[Apreche]

My family came to the US via Ellis Island. Compared to what people have to do today, their legal path to US citizenship was relatively easy. I see no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century. Open a 21st century equivalent of Ellis Island, and let people become citizens.

[roenxi]

The growth of a welfare system seems like the major change. How does that plan interact with the welfare system? If someone is impoverished in Asia can they get a plane ticket to the US and expect to eventually be entitled to a state-sponsored minimum standard of living? Maybe healthcare if the left's plans for that get through eventually?

[jeroenhd]

The welfare system requires a stable population pyramid and currently the US is under-reproducing for that to happen. Without some immigration, the existing welfare system will become impossible to maintain.

The reality is that many rich industries are built on the backs of illegal workers. If countries would punish those who hire illegal workers more than they do the illegal workers themselves, the resulting collapse of the agricultural and food industries alone should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.

The people who would've come through Ellis Island are still coming in, they're just not getting registered anymore, and the people and government have turned a blind eye so they can cheaply dismiss them when they're no longer necessary/when they need to act as a scapegoat.

[rayiner]

The experience in Europe is that immigrants from most of the world are not net contributors to government finances: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...

[surgical_fire]

> Many fear that refugees are a drain on their welfare state

At least the excerpt of the article you linked say that people fear that, but does not provide any numbers to say that this fear makes sense or not.

[rayiner]

The article has a chart based on data collected in Denmark: https://share.google/ilc3koVJx2YOokuXa

[surgical_fire]

So, based on this chart, only migrants from "MENAPT" countries are a net negative in terms of contributions irrespective of age?

It's difficult to evaluate on others.

For example "other non-western immigrants" are net positive during their work years, but net negative in their ols age. But people typically don't become migrants in their 70s, they become migrants mostly during work years.

This chart is bad for multiple reasons. It does not separate migrants by type of visa - are they on some sort of critical skills visa? Are they undocumented? It doesn't say.

It also does not indicate the proportions. If 99% of migrants are on their working years and only 1% of migrants in their old age, then in general it is a net positive even if some are a strain on welfare.

Any evaluation on migrants that don't account for the type of migration going on is very flawed. Are we talking about refugees? engineers? medical doctors? nurses? academic researchers? low-skilled undocumented migrants?

All of those will be dramatically different in terms of how they integrate into society, how they contribute to the welfare state, how mucch they pay in the taxes, etc.

Painting it with broad strokes sound to me way too much like fear mongering.

[roenxi]

> should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.

Well, yes. If there is a pool of workers who aren't covered by the welfare system then it would work out fine to just let them migrate. Big wins for everyone. Probably works great every time it is tried. And if you're arguing that in practice there is an underclass in the US that isn't getting welfare and that works then sure, easy to see.

But, and I'm just going by vague rumours from reading US political news, there seems to be a significant number of people who would want US citizens covered by a welfare system. Phrases like "Universal" and "Basic Human Right" turn up from time to time. The people arguing against offering everyone in a country general support have lost a lot of arguments in parliaments around the world since ... around the late 1800s with Bismark as I vaguely recall. It comes off as unfair and unreasonable.

Frankly I imagine the US political process will start asking why undocumented migrants aren't getting welfare of some sort fairly soon if it isn't already resolved that they get something. That seems like it'd be in line with the general trends. If they are there to stay they're locals.

How does all this square up with easy, formal migration? In a practical sense? Rough numbers?

[bubblethink]

I've heard this argument going back to Milton Friedman, but the immigration discourse these days is quite detached from any economic concerns. Forget impoverished people; there is rabid opposition to pretty much all immigration including, for example, investor or employment categories. It's a lot more tribal than rational.

[roenxi]

Sure. But hypothetically, if we pretend people are rational for a few minutes here, how does the Ellis Island idea interact with a functional welfare system?

[array_key_first]

I would imagine more young, ambitious working age adults would help the welfare system, not hurt it.

If you look globally at countries which have issues with their large social services, they're almost all mostly homogeneous and declining in population, especially among the young. Which makes sense if you sit back and think about what social services are typically offered and where the money comes from.

[mothballed]

Friedman's argument was more so to just keep them as illegals but not deport them. That way they can support the welfare system but not use it. Friedman didn't want to make them legal until the welfare system has been crushed.

Of course that might require some changes to make it actually true illegals don't use state benefits. You need to cut off WIC for illegals, public schooling for illegals for instance before they will actually not be using public benefit. Also their children become legal via jus soli.

The obvious down-side is that those citizens / legal residents who have the skill level of illegal immigrants (sad, but commonly true) will see their real wages depressed and more competition for the job.

[_DeadFred_]

Man I'm ashamed that I wanted to see H1B reformed and was a part of this crowd.

I want more immigration I just don't want companies able to abuse people/people be treated any different/having less rights/power than anyone else in American. I think I'm just going to be full 'open borders' now because otherwise it always ends up with trash manipulating things in racist/corporate power way.

[rayiner]

High skill immigration still brings cultural change. My parents came here from Bangladesh, and while they superficially assimilated, they’re still culturally Bangladeshi. They, like virtually all the Bangladeshis and Indians I know, still overvalue formal education, undervalue risk taking, elevate familial over civic obligation, don’t value economic modesty, believe elites should rule over “the common people,” etc. And this was despite spending 35 years almost completely isolated from other Bangladeshis. Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

Libertarians assign culture zero substantive value, viewing people as fungible economic actors. Like many libertarian assumptions, that one isn’t grounded in empirical observation.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

This seems somewhat incorrect to me, as people change jobs and with it, culture, basically all of the time.

[rayiner]

The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”).

You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).

[disgruntledphd2]

> You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book.

However, what's going on in this chart?

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru...

I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time).

However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust (I'm sceptical of the metric here, would like to see it very density as I suspect that drives a bunch of the results).

> Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily?

In terms of my parents/culture, not at all. It was much, much, much more about drinking alcohol rather than food. And yet, while that part is still there, there's far more emphasis on food as a socialisation tool in my generation.

Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture.

> The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have?

> You can see this just by going around the country

I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

[throw5t434r]

Most countries in Asia already have universal healthcare so they definitely would not be coming to the US for that.

If anything, expats from Asia come to the US to make a higher salary to support their family back at home. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for jobs.

[Steltek]

There were only two requirements at Ellis Island:

1. You were free of contagious medical diseases

2. You were not in danger of "becoming a public charge" (welfare)

That plan is perfectly compatible with your concerns.

[roenxi]

It isn't quite that simple though - you're saying the standard is something like no danger of being a net welfare recipient. Apreche said he saw "no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century".

Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island

[Apreche]

These new immigrants will work and pay taxes.

And of course, taxing the rich can cover a LOT of people.

[rayiner]

No, your assumption is false. Even if all those paper valuations, etc., were real money you could use to pay for school lunches today, a 100% tax on the total wealth of U.S. billionaires wouldn’t even fund the federal and state governments for a year.

[boroboro4]

Total US wealth is ~170T so obviously it will be enough to cover federal and state government for a year (and more like 20 years).

Even considering obvious issue of wealth going down like crazy in such hypothetical scenario in its ends this would be enough. Because in the end it’s all part of same economy.

[rayiner]

That’s including everyone. The wealth of U.S. billionaires is about $8 trillion total, while the government at all levels spends about $10 trillion annually.

[xyzzyz]

You missed the "total wealth of U.S. billionaires". The billionaires own a tiny fraction of total US wealth. Most of the wealth is owned by people like me, who own a house, and stocks in retirement account.

[boroboro4]

My bad.

However billionaires don’t own tiny part of US wealth, more like 5%-10%. And top 1% (and grandparent was talking about rich people) own 1/3 of US wealth.

[csmpltn]

Your family had to leave everything behind, risking a weeks-long journey at sea costing them everything they ever had, going into the unknown - at a time where nobody could travel. The US was not as rich, or built, or anything.

People today get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area.

You don't see why things need to change?

[hn_acker]

> People today get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area.

> You don't see why things need to change?

Are you asserting that the current system of legal immigration needs to change, with an unsubstantiated example of a rare $50 dollar plane ticket as if people can easily move to the US by plane? Do those people leave behind most of their belongings, or do they instead make multiple plane trips to move them? And what about all of the paperwork and approval and unpredictable waiting [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912126

[csmpltn]

I'm talking about maintaining an immigration system which is consistent with the realities of the time we live in.

[hn_acker]

I took issue with the specific example you used ("get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area") because it was too reductive (and unsubstantiated) to represent "the realities of" the immigration system "of the time we live in" in a way that would let me "see why things need to change". I think you should have fleshed out your example or chosen a better one.

[astura]

Where can I buy a international plane ticket for $50 ?

[hagbard_c]

With Ryanair, Easyjet and other similar carriers. Not to the Bay area though, at least not yet.

[tclancy]

Buddy, what are you on about? This sounds just like all those welfare queens in Cadillacs GHW Bush was telling us about.

[hn_acker]

> This sounds just like all those welfare queens in Cadillacs GHW Bush was telling us about.

I don't think George H. W. Bush did that. Do you mean Ronald Reagan [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen#Origin

[tclancy]

Interesting. I think the senior Bush must have used it during the '84 campaign at the RNC? My memory is slipping plus I would have been like 8. But I was a nerd who followed politics for a while before that.

[readthenotes1]

Nowadays, there's both welfare and voting concerns that weren't the same in the 1800s.

If the USA offered food and shelter security, billions would come in