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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.
Yes.
Are you single? Have you considered a sham marriage to an American woman (or man)? I've seen that work fairly well.
I've heard of deals around $50k in New Jersey. It's not that bad. You need to give your wife a good life for 3-4 years, and then you can divorce on amicable terms.
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That’s still expensive and risky. Sham marriage would be immigration fraud, a crime. This means that you need to compensate your co-conspirators generously to go along with it, because it requires a lot of effort and legal risk, and binds them to you for years. Ultimately, the investment visa might be cheaper in practice when you adjust for risk.
Yeah, I don't know.
The most absurd one that I've seen that worked is a dude found a homely lesbian woman with bad career prospects at an anime convention while he was visiting. They became friends and he paid her $20k/year and they roomed together (he paid for the 2 bedroom apartment) so they could fake marry and he could get his citizenship.
Their "wedding photos" were so obviously faked and it still succeeded. I think the fact that they were both awkward ultra nerds threw off the immigration officials.
They were friends and both liked anime so it was kind of a cute romance, in a way.
There's no one to throw off. They aren't checking this shit. My wife's aunt introduced me to a lovely very young couple who were cohabitating in Miami, and they were planning to get married. The only wrinkle they had to get out of the way is that she was currently in the middle of a fraudulent marriage to an immigrant. They were completely open about it. Everyone offered a polite, "Oh, interesting!"
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I know multiple people who got their green cards through a fake marriage, and they each paid $10,000. I was offered that much to do it myself, but I turned it down because I wanted to keep the option of marrying a mail-order-bride for real. Now, granted, that was before inflation, but even now I don't think it would be more than $20,000-$30,000, plus a few thousand more for the lawyer and fees. Definitely cheaper one million dollars, let alone five.
30 k$ seems pretty low for a crime whose default punishment (for the citizen, not for the alien) under the US Sentencing Guidelines is a prison sentence of 8–14 months plus a fine of 4–40 k$. I have a hard time believing that enforcement is so lax that people will commit such an easily-trackable felony for so little.
you think people are not so desperate they wouldn't take $30k to commit a crime that simply involves lying to the government about the contents of their heart?
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It seems very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Just don't write anything down.
"Oh it was love at first sight, so we married shortly after meeting."
"Our marriage wasn't very close, but things don't always match your expectations."
"Yes, I did end up 20-30k richer than you might expect after the divorce, but that's well within the normal variance."
It would be a lot easier to prove that someone had a sham Sacrament of Holy Matrimony than a sham legal marriage because civil standards are incredibly lax.
It isn't that simple. Court opinions on this topic show that the immigration authorities conduct intrusive interviews and investigations to check whether the marriage appears genuine. How did you meet? How did you propose? Where was the honeymoon? What is your spouse's birthday? Do you live with your spouse? Do you share a bank account? Et cetera.
@dr_analog @hydroacetylene
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No, ergvw34 is right- if you’re of the right ethnicity(IIRC he’s Hispanic, which would have a much lower going rate than Africans would have to pony up), the cost of a green card marriage is extremely low, and if you’re willing to live together for the whole five-ish years that’s all the proof immigration needs.
You don’t even need to live together. Just have all your mail delivered to the fake spouse address, and pick it up once in a while. If you have relatives you can live with them and pay them in cash for living expenses. Easy peasy
The federal investigators will check whether you are living together.
None of the people I know who got their green cards this way actually moved in together, except the one marriage that was real. They all just pretended to.
I once heard the process summed up as "find a gringo who is willing to participate, take a dozen photographs together, and practice the right answers for the interview". It's a little more complicated than that (e.g. the woman is expected to change her last name), but not much. That's why you pay an immigration lawyer; he knows what the immigration officials want to see and will teach you how to fake it. Honeymoon photos can be as simple as taking a trip to Disneyland together for one weekend.
I really think you are forming an inaccurate picture of how thoroughly the government investigates these marriages based on the documents you are reading online. Having seen the process with my own eyes, I can tell you it's not like that.
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I think we both know that even if I was willing to go to any lengths to get in, admitting to fraudulent intent in an online forum is a bad idea haha. Even a pseudonymous one.
I think it's nigh inevitable that we're all unmasked by AI doing stylometry. My OP-sec is far from perfect, and there's enough unique information about me out there that a determined human adversary could manage. I even nurse minor ambitions of becoming a Proper Blogger some day, and that just increases the attack surface.
In all honesty, I want it to be as legal as I can make it. I could certainly afford a flight to Guatemala or Nicaragua and find a mule, but I don't want to live the life of an illegal immigrant. The medical profession in UK might not be ideal, but it beats that as far as I'm concerned!
As for finding a legitimate American wife, the easiest way is to be in America. Most Americans are sensible enough not to move to either the UK or India. Most of them would also prefer that their husband be gainfully employed.
To practise as a doctor in the States requires me to be eligible for the USMLE and then pass it. I've been keeping a close eye on the recent trend of many individual US states waiving the residency requirement, but to my dismay, there isn't one that does away with the USMLE altogether, not even if I were a senior clinician who had finished their higher training in a peer medical system like the UK. They usually ask that such candidates work in under-served rural areas, but I can deal with that.
(This is true, the bit about being peers. The NHS is certainly poorer, but not to that extent. We've got the same things you do in your private hospitals, we just have to dole the expensive stuff out much more begrudgingly. And psychiatry? You can't get away with just a pen and paper these days, but it isn't a very demanding field in terms of equipment)
I'd strongly prefer to continue working as a doctor. I haven't entirely ruled out a pivot to something that is non-clinical, which would let me work in the States, but many options take additional degrees and loads of time. Time I don't think I have, with the pace of progress in AI.
A friend of mine, from the same med school, ended up doing a PhD in Public Health in Texas and now works with the big names, but the ideal time for me to have done that would have been 3 years in the past.
If I did so now, not only would I be taking up educational debt, I'd be losing out on several years of earnings. This wouldn't mean shit in India, but since I'm already in the UK..
You can see how complicated things are. If I had to rank my options:
1.5) If that USMLE issue is fixed, I would also be able to go to countries that are better off than the UK and pay doctors well. Think Canada or NZ, the same obstacle blocks all of them. Slightly lower payoff than the States, but I'd be happy with it.
Continue training in the UK and resign myself to life here. It beats India. This is more or less something I can count on.
Discard clinical medicine and do something that doesn't have so much regulatory red tape, and try to get into the States that way. Uncertain odds, massive opportunity costs if I have to quit my job and training program.
Now, if some lovely lady becomes so enamored by my hobby of arguing with strangers online that she wants to marry me, I might not say no haha. If I was a US citizen, then I could apply for jobs that think that even if my medical credentials aren't directly applicable, it's proof of general competence.
Thank you. I'd have linked to the same post on the Motte if I wasn't too tired to dig through my profile. If you were one of the people who had said it back then, I appreciate you, and I do now.
I think I'd be a fine American. Let's see if that pans out, my life hasn't been entirely terrible outside of it.
You also have the option of completing training in the UK and then moving to a country like Australia that wants to poach British-trained doctors.
I would if I could! The same American NGO that certifies international doctors as being eligible for the USMLE, is also relied upon by other Commonwealth countries to vet applicants.
The UK still has delusions of grandeur, and has their own certification pathway without entirely outsourcing that bit to an American org. Unfortunately, this doesn't provide a way to side-step the issues with my original med school, even if my higher training is recognized by Australia and New Zealand.
Otherwise I'd probably be replying back at an awkward time zone, as soon as I was safe from drop bear attack.
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