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Notes -
Raising the Price of Admission
I find myself immensely frustrated by Trump's recent moves to cut down on immigration, especially replacing the EB5 with his new golden ticket scheme.
I've always wanted to move to the States, but by virtue of being Indian, and in a profession with strict regulatory requirements, it was never easy. As of right now, I can't sit for the USMLE if I wanted to, but I believe that is a problem my uni could solve, unfortunately I'm locked into the UK for at least 3 more years and don't have the time to breathe down their necks.
If I wanted to spend $1 million for the old EB5, I'd probably have to sell a significant fraction of my familial assets, and they're not mine yet, I have a sibling and parents to think of. The fact that we even have that much, when my father made $50k at the peak of his career as a OBGYN surgeon, represents a lifetime of my parents being frugal and living beneath their means. My dad started out from scratch, a penniless refugee, and all his life he worked tirelessly to make sure his kids wouldn't have to work as hard as he did. To a degree, he's succeeded. I nearly make as much as he does, but that's virtue of grinding my ass off to escape India. I had to settle for the UK, whereas I'd much rather be in the States.
The EB-5 program already functioned as a high barrier to entry, requiring not just capital but also the ability to invest in ways that met the job creation criteria. By raising the price to $5 million, the U.S. is effectively signaling that it no longer wants "entrepreneurial upper-middle-class" immigrants - it only wants the ultra-wealthy. The problem, is that the truly ultra-wealthy already have multiple options. The US is relatively unique in dual-taxation, and has heavier taxes overall when compared to some of the alternatives. They can buy citizenship in other countries (Malta, St. Kitts, etc.), take advantage of residence-by-investment programs in the EU, or just maintain an arsenal of visas that allow them to live anywhere they please. The U.S. loses out on exactly the kind of people who were willing to put down roots and contribute significantly to the economy while still needing the opportunities that U.S. citizenship provides.
If Trump (or any administration) wanted a truly meritocratic system, they should be auctioning off a limited number of economic immigrant slots each year. That would at least allow market forces to determine the actual value of U.S. residency. A points-based system, like Canada’s or Australia’s, could also make more sense: prioritizing skilled professionals over sheer wealth. A million already strongly filters would-be immigrants. Five is exorbitant, especially if it's a flat sum.
(Let's leave aside the other requirements, such as running a business that creates a certain number of jobs)
Jevon's paradoxmakes us expect that increasing the price of a good by 5 times will not 5x the revenue. It'll decrease it in expectation. If Trump prizes himself as a businessman, this should be clear to him.
Even the abolition of birthright citizenship strikes me as a violation of the American ethos. It was certainly being abused, anchor babies being a case in point, but when even green cards are this hard to get, prospective skilled migrants greatly appreciate the peace of mind that their kids are entitled to citizenship provides.
End it for illegal immigrants if you have to, why lump in everyone else there legitimately? I wouldn't mind people using their visitor visas to get a fast one in being debarred too, but I look at the current state of affairs with great dismay.
At any rate, I'm not an American. I do wish I was, and my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me. Well, I'm used to life being rough, and the UK isn't the worst place I could be. I still think that even from an absolutely monetary point of view, this is a bad plan.
I hope I've made a decent case for why you're not getting much out filtering the immigrants for quality at that point, and the ones who are that loaded are probably not nearly as keen. They're easily Global Citizens for whom nationality is a formality.
Well, I'm still going to see if I manage to figure out the USMLE thing by the time my training in the UK ends, but there must be thousands of skilled immigrants in a similar boat, just noticing a rather significant leak in it. Then they're confronted by a sign at Eliis Island that just any ocean-crossing vessel won't do, they need a yacht. We don't deserve to be clubbed in with those who break the rules.
Have you considered staying inside your home country? Americans overwhelmingly voted to lower immigration - Trump’s policies aren’t a "suggestion" or some miscalculation, they’re the people’s choice. It's quite selfish to continue to game the system in the face of this.
I have to ask - do you not feel uncomfortable coming to a country where the people do not want you there? I know I could not make such a move.
All of the immigrants that I've known (friends included) have a deeply held belief in what I've seen called 'immigrationism': the idea that if you work hard and pay taxes you are entitled to go wherever you please. And of course in the UK it's literally illegal to suggest otherwise.
Please do not use the word "literally" metaphorically.
There are many people in the UK (Nigel Farage most obviously) who have made a good living out of saying things they insist you are not allowed to say. That is because you are allowed to say those things.
There are still too many things that are illegal to say in the UK, to the point where if you didn't say "literally" I would accept that you were engaging in permissible exaggeration and not argue, but one of them is not "the UK has the right as a sovereign country to exclude net-taxpaying immigrants on cultural grounds". And if it isn't illegal to say, it isn't literally illegal to say.
People have been arrested for anti immigration comments.
Can you say, the UK has he right to exclude immigrants for any reason, especially ethnic replacement? I don't think you can.
The UK, as a sovereign state, has the right to exclude any non-citizen it wants, for any reason. (In some cases we would need to withdraw from treaties like the Refugee Convention or the European Convention on Human Rights to do so legally, but treaties have exit clauses).
I just did, from a UK IP, using a weak pseudonym.
Seriously, the UK establishment doesn't have a brief to protect Nigel Farage or Melanie Phillips. If it was illegal to say the things they are saying, they would be arrested. The UK hate speech laws require the speech to be "threatening, abusive, or insulting" as well as discriminatory against a protected group, so if you are polite and don't insult identifiable individuals you are not breaking the law. I don't support these laws, but I don't support foreigners lying about them either.
In the context of the recent riots, the much bigger difference is that the US has an unusually high bar for substantive incitement charges (which carry much higher sentences than hate speech charges) - if you poast "There are asylum seekers at 10 Acacia Avenue. Wouldn't it be a pity if someone burned the place down?" from your mother's basement and someone you never met who read the post does, in fact, burn down 10 Acacia Avenue then you are likely to be convicted of incitement to commit arson in the UK, but this would probably be 1st-amendment protected in the US.
Investigating "non-crime hate incidents" is stupid and the police should stop doing it, but the operative part is "non-crime" - none of the stories you hear about them involve someone being arrested, prosecuted, locked up etc.
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I wasn't clear, sorry. Making the general anti-immigration case is legal, but what about saying to an actual immigrant in front of you, 'I don't care how much tax you pay, I don't think you should be here'? At the very least, I'm pretty sure that it would be counted as a non-crime hate incident. And since that's the case, any given immigrant is never going to have their bubble of 'I pay my taxes, so it's fine' disrupted.
I'm not actually advocating for going around yelling 'Go home' in people's faces, but I think it's important to realise that here as in many areas status quo bias rules. Once you're in the country, it's very hard for people to tell you to leave it. Whereas if you're out of the country and you want to come in, shrugging and saying 'sorry, no can do' is much easier. Thus my constant insistence that immigration is like nuclear fission in a power plant: it has to be strictly controlled at all times because you can't undo a chain reaction later.
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I don't think it's fair to describe any presidential victory margin in the past 25 years as overwhelming. In general, we are usually talking 48% to 49% of the popluar vote.
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If the next US president runs on a platform of repudiating and deplatforming Trump and his followers and wins with something similar to Trump's numbers, will you also ask pro-Trump people who want to continue spreading their message whether they aren't uncomfortable staying in a country where the people do not want them, and tell them that they are being selfish to game the system?
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The mods had a little discussion about this. Your post isn't against the rules on content - "I don't want more Indians here" is an allowable opinion - but it is veering close to consensus building. (You cannot speak for how most people on the Motte feel, let alone presume to speak for the entire country.) And we have noticed that your two posts so far seem to be harping on your dislike of Indians. I'm pretty certain this is an alt you are using to grind this particular axe.
Contribute something other than how much you don't like Indians if you want to keep posting with this account.
That is not how this post came across to me, and it saddens me that this appears to be the Official mod interpretation of that post.
Alas, we often cause sadness.
Fair enough.
Read 'sadness' as shorthand for 'a small but decidedly nonzero tick of update towards having to weight views on this site based on presumed self-censorship, inexpressibility of some views, and resulting skewed representation, when this is one of shockingly few sites left on the public internet that appeared to have not fully gone down that path.'
We've been hearing it since reddit days. For how constantly we're being told we're making some views inexpressible, it's amazing how often those views continue to be expressed.
Attempting to ban a view preferentially results in banning actual discussion of that view.
If a view is common you'll still get one-offs of people who either do not realize the view is banned, or don't care, and who drop an unbacked opinion.
This has the obvious feedback effect.
This hasn't happened.
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To be fair, y'all did ban a certain view for like a month (though I think this was before your time as a mod).
Yes, that was long before I was a mod. Even then, it was a temporary ban because the HBD threads had become exhausting. I personally think it was a mistake, but if one single topic is taking all the air out of the room it's tempting to be fed up with it.
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For the record, despite being a mod myself, I had no part in this discussion. I was too busy replying to people to even notice while that was underway, in case anyone thinks that negativity expressed towards moderators is treated differently.
I've been chided by you yet wholeheartedly defend your regime as mod, FTR. Well done. Amadan too, begrudgingly. And more than I can name.
Even @cjet79 is pretty cool.
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Thank you. It can occasionally be thankless work, I don't enjoy having to rap people on the knuckles, so if someone who underwent that still considers me a decent mod, I'm glad.
We try our best!
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Certainly. I have, on further consideration, decided not to.
Americans have voted against illegal immigration. Against people hopping the border. You could also say that they're against the expansion of asylum seeking, and that would be true.
Skilled immigration is nowhere near as unpopular, I'd have to look up polls, but I recall it being seen as a positive across the aisle.
Trump is keeping his promises this term, but in a ham-fisted way. You can address illegal immigration while not worsening the already difficult process of legal immigration.
Now, my dear friend. Do I look like an illegal migrant or an asylum seeker?
How exactly have I "gamed" the system? By trying my absolute best to sort out the impediments that would prevent me from legally moving to the States as a doctor? By considering an entirely legal class of visa, the EB5?
I'd be uncomfortable if this was true. It's not.
Here's a handy link to a previous post about my desire to move to the States, where I discussed my desperate efforts to make a now ex-girlfriend understand how amazing the States is as a country, and how its flaws are overplayed.
It's on this very forum. It has 70 upvotes at the time of writing, probably putting it in the top 0.1% of posts ever by popularity.
You are welcome to count the number of people who sympathized with my desire, and clearly said they wanted me to achieve my goal. There are people there inviting me to their homes, offering to show me around, take me out shooting.
They dwarf the mere two or three people who said they didn't want me around. Feel free to look yourself.
I am a law-abiding, responsible highly-trained professional in one of the most respected professions around. I'm articulate, fluent in English at a native level, an anglophile and a big fan of the United States. I hold nuanced political views and am friends with people on both sides of the political spectrum. I nurse no ethnic grudges, I'm not seeking to displace or replace anyone. I'm as Westernized as it gets, and my personal views and beliefs, if they were material, are those you could find in any number of Americans. I'd probably be working in under-served communities that your local doctors avoid if they can help it.
I invite you to present to me an example of someone you think would be a better candidate for an immigrant.
Even in the UK, almost everyone I've met has liked me, and been glad to have my presence. That includes old people at bars who complain about Pakis while telling me they vote SNP, that gentleman ended up saying I was one of the good ones and tried to set me up with a bartender.
I rest my case.
Opinion polls on immigration are largely cognitive dissonant bullshit, and nobody means the same things with any of the words they use. People notice where they live getting increasingly alien and dysfunctional, and the nice way to complain about that is to complain about illegal immigration. That goalpost has gradually shifted to fraudulent asylum claims, or fraudulent temporary worker visa, etc. Are they really fraudulent? I don't know. Do people feel like the outcomes of these policies aren't what they were promised, and are using the word "fraudulent" to express how they feel personally lied to about the impacts of all forms of immigration? That'd be my guess.
And especially with H1B, which is the current code word for "skilled immigration", it's the worst shit show anyone has ever seen. People being forced to train their own replacement, people blatantly abusing the system to replace american workers with lower cost wage slaves. I can't go into details, but I'm like 80% certain at least the division of a government agency I have to work with has become a fraudulent H1B colony. All my points of contact have become Indian over the last 5 years, their basic competence has plummeted into hell, and this year they actually didn't do anything. Redelivered last years deliverables, with great difficulty, and basically went "We're the government, eat shit, we don't have to do anything, we can't be fired." This is a ubiquitous experience, and to whatever degree "skilled immigration" polls positively, it is not inclusive of whatever the fuck that is which our overlords appear to consider "skilled immigration".
The Motte is not America. You may be better served taking the temperature on twitter, if for no other reason than the contrast.
You can't take the temperature on a site that shows you an algorithmically-curated selection of what is being posted. It just tells you what Musk wants you to see, either for (his) business or (his) pleasure.
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Large portions of Trump votes are likely based on illegal immigration or concerns about inflation, his election isn’t itself evidence that any majority of the US is deeply against having an Indian doctor move here.
And not just any Indian doctor. I think it's entirely fair to say that my values, attitudes and beliefs are far closer to American than Indian.
Hell, even the way I talk, I've been asked dozens of times by Brits if I'm an American based on my accent.
But yes, I sincerely doubt that the average American would be against a foreign doctor who had passed all the competency requirements, and had even gone through training in a Western country.
Depends on how well informed the American is.
Most Americans assume that doctors trained in Britain(or, say- France, Australia, etc) have fairly minimal hoops to jump through to become American doctors. These people would hear the cliff notes version of your story and think that your difficulties in becoming licensed to practice medicine in the USA are due to competency differences, maybe in some specific area, and not inscrutable bureaucratic bullshit. Anti-Indian prejudice isn’t terribly uncommon- blue collar Americans by and large don’t like Indians and I’ve heard tech workers usually don’t either- but it probably makes an exception for doctors, if not other high skilled professions. But also there are far more people than you might think who are ok with throwing the baby out with the bathwater to reduce immigration- especially from India and ‘not Mexico but the countries south of there’.
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As a pretty average American compared to most of this forum, I'd be okay with you or anyone else living here only if you did most of the following: got married (ideally to an American), had kids, learned to hunt or fish, started going to church or at least showed up and participated in public events hosted by churches, took an interest in local politics, and participated in traditional civil religion ceremonies (e.g. 4th of July cookout), got and kept a stable job, and generally deferred to the local culture, social conventions, and moral code (e.g. no loud ethnic music or fireworks at weird times, no opening abortion or gender transition clinics, no complaining about halal/no vegetarian food).
If you don't want to do those things, I honestly don't really want you in my country at all, no offense personally. If you must come, I hope you stay in the rootless cosmopolitan containment zones (blue cities).
I think this is how many (most?) non urbanite Americans actually feel but as @WhiningCoil points out, even the reddest red state hobbits have been successfully trained by state education to crimestop when thinking these thoughts, so they make mouth noises about "illegal immigration."
Also, just curious, but since you are transhumanist (IIRC) atheist, isn't the social and political climate of the UK much more amenable to your beliefs and political goals? America has a large population of recalcitrant believers in the imago dei, including not a few members of the elite, who completely oppose transhumanism.
Also, speak English [or rather, the country's language whatever it may be] in public spaces. Yes, even when speaking to other people who share a different common tongue.
This may be so self-evident to some as to be not worth mentioning.
Cliques of people speaking a language you don't is demoralizing at best.
Good point.
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Assuming you're American, would you speak Spanish to a fellow American expat in Mexico City? Or Thai to one in Bangkok? I read once that certain Aboriginal Australians would beat to death anyone who uttered so much as a single word of another tribe's tongue on their soil and expected everyone to switch languages even mid-sentence as they were crossing tribal boundaries, but in practice this is an impossible standard to uphold unless you are a hyperpolyglot or simply never visit non-Anglophone countries.
If I was emigrating to there, and it was a public space? Absolutely. Admittedly, that is one of my pushes away from emigrating to a country with a different language, as I am terrible enough at my native tongue.
Be aware that immigration != tourism.
Fair enough, I respect that. I just don't know how one would consistently distinguish between tourists and immigrants just from hearing them speak in public. The children and grandchildren of immigrants also lose their ancestral languages so quickly that it doesn't seem like that big of a problem in the long run.
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I was just about to say that I tick all of the boxes, except for ever being willing to be a devout member of a church, when I saw that you left open the option of simply participating in civic life.
I can genuinely say, with little doubt, that these are all things or practices I would be happy to do, or at least try, in the case of hunting (I fucking love guns, I want to turn a boar into pink mist with .50 bmg, I also have ADHD so I'd probably have to take meds in order to handle all the waiting around).
Abortion clinics? I'm for abortion being legal, and probably more pro-choice than most. I'm not in the business of opening them, I discarded the family trade of OBGYN.
As a psychiatrist, I also treat gender transitioning as something to be greatly skeptical of. I wouldn't be going around encouraging it, even if I don't really have an issue with trans people and try to be polite in their company.
So I can easily imagine myself settling into a small town, showing up to grill beef steaks with no issues, drinking beer and shooting the shit (and beer cans) with my neighbors and their kids while my own kids, the product of legal and ceremonial marriage, speak to them in English.
The UK will jail you for burning a Koran, and will let the person who assaulted you while brandishing a knife go with bail. It's a state that does secularism entirely wrong, unlike the French, who have the right idea with lacité. America handles freedom of speech and religion far better.
I do not expect to have issues with religious people in the States. I usually keep my religious opinions to myself, except when I'm in an argumentative mood in an online forum with internet strangers. If they don't bother me, I won't bother them beyond not practicing their tenets.
Besides, the bulk of the atheist transhumanists live in the Bay Area. That's my first choice, though I like most of America and would be happy to live there (barring Alaska).
I know you're being hyperbolic, but if you want to pass for being fully assimilated into American gun culture you have to be more nuanced than this. Full auto and .50 BMG are the types of things you do as a rental on a weekend to Nevada. You use them to obliterate a junk car or washing machine. Even with physician money it's just to impractical to do all the time. You'll almost never see this kind of thing at a normal range in the US.
More Platonicly American methods of hunting hogs:
I don't consider hog hunting to be the most American form of hunting though. For me the form of hunting that is most characteristic of the American ethos is elk hunting. Probably with something like a .300 Winchester Magnum or one of the other big 30's.
It was hyperbole. I would like to own at least 2 different rifles, probably an AR-15 chambered in 5.56, and a DMR in something like .338 or .408. If you can't tell, I like guns that go boom. I could tell you more about my aesthetics, I'd kit out the AR with Daniel Defense furniture barring a magpul MOE buttstock, Geissele match triggers, an LPVO with a mounted red dot. The DMR would (ideally) be a Mk-18 Mjolnir, because I love that gun, but I'd settle for a off the shelf AR-10 in 7.62x51 if I had to.
The 5.56 for plinking or at the range, the DMR for the hell of it. If I wanted to go hunting boar from a chopper with a Barrett, that would be a special treat if anything.
I suppose given that you are in the UK right now, I'll accept NATO nomenclature for caliber. There is something decidedly transatlantic about using millimeter based measurements to specify caliber over US customary units though.
I'll have to insist on you describing all charge sizes in the mass unit of grains before naturalizing to the US. Of course actually referring to the volume of a some particular brand of dipper and powder you used and not the actual mass.
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Who are the people? Realistically, the vast majority of skilled migrants to the US are going to be living in areas where most of their neighbours are pro-immigration.
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And how is he gaming the system, anyway?
I also disagree with your characterization of “the people’s choice.” Immigration was not the only issue. Immigration from India, specifically, was barely mentioned. What else do Americans “overwhelmingly” not want?
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