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Most of the legal immigration to the United States these days is exceedingly low skilled. The immigrants themselves traditionally take meagerly compensated, menial jobs and thus reduce the operating costs for American businesses, but the benefits to the economy are trivial and short-lived.
The children and grandchildren of these immigrants in their majority are destined for urban poverty, with all its social disfunction: high degree of government dependency, crime, especially gang crime, single motherhood and so on.
The long term costs to society far outweigh whatever minute benefits low-skilled immigration provides.
Canada and Australia do things slightly better, by favoring certain professions the government deems "needed" and thus excluding most low-skilled immigrants. The problem with their immigration policies is that they expect government bureaucrats to know what's good for the economy of the country.
IQ scores have a moderate correlation with lifetime success (which is better than any other test in existence), including income, and is the only test that can easily be made "culture-neutral" (i.e. not requiring the knowledge of any particular language or customs) - see Raven's matrices, an IQ test consisting of purely graphical puzzles, for an example. Some basic logical puzzles (seating a group of people around a round table and such) can also be easily translated into a large number of languages.
Why not eliminate all forms of current legal immigration and replace it with a perfectly neutral and fair IQ-type test? Anyone in the world could take it at one of the centers for a low fee, and the top scorers, up to the annual limit, would be eligible for green cards (provided they have no criminal records or other such disqualifying factors).
By filling America with the brightest people in the world, we could remain the intellectual, technological and scientific gorilla of the world, ensuring the dominance and prosperity of American civilization for ages to come (at least until we're replaced by robots).
With current immigration, I'm afraid we'll be barely distinguishable from Latin America within several generations. Now, Latin America isn't an awful place to live, of course.. but we could do so much better.
Most of the legal immigration to the United States these days is exceedingly low skilled. The immigrants themselves traditionally take meagerly compensated, menial jobs and thus reduce the operating costs for American businesses, but the benefits to the economy are trivial and short-lived.
Is this your opinion, or do you have some facts to back up this claim? I think you will find that this not to be the case at all once you do a little research.
Acceptable if you agree to it that we can force citizens (born or naturalized) to denounce it if they don't meet the criteria... you included. That way, America can be a society of just the intellectuals.
Oh, and if psychological studies around IQ and political/social/religious leanings are true, conservatives will be the one at a disadvantage.
Is this your opinion, or do you have some facts to back up this claim? I think you will find that this not to be the case at all once you do a little research.
Actually if you do the research, it turns out to be fact.
Family reunification accounted for 65 percent of all lawful permanent immigration in 2008.
Immigrants who obtained green cards as spouses, children under 21, and parents of US citizens (488,483), or as immediate family of lawful permanent residents and certain family members of US citizens (227,761), accounted for 64.7 percent of all lawful permanent immigrants (see Figure 2). During the last decade, family-based immigration has accounted for about two-thirds of total lawful permanent immigration.
A mere 15% are based on specific job skills or employer sponsored immigration;
Employment-preference immigrants made up 15 percent of all lawful permanent immigration in 2008.
The 166,511 immigrants who received green cards through sponsorship from their US employers accounted for 15.0 percent of all LPRs. The share of employment-preference immigrants is significantly smaller than that of family-based immigrants and has varied between 8.8 percent (56,678) in 1999 and 22 percent (246,878) in 2005 (see Figure 2). Similar to the past, immediate family members accounted for more than half of employment-based immigrants. In 2008, 54.4 percent (or 90,576) of the employment-sponsored immigrants were spouses and children of principal applicants.
Nearly every other industrialized nation is the exact opposite; admitting people based on specific in demand skill sets and allotting much smaller amounts for family related immigration.
It is too late, America is going to die a slow and painful death. Most Americans don't really understand what made America great, and have completely turned their backs on history and have fallen into the realm of this egalitarian dreamer.
A study recently said that most Americans believe their children will not have life as good as they had it, that the time of success and plenty is behind us. That is the first time that kind of negative attitude has existed since the beginning of the United States. All prior generations believed the best lay ahead of them. And they woke up every morning, put their shoes on to go to work, knowing they were building a better world for their kids.
This pessimism will be pervasive and will continue to sink this country further and further as more and more people angry, at the unfairness abound by the dying economy, will be more and more putting their hand out, as they simply do not care anymore. This will be especially true for the primary earners in this country, who more and more simply do not have children. As illegal immigrants and first-generation immigrants from 2nd and 3rd-world countries rate of births are eclipsing "American" births.
We pretend that all people are equal, that all immigrants are equal, that all cultures are equal. So we refuse to be selective in who we allow to come to this country. We are handing over the country our forefathers worked for, and died for, because of this foolish egalitarian ideal. But most Americans have become apathetic, they simply don't care, they know they will not be around in 50-100 years once most of these changes become more and more obvious. Why fight it? Who cares?
I guess I can understand it from the atheists out there, the ones that choose to "enjoy life" and don't want to be bothered with having children, and resent that they have had it so easy in life while others have struggled. They think "What if that was me? If I was Mexican, I would want to come to the United States also, so it is evil for me to block them from here." Which in itself is admirable, but they refuse to understand that by helping others, they are hurting the people already here, and destroying this country from within.
It is a difficult moral dilemna, that is simply impossible to fix. Since the only solution basically amounts to a combination of unregulated and unfair capitalism and/or basically what amounts to a eugenics program.
Nearly every other industrialized nation is the exact opposite; admitting people based on specific in demand skill sets and allotting much smaller amounts for family related immigration.
You're confusing between skilled labor versus immigration issue. They aren't one and the same.
Don't get me wrong, I do like the idea of low-IQ cleansing and especially if we can apply it across the board as opposed to narrowing it down to ethnic cleansing.
Nearly every other industrialized nation is the exact opposite; admitting people based on specific in demand skill sets and allotting much smaller amounts for family related immigration.
I am not aware of any industrial nation not allowing family related immigration pretty much along the same lines as the US. Citizenship is much harder some places, but permanent residence for spouses, children and parents are pretty much par for the course, at least as far as I know. Can you provide examples?
About 30% of legal immigrants lack a high school degree, compared to about 10% of US natives. Yes, there is skills-based immigration (11% of immigrants have advanced degrees compared to 10% of Americans), but it's not the focus of the current US immigration policy.
Putting an end - as best as we can - to illegal immigration and making legal immigration merit-based would be my desire.
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Acceptable if you agree to it that we can force citizens (born or naturalized) to denounce it if they don't meet the criteria
Cheap demagoguery. Ex post facto laws are almost universally viewed as immoral and illegal.
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I am not aware of any industrial nation not allowing family related immigration pretty much on par with the US. Citizenship is much harder some places, but permanent residence for spouses, children and parents are pretty much par for the course, at least as far as I know. Can you provide examples?
We could get rid of immigration for adult children, siblings (siblings! now that's a waste of immigration spots), adult parents. Space is limited and I'd rather see it filled with the brightest, not the most closely related to whomever came here last year.
As someone who is married to the daughter of Mexican-American immigrants who did migrant work and took her back and forth from Minnesota to Texas, constantly changing schools, speaking Spanish in front of her as they knew little English and growing up with 9 other people in a 700 square foot house, I disagree. The reason I disagree is because she has a BS in Chemistry and an MBA from UT (Texas).
The Irish, Poles, Italians, Jews etc all endured harsh conditions similar to these. I don't think it's necessary to point out the contributions of these groups as their success speaks for itself. Why do you assume that with Mexicans, it won't be the same?
And yes, she is the granddaughter of legal immigrants. Migrants on worker's permits.
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