"Put simply, the government embarked on an optimistic plan of social engineering to transform New Zealand into an 'Asian' country; unfortunately, it did a poor job of publicising its intent or rationale. Under the slogan that a global economy required global citizens, an ambitious plan was hatched to restructure society around an Asian axis. But these initiatives moved too quickly for most people, ignored the need to consult or convince people of the importance of any fundamental shift, and did little to monitor the impact of immigration on public perception (Heeringa 1996)."
Excellent article. Britain has long been a place of refuge for the highly skilled refugee and we have benefitted greatly from them, it is mass migration of the low and medium skilled that has harmed the country so badly. There is also the issue of reliance on importation of foreign workers once you start. Britain went from a country that trained its own doctors and nurses in the 1960s to one where 20% of the NHS is now foreign born.
It is crazy to me that we educate people from other countries and then push them out. I think there's a case to exclude non-dissidents from countries that don't like us, but on the other side we shouldn't work so hard to prevent people from staying once they're educated if they're interested in becoming citizens.
Average immigrant is more loyal to the US than the typical progressive university graduate. I think non-dissudents coming from PRC, middle East or Russia could be an issue worth looking at. If you remove the immigrants who are literally spies, the equation might also look quite different.
This is a thoughtful article that covers this topic well. You didn't mention the Dubai model. Something like 80% of the country is foreign. Indians make up a huge chunk of that foreign population. But the UAE does not give them a path to citizenship. It is extremely rare for a person to be granted UAE citizenship.
We could implement something similar. Make it much harder for someone to become a US citizen. Instead the current 5 year residency period, we can make it 10 years like Switzerland. And not only that. We can also require large payment a requirement for the citizenship application. Trump is selling "Gold cards" for $5M a piece. A lot of countries have citizenship by investment. By making $1M a requirement for ALL naturalization, we will have solved the problem of the Somalians, Haitians, and Guatemalans changing the politics of the country.
And this $1M entry would still allow people like the $10M AI engineer to become a US citizen.
The article looks serious on the surface but it is full of inaccurate and false statements.
First of all, jobs are not a zero-sum game. This is basic economics. Each job taken by a foreigner (high-paying or indentured servitude) is not necessarily a job that the company would be willing to hire an American for. When there is a recession, jobs are lost and nobody takes them over - they are just lost because the economy shrinks.
Secondly, you're wrong about Morris Chang. He left because he felt he couldn't get promotions at Texas Instruments and then Taiwan poached him. You can Google it. It was lack of meritocracy that drove him out. So, all of this DEI bullshit has to go, but American jobs for (white) Americans is DEI for whites and hence it's bullshit as well. Best person gets the job. Period.
Thirdly, people don't become "experts" overnight. If we were to poach Morris Chang back then, all the morons on X would say "but we have Patriot Eagle LeChuck here who can do Chang's job if someone trains him. Stop hiring cheap servants like Morris Chang!"
Finally, and that is the biggest problem, when you put numbers in your analysis it all falls apart. How many are the H-1B visa holders and how much is the total workforce in the US? 750k and 163 million, respectively, which makes H-1B visa holders less than 1% of the entire workforce. You're claiming that a population less than 1% of the workforce is responsible for destroying the future of new grads in America. That's complete nonsense.
Even so, I would be willing to switch off my brain and believe all this nonsense if you answer one thing: why is it that nobody mentions the elephant in the room, which is family-based migration?
Is family-based migration larger or smaller than employment-based migration? It is 3 times larger.
Is family-based migration capped? Some categories yes, others (K-1) no.
Do family-based immigrants displace Americans? According to your zero-sum game logic, yes.
Is there a minimum criterion for K-1 visa holders as there is for H-1Bs (specialty occupation)? No, not even that. There's NO minimum requirement!
So? They have to go. All of them. Now.
Well, there you have it. If you state loud and clear that you support ending ALL family-based migration, then I will fully agree with you that H-1B visas should be terminated. At least then you will be somewhat consistent.
I'm sure you will agree that visas need to serve the interests of the country, not the interest of LeChuck the Republican keyboard warrior who can't get a date on Saturday night.
H1-Bs are disproportionately concentrated in tech, which is an unusually productive and high-margin industry, but only employs ~7% of the US workforce. Secondly, many H1-Bs eventually transition to a green card or citizenship, so 1% is a lower bound for the percentage of the workforce that originally entered on this visa.
I agree with you that family reunification is much worse than the H1-B, as this visa is even less selective, as measured in benefit to the country at large, and the numbers are even higher.
Also traducing Patriot Lechuck middle Americans contra Chang is hilarious considering that a Missourian invented the integrated circuit. Insanely dumb hypothetical
From the link provided in-article to Chang’s Wikipedia:
“In the early 1980s, while still at Texas Instruments, Chang witnessed TI's factory in Japan achieving twice the chip production yield as TI's factory in Texas.[20] Observing that the staff and technicians in Japan are better qualified and had lower turnover, and failing to recruit the same caliber of staff in the United States, he concluded that future of advanced manufacturing appeared to be in Asia”
- the foreign experts model can help you catch up at a specific technology sector. It can't keep you stay at the frontier of new emerging technologies because those experts don't exist yet. If you want to stay at the frontier of such fields you need a consistently replenishing agglomeration of talent.
- if you wanna attack the immigration problem, the lowest hanging fruit is to stop illegal immigration and setup a guest worker program for low skilled sectors. Basically what Australia does for now. Although Australia's skilled migration system has a lot of problems.
Some interesting points, but I think you're ignoring the geopolitical benefit of simply having more Americans - i don't know if this is properly encouraged, but ideally some of those workers will choose to stay, become above average citizens and have above average citizen kids. At the right rate, more (non spy) Americans is a good thing all on its own, as long as the natives see them as fellow Americans and not a threat.
You mean as long as they see *themselves* as fellow Americans and not a threat, right? Because, as seen above, they are actively pursuing the ascendance of their coethnics contra natives.
That's not what I meant, but yes, that's a good point too. In my experience I just see a lot more issues with the former than the latter. But as a native maybe there's some selection bias (immigrants who don't see themselves as American are less likely to talk to me)
"Worse, whereas the foreign experts model strengthens domestic sources of talent by providing extremely capable individuals with large spillover effects, modern brain drain to the US undermines the domestic talent pipeline by encouraging wasteful signalling and by forcing competition with the entire rest of the world."
Have you considered moving to Haiti? After all, you won't have to compete with Indian or Chinese immigrants, nor with 300 million Americans. Just twelve million people with an average IQ that's probably in the 70-85 range, so few of whom will be able to compete with you. It sounds like a paradise of non-competition.
Really, this whole article is just a series of invocations of the zero-sum thinking. You seem to grasp how economics works at other times, you wrote in another article:
"The more internally homogenous the nation, the larger the effective market size, the more prosperous the people and the more powerful the state."
"Put simply, the government embarked on an optimistic plan of social engineering to transform New Zealand into an 'Asian' country; unfortunately, it did a poor job of publicising its intent or rationale. Under the slogan that a global economy required global citizens, an ambitious plan was hatched to restructure society around an Asian axis. But these initiatives moved too quickly for most people, ignored the need to consult or convince people of the importance of any fundamental shift, and did little to monitor the impact of immigration on public perception (Heeringa 1996)."
A Quote from Metro Magazine. NZ.
The H1-B visa program is the modern equivalent of importing Chinese “coolie” labor into the US to build the railroads in the 1800s.
Thanks for an interesting article about a critical topic.
Excellent article. Britain has long been a place of refuge for the highly skilled refugee and we have benefitted greatly from them, it is mass migration of the low and medium skilled that has harmed the country so badly. There is also the issue of reliance on importation of foreign workers once you start. Britain went from a country that trained its own doctors and nurses in the 1960s to one where 20% of the NHS is now foreign born.
Your espionage section should include the "atom spies" of the 50s and 60s to show the danger of hiring those of a different ethnic origin in areas of national security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies#Notable_suspected_spies
It is crazy to me that we educate people from other countries and then push them out. I think there's a case to exclude non-dissidents from countries that don't like us, but on the other side we shouldn't work so hard to prevent people from staying once they're educated if they're interested in becoming citizens.
Another brilliant read about a pressing topic from Aporia. Thank you very much!
Amazing piece
To borrow another tough line from Liam Neeson in Taken: 'Don’t be that pessimistic…'
Average immigrant is more loyal to the US than the typical progressive university graduate. I think non-dissudents coming from PRC, middle East or Russia could be an issue worth looking at. If you remove the immigrants who are literally spies, the equation might also look quite different.
Great idea, now all we need is the spies and immigrants to let us know which is which
This is a thoughtful article that covers this topic well. You didn't mention the Dubai model. Something like 80% of the country is foreign. Indians make up a huge chunk of that foreign population. But the UAE does not give them a path to citizenship. It is extremely rare for a person to be granted UAE citizenship.
We could implement something similar. Make it much harder for someone to become a US citizen. Instead the current 5 year residency period, we can make it 10 years like Switzerland. And not only that. We can also require large payment a requirement for the citizenship application. Trump is selling "Gold cards" for $5M a piece. A lot of countries have citizenship by investment. By making $1M a requirement for ALL naturalization, we will have solved the problem of the Somalians, Haitians, and Guatemalans changing the politics of the country.
And this $1M entry would still allow people like the $10M AI engineer to become a US citizen.
The article looks serious on the surface but it is full of inaccurate and false statements.
First of all, jobs are not a zero-sum game. This is basic economics. Each job taken by a foreigner (high-paying or indentured servitude) is not necessarily a job that the company would be willing to hire an American for. When there is a recession, jobs are lost and nobody takes them over - they are just lost because the economy shrinks.
Secondly, you're wrong about Morris Chang. He left because he felt he couldn't get promotions at Texas Instruments and then Taiwan poached him. You can Google it. It was lack of meritocracy that drove him out. So, all of this DEI bullshit has to go, but American jobs for (white) Americans is DEI for whites and hence it's bullshit as well. Best person gets the job. Period.
Thirdly, people don't become "experts" overnight. If we were to poach Morris Chang back then, all the morons on X would say "but we have Patriot Eagle LeChuck here who can do Chang's job if someone trains him. Stop hiring cheap servants like Morris Chang!"
Finally, and that is the biggest problem, when you put numbers in your analysis it all falls apart. How many are the H-1B visa holders and how much is the total workforce in the US? 750k and 163 million, respectively, which makes H-1B visa holders less than 1% of the entire workforce. You're claiming that a population less than 1% of the workforce is responsible for destroying the future of new grads in America. That's complete nonsense.
Even so, I would be willing to switch off my brain and believe all this nonsense if you answer one thing: why is it that nobody mentions the elephant in the room, which is family-based migration?
Is family-based migration larger or smaller than employment-based migration? It is 3 times larger.
Is family-based migration capped? Some categories yes, others (K-1) no.
Do family-based immigrants displace Americans? According to your zero-sum game logic, yes.
Is there a minimum criterion for K-1 visa holders as there is for H-1Bs (specialty occupation)? No, not even that. There's NO minimum requirement!
So? They have to go. All of them. Now.
Well, there you have it. If you state loud and clear that you support ending ALL family-based migration, then I will fully agree with you that H-1B visas should be terminated. At least then you will be somewhat consistent.
I'm sure you will agree that visas need to serve the interests of the country, not the interest of LeChuck the Republican keyboard warrior who can't get a date on Saturday night.
H1-Bs are disproportionately concentrated in tech, which is an unusually productive and high-margin industry, but only employs ~7% of the US workforce. Secondly, many H1-Bs eventually transition to a green card or citizenship, so 1% is a lower bound for the percentage of the workforce that originally entered on this visa.
I agree with you that family reunification is much worse than the H1-B, as this visa is even less selective, as measured in benefit to the country at large, and the numbers are even higher.
Also traducing Patriot Lechuck middle Americans contra Chang is hilarious considering that a Missourian invented the integrated circuit. Insanely dumb hypothetical
From the link provided in-article to Chang’s Wikipedia:
“In the early 1980s, while still at Texas Instruments, Chang witnessed TI's factory in Japan achieving twice the chip production yield as TI's factory in Texas.[20] Observing that the staff and technicians in Japan are better qualified and had lower turnover, and failing to recruit the same caliber of staff in the United States, he concluded that future of advanced manufacturing appeared to be in Asia”
Some small critiques
- the foreign experts model can help you catch up at a specific technology sector. It can't keep you stay at the frontier of new emerging technologies because those experts don't exist yet. If you want to stay at the frontier of such fields you need a consistently replenishing agglomeration of talent.
- if you wanna attack the immigration problem, the lowest hanging fruit is to stop illegal immigration and setup a guest worker program for low skilled sectors. Basically what Australia does for now. Although Australia's skilled migration system has a lot of problems.
Some interesting points, but I think you're ignoring the geopolitical benefit of simply having more Americans - i don't know if this is properly encouraged, but ideally some of those workers will choose to stay, become above average citizens and have above average citizen kids. At the right rate, more (non spy) Americans is a good thing all on its own, as long as the natives see them as fellow Americans and not a threat.
You mean as long as they see *themselves* as fellow Americans and not a threat, right? Because, as seen above, they are actively pursuing the ascendance of their coethnics contra natives.
That's not what I meant, but yes, that's a good point too. In my experience I just see a lot more issues with the former than the latter. But as a native maybe there's some selection bias (immigrants who don't see themselves as American are less likely to talk to me)
"Worse, whereas the foreign experts model strengthens domestic sources of talent by providing extremely capable individuals with large spillover effects, modern brain drain to the US undermines the domestic talent pipeline by encouraging wasteful signalling and by forcing competition with the entire rest of the world."
Have you considered moving to Haiti? After all, you won't have to compete with Indian or Chinese immigrants, nor with 300 million Americans. Just twelve million people with an average IQ that's probably in the 70-85 range, so few of whom will be able to compete with you. It sounds like a paradise of non-competition.
Really, this whole article is just a series of invocations of the zero-sum thinking. You seem to grasp how economics works at other times, you wrote in another article:
"The more internally homogenous the nation, the larger the effective market size, the more prosperous the people and the more powerful the state."
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/non-linear-ethnic-niches
So which is it? Does "competing" with more people make you more prosperous or less?
If the issue is you don't want non-whites mixing their genes with whites, you can just say that.
He doesn't need to move to Haiti to be surrounded by 70IQ people, the government already imported them.
Ee no zero sum