[wing-_-nuts]

If it were up to me there wouldn't be an h1b. People would be admitted via a points based system like Canada (but stricter) and would then be on a green card path and be granted perm residency after 5y, citizenship after 10.

That's of course my pie in the sky 'we can get congress to agree on things' version. If I were president, I would simply make the h1b go to the highest bidder, so the people that enter the US are, supposedly, the cream of the crop. Yeah, that would make students return home vs someone with more skills and experience. The whole point of the h1b is to bring over people with skills we can't find here in the US.

[bedobi]

Why stricter than Canada? Why green card eligible after five years (Australia, NZ, Canada and others, you get the PR immediately long as you reach the points requirements) and citizenship after TEN? (again, other countries you become a citizen after four)

[wing-_-nuts]

Because the lax immigration regs of the commonwealth countries are already causing significant issues.

[bedobi]

Lol, how are they "lax? And "significant issues" like what? According to who? You?

Those countries are only afloat because of immigration. Their homegrown economies are uncompetitive ones based on resource extraction and the trades, and their populations are uneducated and unambitious.

[undedone]

The mess that the huge flood of immigration of all sorts (students, refugees, etc) has created (housing, food banks etc) has been in the news - mainstream news - for months here in Canada.

[jandrese]

It's a political problem, but it's not clear that it's an actual economic problem. Immigrants are easy to demonize, so absent anything else political provocateurs tend to default back to complaining about immigration. Real life studies show that immigration is a net positive for the economy.

[faeriechangling]

Or maybe it’s you doing the demonizing of “political provocateurs”?

Notice the phrasing, if you are against immigration, you are demonizing IMMIGRANTS. Not for instance the politicians who set immigration policy, it’s not them being demonized, it’s the immigrants being demonized!

Immigration being a net benefit to the economy is also a given. It is still a consensus to have immigration. Even far right parties want immigration. The question is more that if you take in more and more immigrants do you have unending economic benefits for the average member of the population and is more immigrants simply always better regardless of who they are or what they do?

We got to the point where immigration levels in Canada in 2022 were such that the population expanded by 2.7% year over year, which is enough to double the population in 26 years, despite the population having well under sub replacement fertility. Is that too slow to reap the real economic benefits of immigration? Should we ignore the provocateurs and believe studies and try to double the population every 13 years?

[danbolt]

Housing affordability had been an issue in Canada even before recent changes to immigration. Cities have been hesitant to upzone and no premier wants to upset voters in suburban homeowner ridings.

[rmccoy6435]

> Those countries are only afloat because of immigration.

According to who? You? One of the countries you specifically just listed has just tamped down on some immigration efforts [1].

[1] https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/government-responds-unsu...

[bedobi]

A right wing populist clamps down on migration, color me surprised, it must be because of real problems and not to appease anti migrant voters.

It's very interesting how NET migration figures are rarely mentioned when this happens. Yes migrants are entering NZ in record numbers but citizens and migrants alike are also leaving in record numbers. (not uncommonly for the exact reasons I mentioned - the NZ economy is not competitive and it's not a place educated, ambitious, career minded people can maximize their potential)

[rmccoy6435]

I am about the most opposite of a right wing populist as you could be. I was simply calling out your grandstanding and hypocrisy; I don't care what side of the aisle anyone is on, I will call out people being that snide in discourse any day of the week.

Still waiting for your citation about how to measure a populations "ambitions" and how that factors into economics. Maybe work on the source citing, and a bit less on the personal attacks.

[faeriechangling]

The centre-left populist in Canada Trudeau also curtailed immigration.

[rvba]

Because there are billions of people in Africa, India, Pakistan and so on. And you cant just let them all in.

Millions would come even from second tier countries if they could. Look at any war conflict, refugees would come to the western countries too, if allowed.

[ToxicMegacolon]

> Because there are billions of people in Africa, India, Pakistan and so on. And you cant just let them all in.

> second tier countries

Maybe you didn't intend it, but your comment reads like you have an issue with immigrants of certain racial profiles. I'd suggest rewording, unless of course that was your intent behind the comment.

It also comes off as racist/supremacist to term certain countries as "second tier". Unless of course, that is intentional on your part.

[kelseyfrog]

What does it mean, "second tier", and who gets to decide tier placement?

[bedobi]

usually means “brown”

except even when white Western Europeans from first world countries immigrate, that too is also a problem because - you guessed it - they too be stealing dose jerbs

never mind that we’re talking about points based, highly selective visas for educated, experienced professionals, coming to work in fields the homegrown population don’t

[bedobi]

the context of the thread is highly selective points based visas for professionals which have nothing to do with whatever you're imagining

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

I hope at least these uneducated and unambitious populations manage to keep people who think like this out of their countries

[bedobi]

They do! I migrated to but subsequently left Australia in no small part for the reasons mentioned.

[faeriechangling]

Canada has been pulling back in immigration, specifically student visas by a third because things got modestly out of hand and it ended up with about the same number of international students as the US, uh, not adjusted for population. This is after a decades long pro-immigration cross-party consensus so I should highlight how irregular this is as now 2/3 major national level parties have supported curtailing immigration.

“Schools” would open up in strip malls and most of the students wouldn’t show up which existed simply to justify visas.

Some enterprising types would go out and take out mortgages and buy a house and have a dozen plus people living in it.

Public services like the healthcare systems and food banks saw overflowing demand. People were allowed to come to Canada to study with proof of just 10k of credit, which you will obviously blow through long before you complete a 4 year program, and that’s not actually enough to live in Canada.

Housing prices absolutely exploded in no small part to all of this, and in case you’re thinking maybe the immigrants will build more houses, Canada has about 9% of its population working construction compared to 2% of immigrants, because for some reason the immigration ministry was unconcerned with taking in immigrants who can build homes during a housing shortage.

GDP per capita has actually been backsliding, and while this is largely demographics and an aging workforce and low productivity, national bank of Canada economists pointed to there simply being more people and this spreading our economic output thinner. I do notice how immigration numbers are multiples of the number of new jobs in the statscan data. The jobs are also going down in pay over time.

Of course you are correct about these economies being uncompetitive but framing them as resource extraction economies is reductive and mostly wrong. These are service based economies for the most part. If anything, the main economic driver in recent times has been building and selling houses and products and services to people who want to live in the beautiful lands and breathe in the clean air of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to new money bringing fistfuls of cash. You aren’t wrong about these counties being kept afloat by immigration, but this sort of thing is taking the air out of the rest of the economy though because it’s inflating cost of living and gutting the cost competitiveness of other businesses. Also we took in a whack of students who were fuck poor and went to school at a fake strip mall school they did not attend which does not seem like a wise strategy if we want this educated economic juggernaut of a population.

Framing these countries as uneducated is somehow even more wrong, Canada has repeatedly topped the entire world in numbers of those with a post secondary education despite grads constantly bleeding south. In no small part because Canada both has a shitton of student immigrants as I just mentioned and all these students subsidize the education for the rest of the students. It seems like education is not actually the key to economic success and in practice actually results in people getting bachelor degrees to do menial work so they can get hired over somebody with a mere diploma, while the most economically productive graduates fuck off to America.

[dahfizz]

You're claiming the native population of rich western countries are uneducated? And immigrants from the third world are all doctors and rocket scientists coming to save the day? uhuh...

[bedobi]

Have you spent a day in Australia? Overflowing with homegrown bogans working in resource extraction and the trades (at best), meanwhile professionals like Drs and Scientists (including Computer Scientists) are overwhelmingly migrants. So yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

[faeriechangling]

Those working in resource extractions and the trades are some of the most objectively productive sectors of the population, even more so than computer scientists.

It has definitely been noticed how immigrants don’t tend to work in the trades. It is one of the key issues reducing support for immigration due to a shortage of tradesmen and housing only becoming more extreme when you take in doctors and computer scientists instead of carpenters and plumbers. If these governments took in more people who actually were skilled tradespeople, there likely would be more support for immigration, but I honestly think the people who set immigration policy are mostly white collar types who do not respect tradespeople or understand the desperate need for them and just see them as uneducated bogans to turn your nose up at. It’s incredible to me how you observed one of she biggest problems with contemporary immigration but completely misinterpreted the situation instead of thinking “hmm, why are all these Australians working in a different line of work than me, maybe they know something I don’t!”

Canada only instituted a category based immigration system specifically to take in more tradesmen to START to remediate this problem in May 2023. If we were taking in way more tradesmen a long time ago, contemporary political issues wouldn’t even be issues because as we took more people in they would have been building enough houses for their countrymen to keep cost of living under control.

[slackfan]

What a racist and bigoted perspective. I'm so sorry.

[avidiax]

Sorting the applications by 2 year guaranteed total comp would be a great start.

You then have to have a whistleblower program to stop the inevitable practice of inflating the total comp on the understanding that most of it will be kicked back to the employer.

[para_parolu]

How it would work with startups that pay via non liquid equity? Or what about innovative works that is not well funded. Most of jobs will go to large corporations while new businesses will suffer. And it will reinforce corporations even more.

[pphysch]

> If I were president, I would simply make the h1b go to the highest bidder

The article makes clear that many H1B aspirants are manipulated into indentured servant like conditions and debt. Selling H1Bs would just amplify that class divide.

I think the goal of the H1B system is to benefit American labor market, it's not a sort of "Ivy League" that is for elite reproduction.

[fragmede]

The stated goal of the H1B system is to allow companies to import high skilled and high quality labor that isn't available in the US market, into the US. That it doesn't behave that way in practice is at odds with the intent of the program.

[jandrese]

The stated purpose of the H1B program is solving a problem that didn't exist. The problem was that highly skilled people exist, but they know what they were worth and demand living wages. That's the problem that the H1B program solves: how to get skilled people who the company has enough leverage over to prevent them from negotiating high wages.

[pphysch]

The labor market is highly political and any policy that significantly affects it is going to have lipstick on it. US politicians will never admit that the southern border issue is driven by the demand of US business (agriculture, manufacturing, services) for inexpensive+disenfranchised migrant labor, but that is the bottom line for a lot of the stakeholders.