The distinction often is more akin to "promising" and "not promising". Universities, employers, creditors, those looking for a spouse, etc. Everyone does it to some degree. Why can't a country?
I never finished university, and I started a bunch of companies. How do you sort out people on a "promising"/"not promising" scale for doing good things for the economy?
Under your simple scale you would exclude Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Stephen Hawking, respectively. I think they've all been supremely wasteful 'consumers of resources.'
Exceptions all. The point of any laws is not to catch the exceptions, but to state the rule for the average.
There's no way a standard policy is going to somehow separate the Stephen Hawkings from the general population before they have actually accomplished anything of note.
So your policy can either be cautious, or it can be over liberal.
The steven hawking outliers can apply under the O-1 visa type schemes, which he would definitely pass. A points scheme doesn't have to be the only scheme.
And you think of the millions of people wanting to get in here they're all world-renowned physicists or spiritual leaders? We would long run out of money supporting the hordes of cancer-stricken dirt farmers clamoring to get in here before the next Stephen Hawking shows up.
More importantly, how can you not think that? Logically a Canadian is going to be culturally a better fit, financially better off, and more educated and skilled.
It's got nothing to do with race or nationality, just a statement about the average Mexican vs the average Canadian. Don't throw logic out the window in service to liberal ideals.
Why would a Canadian be a better fit for southern california or texas? Is their experience moose hunting going to help in 100 degree heat?
Why would we even want someone who's "culturally" a better fit? I'd love it if the people around me were more diverse, it makes life richer and more interesting.
I used to know a guy in Phoenix, Arizona who grew up in Edmonton, Canada. He made tons of money with the business he created.
It seems like he fit in just fine, thanks to his command of English (his service business would have gotten nowhere if he didn't speak English), and an invention called "air conditioning" let him deal with the 100 degree heat, just like every other person in that metro area.
Honestly, your comment about moose hunting is downright offensive.
> Honestly, your comment about moose hunting is downright offensive.
It's supposed to be: the whole idea of allowing only people who are a good "cultural fit" is offensive. That's the point I was refuting. Determining "cultural fit" requires absurd stereotypes.
The idea that Mexicans can't find a place in our country is as absurd as the idea that Canadians can't.
No, it's really not; it's wishful thinking on your part. When someone doesn't even speak the language that most of the host country uses, they're going to have a harder time integrating than someone who does (esp. if they speak it natively, as almost all non-Quebec Canadians do). Thinking otherwise is just fantasy. I'm not saying "there's no place for them", but we're talking about the ease of integration into a new host country here. It's always easier to adapt to and get along in a country where you speak the native language, can talk to most everyone, and can read all the signs, and understand most of the predominant culture, than to go someplace that's completely alien to you and you can't talk to many people and can't even read the signs anywhere.
You're conflating language and culture. I'm against using "culture" as a reason for (dis)allowing immigrants in. A language proficiency requirement is reasonable.
How can you not conflate language and culture? The two are inseparably intertwined. While not all people who speak the same language (or more likely, dialects of it, e.g. American vs British vs Indian English) will have extremely similar cultures, I don't think there's any good examples of people speaking very different languages and having extremely similar cultures. Language and culture go hand-in-hand. Even for the different dialects, the cultures between UK, USA, and AUS/NZ are still very similar to one another; India is rather different but the way they adopted English is also very different and still for them it's really a 2nd language and used within India as a convenient common language because they refuse to standardize on Hindi as some wish. There is far, far, far more similarity between Australian culture and American culture, for instance, than Mexican culture and American culture.
You assert that there's more similarity between American and Australian culture than American and Mexican. I don't believe that. US cuisine borrows more heavily from Mexico than Australia. We have more Spanish speakers than Spain. We have Veep candidates pandering to them. The US and Mexico both like fake wrestling. We have large cities with Spanish names and an entire state named after Mexico.
But it's a dumb argument to go into because I probably won't convince you about cultural similarity and vice versa.
On the other hand, language can be quantitatively measured and gives an opportunity to ambitious people around the world.
>US cuisine borrows more heavily from Mexico than Australia.
This is just dumb. US cuisine borrows more heavily from China than from Australia too, but no one is going to claim that US culture is very similar to Chinese culture. I live in a little town and there's 3 Chinese restaurants here, and only 1 Mexican.
>We have more Spanish speakers than Spain
We probably have more Chinese speakers than Hong Kong too, but that doesn't make US culture similar to China either. The US is a huge country, #3 in the world by population. Of course it's going to have a lot of foreign-language speakers, especially when there's a ton of Spanish-speaking countries to the south and a lot of immigration from there. But that doesn't mean that the dominant culture in America today is extremely similar to the culture of Mexico; I'd argue that German culture is more similar to American culture. At least German culture is universalist, rather than particularist as are Latin American cultures.
>I'd love it if the people around me were more diverse, it makes life richer and more interesting.
Just to play devils advocate do you think that is the case if they don't speak the language? If they don't share the same values? If they stick to their own groups and don't integrate, does it really make your life more interesting and diverse?
The US already as plenty of people that "culturally fit better", are more educated, are skilled, etc.
We don't have enough people that picks Strawberry crops in California or does home construction in suburbs. We literally don't have those people willing to do those jobs, which can cause runaway inflation.
Immigration is not about adding more of the same. It's about filling holes in our economy and labor force.
How many Canadians do you think are going to go picking Strawberries in California?
I'm not sure why strawberry pickers are always the example. Is there really a shortage? When I was a teenager, in the country, that was a common minimum wage job mostly done by 14 year olds. It really does suck, almost any job would be better, but I didn't think better jobs were more available now than the late 90s. If anything I would have expected more people to be in the job pool for picking now.
Reading you other replies, I'm not sure if I understand the perspective you're coming from, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm curious. Do you consider yourself anti-union?
There really is a shortage of willing workers. There's all sorts of stories of companies in various industries not being able to find people willing to do actual hard work. And why should they? The public doesn't spend thousands of dollars to educate Americans to learn Calculus, ancient history, & Russian literature, only to end up picking strawberries like they're oxen? We'll have to figure out something else for this new class of citizens.
The perspective I'm coming from is "it's complicated". An example is about the Wal Mart here in the DC area, which tried to ban them a few years ago. You'd figure an wealthy liberal city like DC would forever ban them in favor of some fancy locally grown organic co-op farmers market or some crap like that. When the city council meetings came up to approve/disapprove them, the people that came up speak requesting approval were all the poor and the elderly, that relied on their low prices to make ends meet. Wal Mart in DC was approved.
And I would consider myself strong-union. At the very least every incorporated company that has any employee should have an employee representative on their board-of-directors.
> We don't have enough people that picks Strawberry crops in California or does home construction in suburbs. We literally don't have those people willing to do those jobs, which can cause runaway inflation
Then increase the wage paid. You're literally arguing for a slave-wage underclass.
Are you under the mistaken impression that increasing wages paid would cause people to work those jobs?
And you are literally asking for runaway inflation. Guess who pays for that the most at a rate higher than the rest of society? The poor and the elderly on fixed income.
Do you want to punish the poor and elderly on fixed income because millennials can't be bothered to work hard labor because it might interrupt their precious time?
Maybe you would like to take away the healthcare for the poor and elderly as well?
> Are you under the mistaken impression that increasing wages paid would cause people to work those jobs?
Has anyone actually tried paying $25 per hour plus benefits for strawberry picking?
Let me guess, you're entirely consistent in your beliefs and likewise oppose the $15/hour minimum wage for fast food workers. Because after all, that would lead to runaway inflation.
Their crops are getting ruined because they can't get workers.
I can't believe people don't understand how comfortable the average millennial is in this life, and how completely unnecessary it is for them to work hard labor.
And there's no faking it in economics. If you artificially raise prices for unskilled labor, you're going to raise inflation, and now you're back to square one in needing to raise wages again.
We need to have wages tied with age and skill level/profession. A blanket minimum wage is just a dumb idea. Teenagers don't need $15/hour, as they should be at school. The head of a family household does.
> Yes. Actually here's one article about farmers offering $25/hr picking strawberries:
Sounds like Mexicans weren't willing to do it either. What changed from year to year? Clearly there's something else at play if they couldn't even get Mexicans to do it. The article doesn't mention that the farmer is exclusively hiring legal citizens, Washington State is ranked 15th for Hispanic population, and the farm is near a major metro area, so I don't buy the argument that there aren't enough Mexicans available either. It's clearly something else.
> Teenagers don't need $15/hour, as they should be at school. The head of a family household does.
Great, now you've just created an incentive to not hire anyone older than some particular age in a low-skill industry.
Labor is a small part of the total costs of farming. Large amounts of costs are in capital equipment, land, packaging, retail location selling and transportation.
If you are really worried about high priced items that affect poor people, then perhaps we should be getting more immigrants that create these expensive things like healthcare.
If you are a doctor, they should automatically approve your visa application. Lets drive down that price of healthcare! If you make 100k+, auto approval as well. More tax money please! NOT strawberry workers though.
Not possible. Without cheap labor that kind of work would either move off shore to where labor is cheaper, or it'd be automated.
My father lives in rural Alabama and is a proud red neck. But he's a transplant and a little less provincial than many native Alabamians. I visited him a few years ago and noted how many Mexicans and Central Americans had moved into the area, starting from basically none 20 years ago.
Most of southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle is timber land, much of it owned by paper companies. As he explained it to me, at some point the locals became averse to planting new trees. It's back-breaking manual labor. Immigrants filled in the gaps until at some [inflection] point the work all of sudden became "Mexican work", which pretty much guaranteed no white or black native would ever work it again no matter the wage. In a very short timeframe you saw a large influx of Mexicans and Central Americans as the baton was passed from poor whites to poor immigrants. It was to my mind something of an oddity in the rural Deep South, at least since the last influx of Scottish and Irish a hundred-plus years ago.
If the immigrants weren't available, I have no doubt that the paper companies would have turned to automation. The machines they operate to harvest trees are marvels. A machine for planting saplings probably isn't that difficult; indeed, it probably already exists. Doubtless the days of manual sapling planting are already numbered. Nonetheless, the influx of immigrants was a small economic boon that the locals would have appreciated were it not for the typical racist and nativist sentiments almost universally held.
As my father put it, it's absolutely ridiculous that they look down on hard-working immigrants doing the work that they recently once performed but now feel themselves too good to do. To be clear, the unemployment rate in that area is much higher than the national rate, and always has been. But irony of ironies, the social safety net (such as it is in Alabama) provides just enough comfort that poor whites can get by without having to do such work. Mind you, "get by" is still incredibly impoverished, but in that neck of the woods expectations are much lower than most of the rest of the country.
Anyhow, I don't mean to argue with the notion that immigration has historically been used to suppress wages, and that it can contribute to greater income inequality. On the whole I agree with that--it historically has, even though I don't think it's a necessary outcome of immigration. But higher wages isn't always an answer. There are structural and cultural reasons that act as a barrier to natives (especially white natives) performing certain tasks, particularly in historically poor areas where both structural and cultural influences are exaggerated.
That said, maybe automation in this case would have been better than supplementing the unskilled labor pool. Maybe the wages paid to a few skilled machine operators would have been better for the community than the low wages paid to a large number of new manual laborers. It's all a very complex subject. What is certain is that there was no third alternative; higher wages for the manual labor was never gonna happen.
Either pay a higher wage and start paying a higher price, automate it, or do without it. Arguing in favor of exploitative labor practices because you just have to have strawberries or your lawn mowed is a horrible argument. We should not be importing impoverished people and keeping them impoverished for your own personal convenience and desire.
If planting saplings in rural Alabama wasn't a better life from whence they came, then presumably they wouldn't have come. There are some hidden assumptions there, but I think those are pretty safe assumptions given the actuality of their movement.
Also, all labor is "exploitation". Does your company pass through 100% of the value you add to the organization? I seriously doubt it.
Meaningful exploitation would be, say, Alabama benefitting from Mexican immigrant labor while simultaneously discouraging or preventing their children from going to public school.
Now, sending immigrants back home might put an end to that kind of exploitation. But it's disingenuous to say that it's a favor to them to do so. It also ignores the fact one could also end the exploitation by, you know, ending the unfair treatment.
Not everyone deserves to be treated equally. If you are the same as everyone else, what use are you? You become unnecessary. That is the fundamental rationale of life - we are not all the same chunk of organic matter.
Ensuring disparity is a good thing. Your life won't change because a rich person exists.
Also, anything can be considered "exploitative".
We should be importing impoverished foreigners in order to give them a better life here in the US, because that's what they want.
If you can't compete against these impoverished foreigners, then that's your fault, not theirs.
> How many Canadians do you think are going to go picking Strawberries in California?
Standing here, looking out the window at the cold snow blowing, I can say that I would very much prefer to be picking strawberries in California at the moment.
On the whole, a Canadian citizen will be more promising in the U.S. Canadians speak English which is close to Standard American English; the cultures are more similar, and the level of poverty is much lower, meaning they're less likely to become dependent on social programs. If usefulness is measured in ability to contribute to the productivity of the nation as a whole, then Canadians are a better bet (knowing nothing else about the individual).
All else being equal though, I don't see how you could make the claim that the U.S. is engaged in favouritism between equally-promising Canadian and Mexican potential immigrants. Mexicans and Canadians both (technically) need to get permits to work in the U.S.
The Québécois were estimated in 2011 to be about 43% functionally franco-anglo bilingual; seems they're becoming more so year over year, the estimate was about 41% in 2006. About 8% of Québécois have English as their mother tongue. 5% of Québec doesn't even speak French, granted some of those will be allophones and illiterates.
There are plenty of Mexican illegal immigrants in Canada, probably helping with our huge pulse crops.
Anyway, there's no point in enhancing the productivity of U.S. domestic agriculture. It is incredibly productive and food is incredibly cheap at the wholesale level. If it becomes a bit more expensive at the wholesale level, I doubt that will shift the consumer price all that much. The people who would have more trouble affording food would also have higher mean income, since they would be more likely to be employed.
