[rayiner]

> 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/electi...

[hylaride]

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]

> 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.

[rayiner]

> 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.

[hylaride]

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.

[TMWNN]

>That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train.

As raynier said, Canada's diminishing per-capita GDP does not in any way reflect this. It is not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of the country's post-2015 GDP growth has come from massively increased immigration.

Indians in the US are by are large filtered for ability, and contribute to legal immigrants in the country being of high quality in the aggregate (although H1B visa abuse has changed this view).

Canada has seen a colossal recent influx of Chinese and especially Indian immigrants, the latter group now twice as large as in the US per capita.

Like the US, Canada allows international students to work. Unlike the US, Canada allowed those students to work off campus (!) for up to 40 (!!) hours a week. This caused the rise of an entire industry, in which so-called institutions of higher learning (Conestoga, Lambton, Confederation) have 99% Indian "students" that work off campus, destroying the local job and housing markets.

While they are (mostly) legal, unlike the influx of Latinos streaming uncontrolled across the Mexican border until the Trump crackdown, the numbers are still staggering for a country of Canada's size. And at least those illegal aliens entering the US are looking for manual labor, with the men going into construction and other trades. The Indians in Canada aren't nearly so willing to get their hands dirty, working at Tim Horton's ("Timmigrants") and as truck drivers (causing havoc on highways).

[fakedang]

Under the UAE's Golden Visa scheme, it's parents, children and any dependent siblings, which I think is an optimal balance. The person who sponsors the rest is/are the primary visa holder(s) and the authorities only take their situation into account when assessing lifestyle.

So your parents don't need to have a pension or an income source if they want to live with you, and you can sponsor any disabled siblings (who get massive benefits from the UAE government whether citizen or non-citizen). But you cannot support an able-bodied male sibling above the age of 25. You can sponsor female unmarried siblings regardless of age as long as they are unmarried (realities of that region I guess). But more importantly, you cannot sponsor just about everyone and anyone, so it stops becoming a chain of sponsorships like it is in the West. There are some workarounds to this system though (e.g.: you can hire one as a personal driver and another as an administrative assistant staff for your company) but they're still very restrictive.

Citizenship is obviously not at all a given, even for long term Golden Visa holders. But at least they don't tax you either which is still a reasonable balance altogether. You will get considered for citizenship though if you have a stellar track record (research, entrepreneurship, sports, govt service).

[mmooss]

> 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?

[timr]

> 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]

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]

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]

> 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]

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).

[rayiner]

I like your efficiency metric. I think that captures it nicely. My complaint is the efficiency metric is very low in practice, like under 25%. We can disagree on that but I think you see how I’m looking at the issue.

[nicbou]

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]

It’s not just dependents. It includes parents and siblings of both the skilled immigrant and their spouse. And, transitively, cousins, etc.

[nicbou]

I assume we're talking about different countries.

[jmyeet]

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

[2]: https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigra...

[3]: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/11/11/elon-musk-stanford-work...

[4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318

[rayiner]

Immediate relatives is totally uncapped and includes parents. So right there, each skilled immigrant can bring over a spouse and ultimately four parents. And those four people are going to be the least likely to work and assimilate due to their age. On top of that, although the family preference visas are capped, the cap is very high: 226,000 per year. That's triple the number of skilled workers.

I don't care about this or that individual. The problem is volume. When we came to the U.S. in 1989, there were only 10,000 Bangladeshis. Today there are over 600,000. There are "Little Bangladeshes" in many cities. I have a hard time believing highly skilled H1B workers and their kids are going to create these enclaves.

[selimthegrim]

This is about the 1983409258094th time I have to remind you about Vivek Bald's book about Bengali Harlem. There were more than 10k but they would be counting themselves as Black or Latin by that point.

[rayiner]

Do you think the fraction identifying as Bengali has changed? So the 10k to 600k number doesn't reflect actual growth?

Bangladesh got 66 H1B visas in 2025, and 2 O1 visas. Even if that pace was consistent since 1989, that's under 3,000 H1Bs. If there were really 10,000 Bangladeshis in 1989, the population should be under 15,000 people today accounting for natural population growth: https://ile.github.io/population-calculator/#human_age=80&ti....

For the 600,000 figure to be accurate, there must have been hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis already here in 1989 who started identifying as Bangladeshi since then. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. But those figures are shocking for a country that provides the U.S. with a very small number of skilled immigrants.

[jmyeet]

I will never understand not respect migrants whose first instinct is to close the door behind them the second they get to wherever they're going.

This is not a real problem. First we're assuming that migrants only marry foreigners. A significant portion of green cards are issued to people who marry a US citizen or green card holder so there's no spouse there and, at most, one set of parents. Also, it's not like every parent wants to come to the US.

And who really cares if parents come over? They don't get Social Security. They probably don't get Medicare either.

We are in fact completely dependent upon immigration with a fertility rate of ~1.54 per woman. Many industries (eg construction, agriculture) are completely dependent on migrant labor.

[rayiner]

> This is not a real problem.

It doesn't matter what you or I think constitutes a "real problem." The underlying premise of the law is limiting the number and type of immigrants. If a law allows only ~100,000 highly scrutinized skilled workers, but then has a loophole for hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants with no skills and no filtering, then it is broken under its own animating premises.

It's like building a biometric security door and then installing an unlocked sliding barn door right beside it. You can't argue that "well, we don't really need to control who gets access." We went to all that trouble to build the security door, so there must be a reason.

And family reunification is largely unnecessary. Maybe you need a small number of family greencards connected to O and E visas, to attract superstar workers that are well established in their careers. But otherwise, the U.S. could easily fill 65,000 H1B slots just from single college students who don't need to bring family with them.

[selimthegrim]

She's from Slovenia.

[modo_mario]

Same in belgium. It's almost if not the biggest source of migration.