are at the heart of every immigration law. My dad came over from Bangladesh on an H1 and he's the guy you put on the brochure when you market skilled visa programs to voters. He's a public health expert who had a job in-hand in the U.S. And he moved his kids to a neighborhood without any other Bangladeshis and raised us without any foreign attachments or sympathies. Because that's the kind of person who self-selects into leaving everything behind to undertake an arduous immigration process. But none of those filters apply to family reunification. You don't need skills, you don't need a job. You're making much less of a sacrifice in terms of leaving your family behind, since by definition you already have family in the U.S. You can move into an enclave with people from your country and live your life and raise your kids the same way you were doing back home. You just enjoy the benefits of living in a richer country. The result of all that is you end up with this bizarre system where you apply intensive screening to select 65,000 H1Bs, 19,000 O-1s, etc. But then you hand out hundreds of thousands of greencards to people who meet no criteria other than having family who is already here.
  - fc417fc802 4mo ago
    Is that really so bizarre? You're framing it as some sort of fundamental policy failure but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business? Sure, you could propose an alternative regime where that isn't permitted. But that's a competing proposal for how to structure things and has (I think) legitimate tradeoffs. While there might well be practical problems with any given implementation I don't think there's any fundamental issue with handling immigration on the level of the nuclear family.
    - rayiner 4mo ago
      > but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business? That assumes we couldn’t get the number of skilled workers we want without allowing them to bring over their parents, siblings, etc. I don’t think that’s true, especially these days. I bet you could easily fill the 65,000 H1B seats just with unmarried foreign students studying in American colleges. I don’t think the system was ever designed with the idea that we need to allow in all these additional family members to get the skilled immigrants we want. I think it’s just an accident of history. And the result is a law that simply makes no sense on its own terms. Why go to all the trouble of heavily scrutinizing less than 100,000 skilled immigrants while you allow in several times that with no filtering? At that point, you might as well just assign half a million spots by lottery, or auction them to the highest bidder.
      - fc417fc802 4mo ago
        Your reasoning only works if you place zero value on family or only want students or similar. I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong - I'm sure a cohesive position that includes that could be argued - but it's far from being a default assumption. To illustrate the point lets extend your line of reasoning to the absurd by imagining a policy that doesn't permit for one's spouse to immigrate. After all, if we're heavily scrutinizing 100k skilled slots then permitting an additional 100k unscrutinized individuals by association reduces the efficiency to 50%, right? Presumably we won't get many married individuals applying at that point but hey, there's plenty of unmarried students and young professionals so that's fine. My personal view is that ideally any policy should be humane and should work for well rounded people. I don't think we should disregard the well being of the participants in an attempt to maximize a metric that we see as beneficial. I also personally think that the nuclear family is a much more sensible unit of immigration than the individual is. I think we'd be better off with a system where each application is for a family as opposed to an individual and the applications are scored on an aggregate basis (ie multiple highly skilled family members should be viewed favorably, young children should be viewed favorably, things like that).
hylaride 4mo ago
It's a contentious issue in Canada, too. There are legit reasons families may want to bring in certain extended family members (grandparents for childcare, etc), but it becomes a chain. Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services. IMO it should be immediate family (spouse and children) and then maybe one should be able to sponsor 2 others on long term VISAs. But there would still be fraud (there always will be I suppose).
- nicbou 4mo ago
  > Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services. In Germany, the benefits are tied to contributions, and after 45 years old, having some sort of pension is a requirement for getting a residence permit. That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train. It's getting a good deal, but it's not getting a free meal. Those workers will have demands too.
  - hylaride 4mo ago
    I'm not complaining myself, but the system has broken down due to abuse (and outright fraud) of student visas, where the "students" then started working front-line retail and delivery jobs. We stopped getting the skilled workers and got a lot of fraudulent ones, and there was a path to permanent residency/citizenship, which then became a pipeline for their families. There's been a crackdown as of late, but it's significantly impacted the perceived benefits of immigration here (and significantly increased south-asian racism). I know this problem wasn't unique to Canada (AU/NZ/UK all had similar issues) as many countries felt it was better to get these immigrants educated here where their credentials could be recognized, but they underestimated the demand via diploma mills.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    > That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train. It's getting a good deal, but it's not getting a free meal. Canada’s moribund GDP per capita suggests they’re not getting a good deal. One big problem is that foreign education is worth very little because the standards are so much lower. Half my extended family in my parents' cohort moved to the U.S./Australia/Canada. They all had college degrees from Bangladesh, which was very favorable under the point-based immigration in Australia and Canada. Out of a dozen people, only my dad got a college-required job without further education. My uncle became a doctor after redoing medical school. And two cousins went to college in Australia and got professional jobs. That was it--everybody else got permanent residency based on paper credentials then took non-college jobs. And they lived in subsidized housing, and got a lot of support from the government. I would be curious to see the statistics for what fraction of Canadian/Australian skilled immigrants actually get a job that requires their skills and credentials. I suspect that there's a high percentage of people who get permanent residency based on paper credentials, but who can't actually get a job. The American system of tying the visa to a specific job solves at least that problem. I suspect the rate of return for the Canadian/Australian system is poor outside of medicine + people who immigrate to attend college in Canada/Australia.
nicbou 4mo ago
I wouldn't call it a loophole but a compromise. If you want to attract skilled labour, you must allow them to bring their dependents. They come as a unit.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  It’s not just dependents. It includes parents and siblings of both the skilled immigrant and their spouse. And, transitively, cousins, etc.
  - nicbou 4mo ago
    I assume we're talking about different countries.
  - jmyeet 4mo ago
    Just speaking for the US: - Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only; - Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently; - Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth; - Spouses of green card holders and unmarried children under 21 of green card holders have a wait of 1-2 years generally; - Married children of US citizens have a wait of 10-25 years; Additionally, the president has broad powers to limit giving visas (nonimmigrant or immigrant) for consular processing thanks to Trump v. Hawaii [1] that mostly cannot be challenged in court. There are various bans on this for 19, 39 and 75 countries. It is unlikely many of these people will not be able to get a visa at all at least until Trump leaves office. Immigration has become a political scapegoat for many things from housing prices to crime to unemployment. There's no evidence of any of this. Housing is particularly funny. Migrants (undocumented or documented) aren't the reason your rent is through the roof. Also, migrants of any type commit fewer crimes on a per-capita rate than US citizens [2]. If you want to look at actual immigration abuse, I'll give you two examples: 1. There are credible allegations Elon Musk was out-of-status after leaving Stanford [3]. This matters because, if true, it makes him ineligible to adjust to an employment-based green card and, by extension, it means he can be denaturalized. USCIS under this administration is more aggressively pursuing denaturalization. Do you think that includes Elon Musk? Yeah, me neither; 2. Melania Trump, a model from Slovakia, came to the US on a tourist visa in 1996 and allegedly worked on that visa, which is unauthorized. She later got an EB-1 green card in 2001 [4], colloquially known as an "Einstein visa". Again, unauthorized work here would make her ineligible to adjust status and could be grounds for denaturalization as well. Do you think USCIS will pursue that? No, me neither. Also, she engaged in the Republican sin of "chain migration" by sponsoring her parents in 2006. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii [2]: https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigra... [3]: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/11/11/elon-musk-stanford-work-status/ https://stanforddaily.com/2024/11/11/elon-musk-stanford-work... [4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318
mmooss 4mo ago
> Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. It's a huge benefit, giving more people the benefits of freedom, bringing the country benefits of more free people (including economic growth), and bringing families together. As there is little documented downside, it's a huge win. I want people to have freedom and families to be together. What's the downside?

mitthrowaway2 4mo ago

I have to say though, the abundant authentic, high-quality and low-cost Indian and Nepalese restaurants across the country was a real quality of life benefit for people living in Japan.

timr 4mo ago
I tend to be pretty sympathetic to anyone who does the insanely hard work of operating an actual restaurant.

alephnerd 4mo ago

Those "Indian" restaurants are primarily run by Nepali nationals.

timr 4mo ago
Yeah, I’ve heard that. Also Bangladeshi. I think it’s a southeast asian mix, really.

alper 4mo ago

> much harder road Given that we have 2+ in each high street in Berlin, it seems it's not that difficult.