[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.