[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.