In my economic recovery plan (November 2008), I proposed that the U.S. adopt an immigration system that favors people who are likely to earn a lot of money. My basic theory was that Americans will never be able to pay back all of the money that our government is currently borrowing, so we need to find some foreigners who will agree to come in here and work to pay our debts.
A few recent news events seem to indicate that we’re going in the opposite direction. Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni was granted asylum and will be eligible for citizenship, not on the grounds that she might one day earn enough money to stop living off the taxpayers of Massachusetts but rather because she is too ill to work or travel (nytimes).
Meanwhile, Faisal Shahzad, granted citizenship in April 2009, went down to Times Square and tried to kill a few hundred of the Americans who had welcomed him just a year earlier. In looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_Shahzad, it is hard to understand what economic or cultural benefit we could have expected from adding Mr. Shahzad to the ranks of U.S. citizens. Here are some of his credentials:
- D student in high school
- “mediocre student” in a Pakistani business school
- C, D, and F student at a college in Washington, D.C. that was stripped of its accreditation
By the time Mr. Shahzad was granted citizenship, there were 15 million unemployed Americans, many of whom had superb educations and skills. How was Mr. Shahzad supposed to thrive in a U.S. economy flooded with jobless native-born Americans? In this case, of course, we know that Mr. Shahzad did not thrive and that whatever taxes he may have paid are now dwarfed by the billions in antiterrorism costs his actions have imposed on the rest of us.
I would be interested to get comments from readers who live in countries such as Australia and New Zealand that use point systems to evaluate potential immigrants. Could Faisal Shahzad have earned citizenship under these systems? (And we might as well ask about Aunt Zeituni as well.)
My understanding (rather unfounded) is that allowing people from random origins immigrate (to whatever country, I speak as well in the case of USA as of Europe here), increasing diversity (while at the same time “relocating” jobs), would be beneficial on the theory that it would “homogeneize” and increase the dependencies between people of the Earth (both culturally and economically, and both in the destination and source countries).
If China produces your TV and computers, and you are debtor to China, then it is neither in your interest to declare war on China or in China interest to declare war on USA.
If half of the people of USA’s familly is in Afganistan, and half of the people of Afganistan’s familly is in the USA, by the same token it woudn’t be a good idea for USA to attack Afganistan or for Afganistan to attack the USA. And similarly for all the other “diverses” countries of origin.
Well, that’s my optimisitic, well-minded reading of this notion.
Obviously, it doesn’t work, and perhaps that my realist or pessimistic, conspiration ridden reading I had originally was the good one, that this is allowed on purpose to destroy occident.
Or perhaps just to increase the benefit of some who profit from the lower wages high unemployment (or at first competition from immigrants used to lower wages) leads to.
They can just paper over that plaque on the Statue of Liberty, then… “Give me your well-off, your highly educated, your yearning to take advantage corporate welfare…”
Huddled masses not typically being a strong profit generator.
The primary requirement for Australia seems to be having enough cash to keep the property bubble alive; this is called the business migration scheme. If you have enough cash you get a visa that you can later turn into citizenship. If you don’t have cash, things seem (anecdotally) grim although you can make a case if you have family here or have a degree that means you can do a job that there isn’t an Australian to do. Of course, there is also the cultural test, which probably consists of questions about Donald Bradman.
For Australia, the answer would most likely be a no. Forget Citizenship, he would have a hard time getting any kind of right to live and work in Australia. Unless you have an employer sponsor you (difficult because they have to employ suitable Australian residents first before the government will allow the to sponsor foreigners), are a skilled professional where there is a shortage of workers, have a relative sponsor you (again difficult as a bond will need to be provided to the government), or are married to an Australian (immigration will conduct interrogations to determine if the marriage is merely an attempt to gain entry by deception).
Most assessment is done using a points based system you have discussed previously on this blog. This system has now been copied by the UK who refer to it as an Australian style points based system. On a related note at the height of the financial crisis the UK changed the points awarded under their highly skilled migrant visa so that a masters degree was the minimum requirement whereas a bachelors sufficed previously.
Sources: Immi.gov.au has a wizard that would have discouraged Faisal had he input his details. I am an Australian with a British wife (and have several friends who have gained Australian citizenship) who is looking at how my wife and I can settle in Australia after having been through the UK visa/residence system myself.
Phil,
Your cite doesn’t support your claim that she was granted asylum because she was “too ill to work or travel.” Below is the relevant excerpt.
The only basis for the immigration judge to grant asylum is fear of persecution. Given her families involvement in politics, she likely had a basis.
People are entitled to their own ideology, but not to their own facts. You should really delete the cite or find another source.
NY Times:
“While people seeking asylum must show that they would face persecution if they returned to their homeland, the exact basis of Ms. Onyango’s claim, and the judge’s decision, remained private.
“The asylum process is confidential, and she wants to keep it that way, so we can’t get into details on why the judge granted asylum or the exact basis for her claim,” Scott Bratton, one of her lawyers, told reporters in Cleveland on Monday, according to The Associated Press.
ryan: “Huddled masses” is a noble-sounding idea, but now that the U.S. has 310 million people and 15 million unemployed, some might argue that we are already fully supplied with huddled masses. There is also the fact that it will take 500% of U.S. GDP to pay our debts plus pension obligations to government employees, Medicare, Social Security, etc. (Greece was at 800% when they went bust.) If we don’t have enough money to pay what we’ve promised to existing U.S. citizens, it doesn’t seem sensible to let more folks in and promise them stuff that we’re not going to deliver.
ryan: There are over 5 billion people[1] who live in countries poorer than Mexico[2]: how many of them would you accept? Your answer must be an integer, not an emotion.
[1] This is a number from about 4 years ago: the poorest countries tend to have the highest birthrates, so it’s probably much more now.
[2] Mexico is middle-class by world standards.
Tell it! For the bottom 80% of Americans, average wages in this country have been stagnant for the past *thirty years*. Simple supply and demand, this is what happens when cheap labor floods the market. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_12/012733.php
Not to mention the strain on the social safety net.
I wish progressives would wake up and agree to build the fence already.
On the other hand, in the long run the poor countries seems to be getting richer by leaps and bounds, and the incentives to migrate to the U.S. will decrease… eventually.
Argh I misread the graph and overstated the wage stagnation situation. It’s still pretty bad though.
What gets me is that large numbers of people like Auntie Zeituni remain in this country illegally and fraudulently for years without legal ramification. Yet when an American kid uses similar tactics that illegal’s use (identity fraud, falsifying documents) to get into Harvard, they want to throw the book at him.
Now I’m not saying Wheeler shouldn’t be punished – he definitely should. I’m just having a tough time being angry at him for it when so many other non-Americans get away with it openly in America every single day.
Philip: A points-based system might make sense for employment-related immigration. The problem is that the immigration system might end up being monopolized by people of a few nationalities that churn out engineers and scientists. You may be OK with it, but other segments of the voting population probably aren’t, and would lobby endlessly against such “discrimination”.
With that said, a points-based system would not have kept out the talented Mr. Shahzad. It appears that he was allowed a green card and citizenship based on marriage to a US Citizen (a much easier and faster route to citizenship than the employment-based one). If he wanted to migrate based on his employment skills, he would have needed to find an employer willing to sponsor him, and wait the 5+ years that it would take for the green-card process to be complete. it would then take him a further five years of non-felonious living to apply for naturalization.
Jagadeesh: I’m not sure why you think that a points-based system would favor engineers and scientists, especially as the number of people who work in the manufacturing sector shrinks here in the U.S. I would say that a fully trained medical doctor would have a much easier time getting a job in the U.S. than a mechanical engineer (especially if the U.S. were to remove restrictions on certifying doctors who trained in foreign countries so that a doctor from England, for example, did not have to repeat her residency).
I recognize that Mr. Shahzad eventually found an American to marry, but prior to that he was able to stay in the U.S. on the strength of his presumed ability to work. Wikipedia says that “Just before graduation, in April 2002, he was granted an H1-B visa for skilled workers.” This was two years before his marriage. It is unclear what skills Mr. Shahzad possessed that were scarce (though I guess getting Cs and Ds is now unusual for Americans given our rampant grade inflation).
There is a system that accepts people if they are rich. It’s called investor’s visa. There are also about 140K green card slots a year based on employment. The diversity system is 50K, relatives 225K+, refugees 70K and others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Permanent_Resident_Card#Immigration_eligibility_and_quotas
Since US is such attractive destination, think any point system would be quickly hacked. Fake language certs, diplomas, health docs, etc. And how is the government suppose to judge if diplomas from Kharkov’s Engineering School are more valuable than Kuala Lampur’s one? And with the speed cases are looked it is impossible to look at the family situation. In my experience children of immigrants can often achieve success that seem completely unlikely based on their parents’ history so we could be losing many valuable future citizens.
Jagadeesh is correct: the reality of engineering employment doesn’t matter because of politics: While physicians and attorneys have a voice through their unions (AMA / ABA), engineers do not have a voice, and, ironically, are “represented” by their ~counterparties~ in the employment negotiation, large high-tech employers, who persistently cry that there is a shortage of engineers and demand more H1-B visas so that they can hire people much like Mr. Shahzad under the ruse of “needing the best and the brightest.”
Norman Matloff has documented for many years that a student visa and stipend to a 4th tier university are very attractive to people from poor countries, while American students with a solid BSEE or BSCS would take a pass on the type of institutions favored by Mr. Shazad, but that employers often use such bogus “advanced degrees” to justify hiring an H1-B.
Nick C: Bringing your wife to Australia is a piece of cake. I am Dutch and met my Australian wife while both living in London and am permanent Australian resident now. Citizenship is a year away.
Get the application form, then spend the next month or two collecting birth and marriage certificates, police record searches, statutory declarations from friends, etc. Then send it all in and in my case 10 days later had a temporary residency visa. Easy.
The embassy in London prefers to communicate by email and does so very efficiently. (3.5 years ago anyway)
I have an idea. Combine national quotas with an auction and the militaries’ mental/physical screening system. The quotas can be based on the dollar value of trade divided by the other countries’ population (Canada would rank 1st). We could then just auction off those visas…Or have a 1st-come-1st-served system where we cut off handing out visas for a period of time (1 mth? 3 mths? 1 yr?) before starting up again. The military screens for IQ, communicable disease, being fat, being too skinny, poor vision, and females must have a negative pregnancy test. Amoung other things.
Or we could just limit migration to people who can get an adult citizen who primarily reside in the US to sponser them.
Military screening process: http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/mepsglance.htm