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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.
EB-5 is already over for Indians and Chinese, with wait times of over 5 years. At the current rate and as a doctor, you are probably better grinding for EB-1 or going for a nonimmigrant visa and hope you get lucky and figure something out. The fact is that the number of Indians with the means and desire to immigrate is absurdly, overwhelmingly large. Any system that doesn't just unleash total replacement of the native population (see Canada) will inevitably the majority of well-meaning fine people who want in. It's like the admissions system to Harvard, where there's no illusion that they're selecting the "best" or even any idea what the "best" might be, but irregardless they have to keep 97% of applicants out.
Anyways, don't blame Trump for changing EB-5 because you weren't going to get it anyways, and either way the number of spots on EB-5 is so small that it was destined to be overrun irregardless.
Specifically the EB-5 number is so small that the actual immigrants themselves are unlikely to have any substantial impact in the long run. The entire program isn't for the benefit of the immigrants, but just a slightly roundabout stimulus program that is hopefully slightly less wasteful than direct helicopter money. Anyways with such a small number of spots, any impact that could be made is going to be through an even smaller number of exceptional people, and idk if changing the cutoff will make it more or less likely to admit unicorns, but I also don't think it's obviously worse.
Then you definitely won't be getting it if they implemented an auction.
I would be happy to have you, but not 10 million of you.
Letting in all Indians at or above self_made_human's intelligence / merit would not lead to total replacement of the native population, though? They aren't all doctors or FAANG engineers
Google lied to me and said there were 10 million+ doctors in India but actually there are 10 lakh+ doctors in India.
Nevertheless if you had a system that made it easy for Indian doctors to get a visa, you would find that thousands of diploma mills would spring up overnight churning out millions and millions of degrees. And somehow all of them will have the full Indian government licensing, accreditation, and whatnot to seem as legit as anything can be without actually existing.
We already have the flood of fraudulent paperwork with Indian companies filing dozens and dozens of H1-B applications per person, just to abuse the lottery, and trying to catch even a fraction of them is a losing battle.
As far as I can tell, there's no way an Indian doctor can practise in the States without clearing the USMLE.
That is a protracted process, and there is identity verification involved. If a licensing exam can't rule out fraudulent or unqualified candidates, it's not worth the name.
Just being a doctor is of little value, they want you to prove equivalency.
The fact that doctors and lawyers aren't allowed to sit for their exam without taking years of schooling and training suggests otherwise. Of course the training requirements are likely more of a cartel thing, but at least ostensibly the exam only tests a fraction of what's necessary to practice.
@Throwaway05 has been scaring me with claims of how difficult the USMLE is. He's better positioned to answer this than I am, but I'm personally quite confident that almost nobody who did not actually have the skills and knowledge of an American doctor could make it through the gauntlet. The only way to get those, at present, is med school.
The USMLE is necessary but not sufficient, other stuff is required to be a competent doctor (and NPs/PAs certainly become doctors without passing the USMLE, and while not actually good enough certainly make some people comfortable).
Preparation side of things gets weird, these days most applicants use uniformly the same few "best in class" test prep resources like Sketchy and First Aid, hypothetically someone could pass the USMLE without the structure and context of course work but it would be nearly impossible because of the sheer amount of crap you need to know.
As you know but the other poster likely doesn't, a lot of what is involved in being a good doctor involves practical experience doing shit in the hospital (sometimes physical skills and the like) with training wheels for awhile before you do it on your own.
You don't want your first time doing X to be doing it by yourself with no supervision, it's a terrifying thought.
Incidentally some states in the U.S. do allow lawyers to became barred without law school but I don't know the details of that.
Can't really do that in the same way for medicine.
Lastly it's entirely possible to pass USMLE and be ass as a physician for a variety of reasons including skills atrophying and laziness.
I believe you. It's not like the PLAB doesn't occasionally let absolute lemons through, and I wish I could say that every doctor with the same nominal degree I have was someone I'd entrust my medical care to.
God knows that I've sometimes felt scared and befuddled by how much autonomy the UK saw fit to grant me, back in India it was far too easy to hide behind a consultant's skirt, but that's not really a possibility when the senior psychiatrist hasn't had to interpret a CXR longer than I've been alive. I personally think it's nigh miraculous how doctors once managed without ready access to the internet.
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Yeah, and if you have a competent right-wing administration overseeing the immigration process, and also immigrating costs $1M USD, then this won't be an issue
In a democracy you absolutely should never make laws that only work well as long as you're in power but become a giant thorn in the side once you aren't anymore. In fact, while Musk & Trump are certainly trying to change that, the current government staff is still massively left-leaning. So such a law would be a thorn pretty much instantly.
I mean it's going to be hard to have any immigration laws work well if half the time the executive is held by people who want unlimited immigration. A lot of the policies people here would prefer aren't currently politically practical but they'd still be better if they were
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The obvious next step seems to me to be removing those laws again before the next election.
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There's a lot of them.
... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so
Why should HBD tell you that? India's been pretty civilised for ages, and Indians have the same basic subspecies makeup as whites AIUI (and there was plenty of geneflow even after OoA2; Persia wasn't a hard barrier, which is why Indians look more like whites than they do Chinese). I would expect the average Indian IQ to have been lower in the 20th century due to the Flynn effect, but I don't see a reason to suspect a large genetic difference. If you have something I'm not aware of, I'm all ears.
Indian students score so poorly on the PISA exams that their government pulled out in embarassment. Most lines of evidence suggest that there is extreme IQ stratification in India, with only certain high-caste subgroups performing at or above European or East Asian levels.
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So, a substantial part of the Indian population has the Y-DNA haplogroup R, which is a European lineage almost certainly introduced to India by the Aryan steppe invasion which conquered the existing Dravidian culture in the north of the subcontinent and introduced Indo-Aryan language and culture.
However, there is a gradient of R ancestry which is stronger in the north and much more rare in the south of the continent, where more South Asian Y-haplogroups such as L and H are far more prevalent. And of course once you look at mitochondrial ancestry, which comes from female ancestors, you see far more Asia- and India-specific lineage, such as the M haplogroup. This is consistent with the story of male conquerors intermingling with local women of Dravidian ancestry in the north and spreading their DNA in areas where they had political and cultural control. Over time their ancestry has been diluted substantially by intermarriage with people of ancient pre-Aryan Indian ancestry — people related to the Austronesian peoples of Southeastern Asia.
The big question mark over the Austronesians from my POV is the substantial Denisovan admixture, which fits the pattern of (lack of) civilisation suspiciously well. According to WP the Denisovan admixture in Indians is of a smaller level, similar to that in Orientals.
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That's a ton of people. We should not be inviting millions of people into the country. That's too much by an order of magnitude, and we're only talking about one country that is not compatible with our values and culture.
The US currently has 40M people who were born in foreign countries? I can see the argument that that's too much, but a few million doesn't seem like that many to our current 350M.
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