The keyhole solution idea sounds great in theory but it is not very credible in practice. Reagan's 1986 amnesty deal was basically an attempt at a keyhole bargain. The Democrats were happy to take the amnesty and then de facto renege on the restrictions once they got in power. A large pool of immigrants creates a latent "pot of gold" of potential voters that becomes too tempting to pass up for the political party that expects a net electoral benefit from regularizing illegals and expediting the citizenship pipeline. Over time the welfare restrictions get relaxed, interior deportations become infrequent even for criminals due to local non-cooperation (sanctuary cities) and high cost, and the requirement to learn the language gets watered down or abolished.
For the keyhole solution to be viable it would have to effectively be written in stone through a constitutional amendment that provides standing to sue to all states and to individual voters through a private right of action (to prevent future de facto executive nullification). Illegals must be given a lifetime ban on ever getting the ability to vote in elections of any level (even municipal elections). Company executuves that knowingly hire illegal or out-of-status workers must be given long mandatory minimum prison sentences. The constitutional amendment would also need a clause that forces all government and police officials to cooperate with legal immigration enforcement efforts upon threat of personally going to prison (a ban on sanctuary locales that has teeth). Otherwise the keyhole restrictions would die a slow death of many silent compromises.
Came here to say exactly this. Keyhole solutions may work well in benevolent despotisms like GCC (which is Caplan's model), but create time consistent bargaining problems in democracies. We saw this with IRCA 1986's enforcement/amnesty swap, we saw it with whether sponsors are held responsible for public charges, and we are seeing it right now with half the country acting like it's unconscionable to expect temporary protected status to be temporary. And presidential caesarism makes this issue worse since while we can count on the filibuster and related issues to make it hard to change facts on the ground, since Obama's second term presidents have not been shy about making radical changes to immigration policy with a pen and a phone in ways that create new facts on the ground that are infeasible and/or less humane to reverse.
There is no reason to constitutionalize any of that. Put it in a federal statute and it only gets undone with another federal statute. Given how hard it is to pass any controversial federal statute outside of the reconciliation process (which is irrelevant here), a grand bargain that implemented the restrictions you want, plus a raft of keyhole solutions in exchange, would be extremely durable.
This is ahistorical. Traditionally, the GOP (or at least its pro-business wing) was the more pro-immigration party and liberals like Bernie Sanders, trade unions, and a lot of democrats were restrictionists. This has changed overtime, but there’s a reason Reagan did this.
That's not quite right. The GOP has been factionally torn on immigration for decades between the libertarian Free Traders and the Cultural Purists (like Steve King, Chuck Grassley, and Pat Buchanan). George W. Bush experienced heavy intra-party pressure to build a border wall (and did in fact build mini-walls near Yuma, Arizona). Reagan's 1986 amnesty was framed as a deal (amnesty in exchange for enforcement). When the Democrats de facto reneged on the deal Reagan's legacy was tarnished among GOP voters.
The idea that Democrats reneged on Reagans deal doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny. The numbers indicate that the employer enforcement actions didn't take off until after Bush 41 under Bill Clinton. Border encounters were rising before the end of Reagans term and were almost back to pre-86 levels under HW. Deportations overall actually fell slightly after the passage of the IRCA and remained at historically low levels through the remainder of the Reagan years ant through the Bush presidency, only rising under Clinton.
That actual history seems to be that Republicans never actually bothered to enforce the enforcement actions that supposedly balanced the amnesty part. Those features only started to be enforced under a Democrat.
I think this is missing the point. Unless the point is "Democrats must never be allowed to take power again." Because strong restriction / deportation policies are equally or more vulnerable to Democrats taking power and rolling them back.
The point is that "keyhole" policies are more popular than strong restrictive measures, and therefore politically harder to roll back. You may think Democrats will roll them back anyway, but they'd pay a bigger political price if they did.
(And I disagree Democrats would do that, at least not soon. I think the Biden administration touched the hot stove on this issue, and the burn they got is still fresh enough in the party's memory.)
"The Democrats were happy to take the amnesty and then de facto renege on the restrictions once they got in power"
The IRCA was signed into law in November of 1986. The democrats didn't take power until 1993 when Clinton was sworn in, after 2.5 years of Reagan and 4 years of George HW. Over that time border apprehension dipped and then returned to pre-IRCA levels, deportations maintained a historic low level, and enforcement actions against employers were rare. Bill Clinton actually increased border enforcement and deportations when he came to power.
The truth is that employer sanctions was never a priority of the Republican administrations because it was unpopular with the business interests that formed the Republican base.
Former pro-migration guy here, who recently got flipped by arguments/stats about electoral dynamics, crime, culture, social trust, and state security. More posts like this, please. I’ve scrolled past almost all your recent posts since they deal with economic arguments against migration (which I never believed), but now that you’re dealing with the actual reasons why nonmorons question conventional border policies, you’ve caught my attention!
Why not just rely more on guest workers ? Guest workers improve the economy, but don't change the culture given that they are there only for a limited amount of time, if they commit a crime they can be deported much more easily (since they have a home back at their home country ), they have no rights to welfare, and can't vote. The one issue I foresee is the problem of their children being born in the U.S. which would result in them getting citizenship, to my knowledge this is a big part of how the massive German guest worker program from Turkey ended up changing the demographics of the county once they allowed for birthright citizenship. Maybe there's a way around that ?
Terrible idea for the reason you hinted at. I would argue that it is actually cruel and immoral to deny the children birthright citizenship, which means denying someone citizenship of the only country they’ve ever known. You can create a situation where even 3rd generation immigrants are not citizens and a permanent second class. Guest workers also have little incentive to make lasting investments in the country, start businesses, etc.
The problem with Guest workers is you are basically hiring someone, training them for few years and you let them go. This works in Agriculture and Service industry but its a headache to hire someone every 3 years because the previously trained person has to go back and will not return.
This gets worse with skilled labor as you are teaching them ins and outs of your manufacturing and engineering systems and 3/6 years later you just send them home, so they learn everything from our architecture and infra and can use that knowledge back home with a competitor.
Training and learning are the most time consuming part of any job and has the highest ROI, you train a new worker good and they will increase the productivity, so you take up the burden of training them efficiently and 6 years later you send a polished worker home to work efficiently for your competitor will all the skills you invested in.
This is a fair point, although I wonder if these jobs just can't go to natives. While I understand this is suboptimal, what is your alternative for reaping benefits of immigration while assuaging the voters concerns ?
It definitely can, but then you have to train them again. And your skilled employee can go back and build a better product with the competitor stealing your IP and employer can't do anything about it.
Alternative is simple, Permanent Residency, they can't vote, can't use welfare and can't commit violent crimes. Trade off between being here vs home country. Employer gets to keep the person they trained, govt gets to keep their taxes, natives get to vote and use welfare.
I don't think you can really argue that to a child born to a guest worker it's "the only country they have ever known." A guest worker visa should be short, 3 years maximum. Realistically even if you get your wife pregnant the moment you get in U.S. soil, the child will literally not even remember America when they go back home.
I don't see how you would end up with a 3rd generation immigrant under a guest worker system. When the visa is up you have to return to your country.
"When the visa is up you have to return to your country."
This is not true for many guest worker visa categories at present. The H-1B is a "dual-intent" visa, which does not preclude the holder from applying for permanent residency if they so choose. And if a person on H-1B (plus his/her dependents) embarks on the green card route, they can get indefinite extensions on their H-1B visa (unless they get fired from their jobs).
But while the H-1B visa has no limits on country of origin, the green card does (not more than 7% of green cards in a given year can go to people from a single country). This has ended up creating a massive green card waiting line for Indians especially (and to a lesser extent, Chinese and Mexicans). It's quite feasible for multi-generational families to exist where the patriarch/matriarch has still not gotten a green card.
Right, I know this is how the H-1B works and that in practice it's always treated as a way to get residency later on. Under a guest worker program this would be explicitly not allowed
I agree. This would be much better for the host country, guest workers, and prospective immigrants. Temporary work ought to be decoupled from immigration and path to citizenship. But (I believe) this also requires an attitudinal change in US Immigration: allow people to do both if they want to (study/work and apply for a green card). Currently, applying for a green card all but puts one on a blacklist for any kind of temporary visa.
Keyhole solutions are only rational, if one can trust the people who sell them. It's kind of obvious that the political left will disregard the no-welfare clause and no-voting rights clause because (a) poor migrants need tons of welfare and (b) they will vote for the party that provides them with tons of welfare. As with taxes on companies that employ foreigners - let's say a 50% employment surcharge - that will also ONLY work if there is no hidden social welfare support for the dependents.
A and B are not obvious at all. Poor migrants generally don't need tons of welfare because they are hardworking people who get jobs. Even if they do need tons of welfare, there is no reason to assume they will vote for the party that gives them tons of welfare because voting is an expressive behavior not motivated by economic self interest. Poor people in rural America who rely on welfare usually vote Republican anyway.
In order to get any welfare at all in the United States, you have to live here for five years, barring certain limited exceptions like Cubans and DV victims. It is already the case that immigrants don't get welfare. This has been the law since 1996! Nobody even talks about changing it!
(Technically, emergency Medicaid is also covered, but that's because the hospital isn't going to be able to determine your insurance status right after you get hit by a car. So either the hospital pays or the government pays, and we decided the government paying is more fair. It only applies for true emergencies.)
What do you think of eliminating jus soli as a keyhole condition? It's the children of immigrants (who have often regressed to the mean, making them less talented) who irritate a lot of people more than the immigrants themselves, since they're the ones who are more likely to go woke or commit crimes. Then you could undercut the nativists on anchor babies, birth tourism, all of it. Australia got rid of jus soli in 2007, and the world didn't end.
Similarly, our system being built around family reunification rather than focusing on skills, like Canada's, is stupid.
Perhaps we can fast-track immigration candidates who voluntarily waive their right to jus soli.
You would need to change the Constitution to achieve that, since it's currently required by the 14th Amendment. IIRC even the Supreme Court justices who dissented in the recent case to argue that jūs solī doesn't apply to tourists' children/"anchor babies" (which contradicts the plain text of the Constitution...) would still apply it to the children of legal immigrants residing, even temporarily, in the US. So to restrict it as much as you want, you would need a constitutional amendment, which is in practice impossible.
Sure, it's all impossible. Notice that neither Richard nor Bryan Caplan talk much about getting their pet immigration reforms through Congress etc. since these things are all totally impractical in the current situation with the current system. I am just building my own castle in the sky alongside theirs: jus soli needs to go. It's a relic of a time before convenient transportation.
This sounds like a slippery slope argument, though about what I'm not sure. Did Australia become a fascist state in the 19 years after they got rid of jus soli? Seems like they have a higher foreign-born population with fewer populists in power than the US has! It, the Gulf states, and Canada indicate that when immigration policy is explicitly constructed for the best interests of the country making it, rather than for bleeding-heart reasons like family reunification, asylum, etc., the native born are far more tolerant of high levels of immigration.
Sounds simple on paper: “… a more open immigration system, conditional on learning English, banning welfare use, and zero-tolerance for crime…”
But realistically think through the steps involved in implementing this and you find yourself with the same system we have now. You can move the parameters of the current system in one direction or another—and that might indeed be a good thing to do—but you’re still right back at making the same pro and con arguments that we’ve been engaging in for the past century (and even longer if you consider the European-to-indigenous-American “immigration” era).
Who decides how much “more open” immigration to the U.S. should be? Can every Haitian earning $3,200/yr freely come to the U.S. so they can earn $72,000/yr? If not, who “plays God” and decides who can come and who can’t? Multiply this to every country of the world and your argument that this will be good for the American economy and culture surely falls apart.
Likewise if they don’t learn English, do go on welfare, or do commit some sort of crime. For both fairness and basic humanitarianism you have to have a legal review system to decide who has or hasn’t met the conditional requirements. Mitigating factors would have to be considered (e.g., they have a sick child who will die if returned to Haiti; they fell in love with and married an American citizen and are the sole provider for their children; the crime was only a “minor” crime and shouldn’t result in the horrendous consequence that returning to their severely economically disadvantaged—and politically or culturally oppressive—country of origin, would entail).
Yes, some immigration is good for our economy and for our culture. And yes, those allowed to immigrate should—at least initially—have some conditions placed on their remaining here and eventually becoming U.S. citizens. But I don’t think anyone can argue that there should be no limits on who and how many can enter. And therein lies the controversy that we cannot easily resolve.
I’m not saying that there aren’t better solutions than the current system—but the one proposed here doesn’t begin to address the complexities involved in finding that solution.
>"In the last few years, watching what the right has turned into, I have become a lot more sympathetic to the woke idea that racism is a dominant factor in American political life."
I have had the same experience and I think I can explain why. Wokeness is optimized for bullying other leftists, not for combating rightists. It is designed to let leftists attack each other with accusations of racism. Most leftists are not racists in the conventional sense (they do exhibit a lot of unconventional forms, like the "soft bigotry of low expectations"). For this reason, they need to radically expand and distort the definition of racism to successfully accuse each other of it. They need to make up nonsense about "structural racism" and "implicit bias." This nonsense is naturally extremely unconvincing.
By contrast, the racism we see on the right is plain, old fashioned racism. It isn't "structural" or "implicit;" they just don't like that America has so many non-white people.
The left cried wolf. They repeatedly accused each other of racism in an unconvincing fashion. That made me disbelieve it when they correctly made that accusation against the right.
The green card application already has a list of like 80 questions about like "have you ever been a communist," "have you ever worked in a prison camp," "have you ever done terrorism," "have you ever been a prostitute or pimp?"
You could add an 81st question! And reject anyone dumb enough to answer yes to it. (Or, to be fair, to be unconvincing enough on the point in an interview. Or to later have evidence to the contrary surface, at which point you could deport them for lying on the form).
Interesting, but yeah there's no way to validate that someone is telling the truth, or that their kids won't grow up with crazy beliefs. (Hasan Piker was born in the US)
Anyways from my perspective, we're just getting too many Hasan Piker and Darializa Avila Chevalier types for my liking. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate some of our policies.
From my perspective, we're getting too many Donald Trump and Ken Paxton types for my liking, so we should deport all the white people. See how stupid this sounds?
Why would you want to filter out people who think the US deserved 9/11? Who makes the list of viewpoints that must be filtered out? If it's me that makes the list, I'm all for viewpoint discrimination, because my opinions and views are the right ones. But if the list is made by politicians and deep-state bureaucrats, then filtering immigrants by some viewpoint list is an awful idea.
In a democracy you need some sense of shared civic purpose. If you add enough people whose goal is essentially to undermine the entire thing, don't be surprised if the entire thing gets undermined.
>Who makes the list of viewpoints that must be filtered out? If it's me that makes the list, I'm all for viewpoint discrimination, because my opinions and views are the right ones. But if the list is made by politicians and deep-state bureaucrats, then filtering immigrants by some viewpoint list is an awful idea.
You're explaining why such a keyhole setup is difficult, yes. I think immigration skepticism is heavily driven by cultural issues, and this is arguably pretty sensible! So until we have a good keyhole method for cultural issues, expect immigration skepticism to continue.
Is some who says something like "the US deserved 9/11" actually likely to be a terrorist? If we're excluding real threats to the US, people who have poor reasoning skills, surely anybody who says "lower taxes, raise spending, borrow more and more" is a much bigger threat and is the real terrorist.
There's a reason for the 1st Amendment. Madison was thoughtful.
Do you think shared civic purpose comes from populist politicians?
>Is some who says something like "the US deserved 9/11" actually likely to be a terrorist?
Their probability of being a terrorist is certainly higher.
>If we're excluding real threats to the US, people who have poor reasoning skills, surely anybody who says "lower taxes, raise spending, borrow more and more" is a much bigger threat and is the real terrorist.
"If you're in a hole, stop digging." Even if the average American voter has poor reasoning skills, that's no reason to make the situation worse.
>There's a reason for the 1st Amendment. Madison was thoughtful.
Government regulation of speech disrupts the feedback mechanism by which we, the people, keep our government accountable. It's not that all speech is valuable; it's that the power to restrict speech is a power that's too easily abused.
That's not an argument for welcoming angry foreigners with semi-coherent anti-American beliefs.
>Do you think shared civic purpose comes from populist politicians?
Not especially. I'm anti-Trump. But I can both oppose Trump and also be a skeptic of immigration. There's no contradiction there.
This is black and white thinking. Consider the "fraction of the population which is sensible" as a number to optimize like GDP. If that fraction goes down, while GDP goes up, you're not obviously left with a net win.
Filter them in or filter them out? I think Obama Democrats want to filter them in... That's exactly what's so wrong with the keyhole approach. Everybody asked in 2020 would have said that Biden is going to rule from the center. Well, that was then...
Same false binary as ever - pro-immigrant vs anti-immigrant. Every person who is halfway reasonable has an optimal number of immigrants that is between zero and six billion. So now we are just arguing about what the number should be.
But for that we need the government in control of who gets into the country and who gets to stay - not the mass border crashing, tourist visa and asylum system abuse, and other shenanigans we had until very recently.
Every comment I see here is a chud-adjacent "keyhole solutions would never work" canard. Obviously, these solutions would "never work" because if they did then your chud-adjacent views on immigration would be wrong.
This is exactly why I left conservatism years ago. I realized that while correct on a handful of issues (related to free trade, national defense, etc.), most of what constitutes conservatism is really just intellectual attempts to justify bigotry, religious fundamentalism, and the maintenance of the economic power of certain elites. And this was before the Trump era, so it's even more true now.
You're all chuds and grifters. Kudos to Hanania for seeing it.
How about no immigration at all for 30 years? Then we can discuss the "keyhole" proposals, many of which are sensible. But one must stop the bleeding before prescribing better nutrition and exercise. Stop the bleeding.
"In other words, polling and survey results show precisely the opposite of what opponents of keyhole solutions would expect. People like immigration with conditions more than they like immigration without any conditions!"
Sorry, this is a strawman.
Obviously, "immigration with conditions" has more support in polling. This doesn't mean that it is realistic to implement in practice, because the US is a federal state and the will of the "median voter" doesn't get translated to policy (interest groups and elites matter more).
The keyhole solution idea sounds great in theory but it is not very credible in practice. Reagan's 1986 amnesty deal was basically an attempt at a keyhole bargain. The Democrats were happy to take the amnesty and then de facto renege on the restrictions once they got in power. A large pool of immigrants creates a latent "pot of gold" of potential voters that becomes too tempting to pass up for the political party that expects a net electoral benefit from regularizing illegals and expediting the citizenship pipeline. Over time the welfare restrictions get relaxed, interior deportations become infrequent even for criminals due to local non-cooperation (sanctuary cities) and high cost, and the requirement to learn the language gets watered down or abolished.
For the keyhole solution to be viable it would have to effectively be written in stone through a constitutional amendment that provides standing to sue to all states and to individual voters through a private right of action (to prevent future de facto executive nullification). Illegals must be given a lifetime ban on ever getting the ability to vote in elections of any level (even municipal elections). Company executuves that knowingly hire illegal or out-of-status workers must be given long mandatory minimum prison sentences. The constitutional amendment would also need a clause that forces all government and police officials to cooperate with legal immigration enforcement efforts upon threat of personally going to prison (a ban on sanctuary locales that has teeth). Otherwise the keyhole restrictions would die a slow death of many silent compromises.
Came here to say exactly this. Keyhole solutions may work well in benevolent despotisms like GCC (which is Caplan's model), but create time consistent bargaining problems in democracies. We saw this with IRCA 1986's enforcement/amnesty swap, we saw it with whether sponsors are held responsible for public charges, and we are seeing it right now with half the country acting like it's unconscionable to expect temporary protected status to be temporary. And presidential caesarism makes this issue worse since while we can count on the filibuster and related issues to make it hard to change facts on the ground, since Obama's second term presidents have not been shy about making radical changes to immigration policy with a pen and a phone in ways that create new facts on the ground that are infeasible and/or less humane to reverse.
There is no reason to constitutionalize any of that. Put it in a federal statute and it only gets undone with another federal statute. Given how hard it is to pass any controversial federal statute outside of the reconciliation process (which is irrelevant here), a grand bargain that implemented the restrictions you want, plus a raft of keyhole solutions in exchange, would be extremely durable.
This is ahistorical. Traditionally, the GOP (or at least its pro-business wing) was the more pro-immigration party and liberals like Bernie Sanders, trade unions, and a lot of democrats were restrictionists. This has changed overtime, but there’s a reason Reagan did this.
That's not quite right. The GOP has been factionally torn on immigration for decades between the libertarian Free Traders and the Cultural Purists (like Steve King, Chuck Grassley, and Pat Buchanan). George W. Bush experienced heavy intra-party pressure to build a border wall (and did in fact build mini-walls near Yuma, Arizona). Reagan's 1986 amnesty was framed as a deal (amnesty in exchange for enforcement). When the Democrats de facto reneged on the deal Reagan's legacy was tarnished among GOP voters.
The idea that Democrats reneged on Reagans deal doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny. The numbers indicate that the employer enforcement actions didn't take off until after Bush 41 under Bill Clinton. Border encounters were rising before the end of Reagans term and were almost back to pre-86 levels under HW. Deportations overall actually fell slightly after the passage of the IRCA and remained at historically low levels through the remainder of the Reagan years ant through the Bush presidency, only rising under Clinton.
That actual history seems to be that Republicans never actually bothered to enforce the enforcement actions that supposedly balanced the amnesty part. Those features only started to be enforced under a Democrat.
I think this is missing the point. Unless the point is "Democrats must never be allowed to take power again." Because strong restriction / deportation policies are equally or more vulnerable to Democrats taking power and rolling them back.
The point is that "keyhole" policies are more popular than strong restrictive measures, and therefore politically harder to roll back. You may think Democrats will roll them back anyway, but they'd pay a bigger political price if they did.
(And I disagree Democrats would do that, at least not soon. I think the Biden administration touched the hot stove on this issue, and the burn they got is still fresh enough in the party's memory.)
A Democrat-controlled Congress would not roll back "keyhole" measures--a Democrat president would just stop enforcing them.
"The Democrats were happy to take the amnesty and then de facto renege on the restrictions once they got in power"
The IRCA was signed into law in November of 1986. The democrats didn't take power until 1993 when Clinton was sworn in, after 2.5 years of Reagan and 4 years of George HW. Over that time border apprehension dipped and then returned to pre-IRCA levels, deportations maintained a historic low level, and enforcement actions against employers were rare. Bill Clinton actually increased border enforcement and deportations when he came to power.
The truth is that employer sanctions was never a priority of the Republican administrations because it was unpopular with the business interests that formed the Republican base.
Former pro-migration guy here, who recently got flipped by arguments/stats about electoral dynamics, crime, culture, social trust, and state security. More posts like this, please. I’ve scrolled past almost all your recent posts since they deal with economic arguments against migration (which I never believed), but now that you’re dealing with the actual reasons why nonmorons question conventional border policies, you’ve caught my attention!
Why not just rely more on guest workers ? Guest workers improve the economy, but don't change the culture given that they are there only for a limited amount of time, if they commit a crime they can be deported much more easily (since they have a home back at their home country ), they have no rights to welfare, and can't vote. The one issue I foresee is the problem of their children being born in the U.S. which would result in them getting citizenship, to my knowledge this is a big part of how the massive German guest worker program from Turkey ended up changing the demographics of the county once they allowed for birthright citizenship. Maybe there's a way around that ?
Terrible idea for the reason you hinted at. I would argue that it is actually cruel and immoral to deny the children birthright citizenship, which means denying someone citizenship of the only country they’ve ever known. You can create a situation where even 3rd generation immigrants are not citizens and a permanent second class. Guest workers also have little incentive to make lasting investments in the country, start businesses, etc.
Thank you. I was looking for arguments why keyholes don't work, and you give a very lucid account of why they don't work.
I wrote a response to you but I am on mobile and for some reason it got posted as a seperate comment. I'd be interested in your reply
The problem with Guest workers is you are basically hiring someone, training them for few years and you let them go. This works in Agriculture and Service industry but its a headache to hire someone every 3 years because the previously trained person has to go back and will not return.
This gets worse with skilled labor as you are teaching them ins and outs of your manufacturing and engineering systems and 3/6 years later you just send them home, so they learn everything from our architecture and infra and can use that knowledge back home with a competitor.
Training and learning are the most time consuming part of any job and has the highest ROI, you train a new worker good and they will increase the productivity, so you take up the burden of training them efficiently and 6 years later you send a polished worker home to work efficiently for your competitor will all the skills you invested in.
This is a fair point, although I wonder if these jobs just can't go to natives. While I understand this is suboptimal, what is your alternative for reaping benefits of immigration while assuaging the voters concerns ?
It definitely can, but then you have to train them again. And your skilled employee can go back and build a better product with the competitor stealing your IP and employer can't do anything about it.
Alternative is simple, Permanent Residency, they can't vote, can't use welfare and can't commit violent crimes. Trade off between being here vs home country. Employer gets to keep the person they trained, govt gets to keep their taxes, natives get to vote and use welfare.
In the end, almost all Turkish guest workers became naturalized German citizens. At the same time, PISA numbers for Germany are collapsing...
I don't think you can really argue that to a child born to a guest worker it's "the only country they have ever known." A guest worker visa should be short, 3 years maximum. Realistically even if you get your wife pregnant the moment you get in U.S. soil, the child will literally not even remember America when they go back home.
I don't see how you would end up with a 3rd generation immigrant under a guest worker system. When the visa is up you have to return to your country.
"When the visa is up you have to return to your country."
This is not true for many guest worker visa categories at present. The H-1B is a "dual-intent" visa, which does not preclude the holder from applying for permanent residency if they so choose. And if a person on H-1B (plus his/her dependents) embarks on the green card route, they can get indefinite extensions on their H-1B visa (unless they get fired from their jobs).
But while the H-1B visa has no limits on country of origin, the green card does (not more than 7% of green cards in a given year can go to people from a single country). This has ended up creating a massive green card waiting line for Indians especially (and to a lesser extent, Chinese and Mexicans). It's quite feasible for multi-generational families to exist where the patriarch/matriarch has still not gotten a green card.
Right, I know this is how the H-1B works and that in practice it's always treated as a way to get residency later on. Under a guest worker program this would be explicitly not allowed
I agree. This would be much better for the host country, guest workers, and prospective immigrants. Temporary work ought to be decoupled from immigration and path to citizenship. But (I believe) this also requires an attitudinal change in US Immigration: allow people to do both if they want to (study/work and apply for a green card). Currently, applying for a green card all but puts one on a blacklist for any kind of temporary visa.
Keyhole solutions are only rational, if one can trust the people who sell them. It's kind of obvious that the political left will disregard the no-welfare clause and no-voting rights clause because (a) poor migrants need tons of welfare and (b) they will vote for the party that provides them with tons of welfare. As with taxes on companies that employ foreigners - let's say a 50% employment surcharge - that will also ONLY work if there is no hidden social welfare support for the dependents.
A and B are not obvious at all. Poor migrants generally don't need tons of welfare because they are hardworking people who get jobs. Even if they do need tons of welfare, there is no reason to assume they will vote for the party that gives them tons of welfare because voting is an expressive behavior not motivated by economic self interest. Poor people in rural America who rely on welfare usually vote Republican anyway.
Let's start a poll amongst the readers here, who thinks a and b are obvious and who not, lol
If only people were as rational as B Caplan indeed...
In order to get any welfare at all in the United States, you have to live here for five years, barring certain limited exceptions like Cubans and DV victims. It is already the case that immigrants don't get welfare. This has been the law since 1996! Nobody even talks about changing it!
(Technically, emergency Medicaid is also covered, but that's because the hospital isn't going to be able to determine your insurance status right after you get hit by a car. So either the hospital pays or the government pays, and we decided the government paying is more fair. It only applies for true emergencies.)
What do you think of eliminating jus soli as a keyhole condition? It's the children of immigrants (who have often regressed to the mean, making them less talented) who irritate a lot of people more than the immigrants themselves, since they're the ones who are more likely to go woke or commit crimes. Then you could undercut the nativists on anchor babies, birth tourism, all of it. Australia got rid of jus soli in 2007, and the world didn't end.
Similarly, our system being built around family reunification rather than focusing on skills, like Canada's, is stupid.
Perhaps we can fast-track immigration candidates who voluntarily waive their right to jus soli.
You would need to change the Constitution to achieve that, since it's currently required by the 14th Amendment. IIRC even the Supreme Court justices who dissented in the recent case to argue that jūs solī doesn't apply to tourists' children/"anchor babies" (which contradicts the plain text of the Constitution...) would still apply it to the children of legal immigrants residing, even temporarily, in the US. So to restrict it as much as you want, you would need a constitutional amendment, which is in practice impossible.
Sure, it's all impossible. Notice that neither Richard nor Bryan Caplan talk much about getting their pet immigration reforms through Congress etc. since these things are all totally impractical in the current situation with the current system. I am just building my own castle in the sky alongside theirs: jus soli needs to go. It's a relic of a time before convenient transportation.
There's building castles in the sky and there's building castles at the top of a steep hill.
This sounds like a slippery slope argument, though about what I'm not sure. Did Australia become a fascist state in the 19 years after they got rid of jus soli? Seems like they have a higher foreign-born population with fewer populists in power than the US has! It, the Gulf states, and Canada indicate that when immigration policy is explicitly constructed for the best interests of the country making it, rather than for bleeding-heart reasons like family reunification, asylum, etc., the native born are far more tolerant of high levels of immigration.
Sounds simple on paper: “… a more open immigration system, conditional on learning English, banning welfare use, and zero-tolerance for crime…”
But realistically think through the steps involved in implementing this and you find yourself with the same system we have now. You can move the parameters of the current system in one direction or another—and that might indeed be a good thing to do—but you’re still right back at making the same pro and con arguments that we’ve been engaging in for the past century (and even longer if you consider the European-to-indigenous-American “immigration” era).
Who decides how much “more open” immigration to the U.S. should be? Can every Haitian earning $3,200/yr freely come to the U.S. so they can earn $72,000/yr? If not, who “plays God” and decides who can come and who can’t? Multiply this to every country of the world and your argument that this will be good for the American economy and culture surely falls apart.
Likewise if they don’t learn English, do go on welfare, or do commit some sort of crime. For both fairness and basic humanitarianism you have to have a legal review system to decide who has or hasn’t met the conditional requirements. Mitigating factors would have to be considered (e.g., they have a sick child who will die if returned to Haiti; they fell in love with and married an American citizen and are the sole provider for their children; the crime was only a “minor” crime and shouldn’t result in the horrendous consequence that returning to their severely economically disadvantaged—and politically or culturally oppressive—country of origin, would entail).
Yes, some immigration is good for our economy and for our culture. And yes, those allowed to immigrate should—at least initially—have some conditions placed on their remaining here and eventually becoming U.S. citizens. But I don’t think anyone can argue that there should be no limits on who and how many can enter. And therein lies the controversy that we cannot easily resolve.
I’m not saying that there aren’t better solutions than the current system—but the one proposed here doesn’t begin to address the complexities involved in finding that solution.
>"In the last few years, watching what the right has turned into, I have become a lot more sympathetic to the woke idea that racism is a dominant factor in American political life."
I have had the same experience and I think I can explain why. Wokeness is optimized for bullying other leftists, not for combating rightists. It is designed to let leftists attack each other with accusations of racism. Most leftists are not racists in the conventional sense (they do exhibit a lot of unconventional forms, like the "soft bigotry of low expectations"). For this reason, they need to radically expand and distort the definition of racism to successfully accuse each other of it. They need to make up nonsense about "structural racism" and "implicit bias." This nonsense is naturally extremely unconvincing.
By contrast, the racism we see on the right is plain, old fashioned racism. It isn't "structural" or "implicit;" they just don't like that America has so many non-white people.
The left cried wolf. They repeatedly accused each other of racism in an unconvincing fashion. That made me disbelieve it when they correctly made that accusation against the right.
Is there any keyhole solution for cultural issues? Any way to filter out the people who think we deserved 9/11 and so forth?
The green card application already has a list of like 80 questions about like "have you ever been a communist," "have you ever worked in a prison camp," "have you ever done terrorism," "have you ever been a prostitute or pimp?"
You could add an 81st question! And reject anyone dumb enough to answer yes to it. (Or, to be fair, to be unconvincing enough on the point in an interview. Or to later have evidence to the contrary surface, at which point you could deport them for lying on the form).
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-485.pdf#page=14
Interesting, but yeah there's no way to validate that someone is telling the truth, or that their kids won't grow up with crazy beliefs. (Hasan Piker was born in the US)
Anyways from my perspective, we're just getting too many Hasan Piker and Darializa Avila Chevalier types for my liking. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate some of our policies.
From my perspective, we're getting too many Donald Trump and Ken Paxton types for my liking, so we should deport all the white people. See how stupid this sounds?
I don't advocate deporting US citizens, unless they lied on their citizenship application.
Why would you want to filter out people who think the US deserved 9/11? Who makes the list of viewpoints that must be filtered out? If it's me that makes the list, I'm all for viewpoint discrimination, because my opinions and views are the right ones. But if the list is made by politicians and deep-state bureaucrats, then filtering immigrants by some viewpoint list is an awful idea.
>Why would you want to filter out people who think the US deserved 9/11?
Well let's see... they might commit additional terrorist attacks, for one thing. They're quite likely bad at moral reasoning, for another.
See the concept of The Economist's Fallacy here: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/list-of-useful-terms
In a democracy you need some sense of shared civic purpose. If you add enough people whose goal is essentially to undermine the entire thing, don't be surprised if the entire thing gets undermined.
>Who makes the list of viewpoints that must be filtered out? If it's me that makes the list, I'm all for viewpoint discrimination, because my opinions and views are the right ones. But if the list is made by politicians and deep-state bureaucrats, then filtering immigrants by some viewpoint list is an awful idea.
You're explaining why such a keyhole setup is difficult, yes. I think immigration skepticism is heavily driven by cultural issues, and this is arguably pretty sensible! So until we have a good keyhole method for cultural issues, expect immigration skepticism to continue.
Is some who says something like "the US deserved 9/11" actually likely to be a terrorist? If we're excluding real threats to the US, people who have poor reasoning skills, surely anybody who says "lower taxes, raise spending, borrow more and more" is a much bigger threat and is the real terrorist.
There's a reason for the 1st Amendment. Madison was thoughtful.
Do you think shared civic purpose comes from populist politicians?
>Is some who says something like "the US deserved 9/11" actually likely to be a terrorist?
Their probability of being a terrorist is certainly higher.
>If we're excluding real threats to the US, people who have poor reasoning skills, surely anybody who says "lower taxes, raise spending, borrow more and more" is a much bigger threat and is the real terrorist.
"If you're in a hole, stop digging." Even if the average American voter has poor reasoning skills, that's no reason to make the situation worse.
>There's a reason for the 1st Amendment. Madison was thoughtful.
Government regulation of speech disrupts the feedback mechanism by which we, the people, keep our government accountable. It's not that all speech is valuable; it's that the power to restrict speech is a power that's too easily abused.
That's not an argument for welcoming angry foreigners with semi-coherent anti-American beliefs.
>Do you think shared civic purpose comes from populist politicians?
Not especially. I'm anti-Trump. But I can both oppose Trump and also be a skeptic of immigration. There's no contradiction there.
America has been able to get by for a long time in spite of being full of people who believe stupid things.
This is black and white thinking. Consider the "fraction of the population which is sensible" as a number to optimize like GDP. If that fraction goes down, while GDP goes up, you're not obviously left with a net win.
Filter them in or filter them out? I think Obama Democrats want to filter them in... That's exactly what's so wrong with the keyhole approach. Everybody asked in 2020 would have said that Biden is going to rule from the center. Well, that was then...
Same false binary as ever - pro-immigrant vs anti-immigrant. Every person who is halfway reasonable has an optimal number of immigrants that is between zero and six billion. So now we are just arguing about what the number should be.
But for that we need the government in control of who gets into the country and who gets to stay - not the mass border crashing, tourist visa and asylum system abuse, and other shenanigans we had until very recently.
Every comment I see here is a chud-adjacent "keyhole solutions would never work" canard. Obviously, these solutions would "never work" because if they did then your chud-adjacent views on immigration would be wrong.
This is exactly why I left conservatism years ago. I realized that while correct on a handful of issues (related to free trade, national defense, etc.), most of what constitutes conservatism is really just intellectual attempts to justify bigotry, religious fundamentalism, and the maintenance of the economic power of certain elites. And this was before the Trump era, so it's even more true now.
You're all chuds and grifters. Kudos to Hanania for seeing it.
I'm genuinely interested if you have a keyhole solution for culture.
Huh?
We can't compromise because neither side thinks the other will keep their end of the bargain.
(Probably correctly so.)
How about no immigration at all for 30 years? Then we can discuss the "keyhole" proposals, many of which are sensible. But one must stop the bleeding before prescribing better nutrition and exercise. Stop the bleeding.
"In other words, polling and survey results show precisely the opposite of what opponents of keyhole solutions would expect. People like immigration with conditions more than they like immigration without any conditions!"
Sorry, this is a strawman.
Obviously, "immigration with conditions" has more support in polling. This doesn't mean that it is realistic to implement in practice, because the US is a federal state and the will of the "median voter" doesn't get translated to policy (interest groups and elites matter more).