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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.
That is frustrating. I do wish skilled immigration was generally very permissive in the US. Even though it already directly impacts my ability to get programming jobs (my profession).
I've always had a sense that "stop illegal immigration" is the bailey while "stop all immigration" is the motte. I think Vivek and Elon didn't realize that when they waded into the H1-B visa debate a few weeks ago.
There is this weird emotion I get watching anti-immigration stuff. Its maybe like being the first hipster in your grade level that gets into music, and you find all these awesome classic rock songs. And then everyone else starts getting into music and they just like pop garbage. Don't read too much into that metaphor. Its just the feeling.
I recently joined a family society. On my mother's side we can trace our ancestry back in the US to the 1620's. My dad's family is what I consider more recent immigrants. They came here about 150 years ago sometime after the Civil war. My dad is anti-immigration, my mom is not.
... I just realized what the feeling is. Its elitism. I feel a sense of elitism over most of the anti-immigration people I personally run into. Just as a matter of demographics most people in the US came here or are descendants of people that came here within the last 100 years. The same way that you might look at a guy with a broken hispanic accent who just attained citizenship saying "shut down the border" is how I look at most people saying "shut down the border". Or the same way you might look at a person, still dripping wet after pulling themself onto the lifeboat and saying "we can't let anyone else on".
"Hey scum stop talking about founding stock as if you are part of the founding stock, you are a recent jumped up German immigrant. Be happy we let you in and stop trying to gate keep." Is what I'd say in my head to my dad if we was annoying enough to talk about "founding stock".
Anyways, I hope the political winds shift back on this issue. Middle class immigrants seem like the best immigrant class to get, I don't understand why the US makes it so hard.
I don't want African Muslims in my neighborhoods, and I don't want giant Hindu statues erected in America. I simply do not want more immigrants right now, because the ones we have are not integrating, and there is no reason for them to try.
We need sixty years, two generations, of essentially no immigrants in order to stabilize. The is what we've done in the past, and it had resulted in prosperity and community those times.
As for my bona fides, I don't have any known ancestors in the 17th century, but both sides have borderer roots in the middle 18th century.
Both sides also have Italian, and other immigrant stock, from the early 20th century. Italian great-grandmothers, that sort of thing.
Those borderer men crossed the Cumberland gap and settled Tennessee, and I think they earned the right to bequeath the country they forged to their posterity, and not to, again, African Muslims and Hindus who do not share their blood, their religion, or their values.
Seriously though, it's an embarrassment that people like Ilhan Omar an get elected as a foreign agent in Minnesota, or Jayapal can do the same in Washington. If that is the result of this immigration, then no thank you, we're not full you're simply not welcome here.
Any man who says he is American by something else besides is no American at all, and any American who carries a hyphen carries with him a dagger to plunge into the back of the American nation.
Last thing, you mixed up motte and bailey. The defensible motte is no illegal immigration. The bailey is no more foreigners, denaturalize and deport the paper citizens, too.
Ah ya I did mix up the motte and bailey.
Anyways most of the US was settled by 1870, some parts were a little more filled in, and they were done by 1900. That's why I like civil war as a good cutoff. Plus the civil war shaped the nation just as heavily as the revolutionary war.
We have above us an example of a more American person than most actual Americans.
My ancestors founded this country, and it was based on an idea, not blood. A bunch of nationalist and monarch loving central Europeans started coming over in the 1900's and started trying to make it all about blood. If it's blood then the English, the Dutch, and the descendants of slaves can stay and everyone else can fuck off.
A bunch of them even think that fighting in European and Asian wars (aka every 20th century war) should grant them special consideration. Yuck.
My ancestors founded this country and trying to explain to them it's not about blood and their posterity but about "an idea," would leave them very puzzled. And to be frank, I would be pretty shocked if your ancestors didn't either. The writings of the time, e.g., a relative of mine died in King Phillip's War, make it pretty clear they were concerned with blood at least as a rally against the Indians (and later black slaves).
I encourage anyone who qualifies to participate in the various family societies like the Sons of the American Revolution. They average age may be 75, but they're good people and are a great way to feel more apart of wherever you live.
Oh yes, the German and especially catholic waves of immigrants post 1850 were a terrible idea and many, including my ancestors at the time, repeatedly said so. It's only gotten worse since then.
Palatine German immigration to the USA began around ~1709, it reached its height from the 1720 - 1750.
so not the "German and especially catholic waves of immigrants post 1850"?
They're German but very pre-1850 and heavily / mostly Protestant.
I probably should have phrased that part as "post-1850 German and especially Catholic immigration... ." I didn't mean to include the earlier anabaptists in that sentence.
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It was based on both, which was reflected in the first eighty years of immigration acts as passed by the Congress, after being reaffirmed by many founding fathers. The idea is a necessary, not sufficient, condition.
I don't consider African-Americans to be the same as Americans, but they have no where else to go, and I view them as native to the land, despite their distance from the American population. The time to repatriate them to Africa was 150 years ago, and that door has since closed*. They are one of three categories of people native to the continent, which are essentially Americans, African-Americans, and the various tribes (not American and so not Native American, either).
Otherwise, unironically yeschad.jpeg. The only reason I don't use the revolutionary war as the cutoff is because of the 14th amendment, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died to settle that dispute, but if your ancestors weren't here on Jan 1 1866, then you're just visiting. Immigrants have the responsibility not just to assimilate through dress and culture and language, but through blood, and so the Irish-American and Italian-American communities you see on the East Coast are also repugnant to my sensibilities.
Gary Locke is my prime example. Ancestors immigrated in the late 19th century, but his Chinese grandmother gave birth to his Chinese father in China, and then that man moved to back to America and served in WWII, but went back to Hong Kong to marry a Chinese woman. He's Chinese, still, and married another Chinese woman (Mona Lee) and made Chinese children.
Being born in a barn does not make a man a horse.
I've always respected the logical consistency of this position, but it is so far outside the realm of possibility that to debate it feels like stepping into some alternate dimension where the platonic forms of nationalism, true communism (tm), and libertarianism exist unmoored from the flesh and blood human beings they are supposed to apply to. How much pre-1866 ancestry is enough? Is someone whose grandparents came through Ellis Island but only identifies as American really less worthy of the title than me, who has colonial ancestry but also an immigrant mother and speaks a foreign language at home? If some immigration officer with a Polish last name comes to deport me one day, can I pull out my SAR badge like an Uno reverse card and send him to Warsaw instead, or would we have to compare blood quanta first? In short order this gets as messy as trying to dole out reparations for slavery would.
For most people, common sense says no, if they observed all aspects of my life they would conclude that I am in fact less American than the third generation Italian, or the Korean adoptee who hasn't been outside the midwest since she was a baby and speaks only English, or even the Indian doctor in the UK who would love nothing more than to become an American and believes it's the greatest country in the world. The fact that there were minutemen with my last name in the New England militias 250 years ago doesn't change that. Now, if both majority pre-Civil War ancestry and belief in the existence of an Amerikaner ethnos defined by said ancestry are necessary to make one a true American, that leaves you with a population of several thousand Twitter shitposters and a lizardman's constant of rednecks. That's not nothing; Australia was created with less, but you aren't winning a civil war against the civic nationalists anytime soon.
We have to start somewhere, and you start by asserting your frame and believing in it.
Yes, actually. Your SAR card is the whole point. After all, the Constitution says that its purpose is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. That means you, and it doesn't mean Polaski or Tinetti.
The fact that there are so many immigrants that we have so many halfsies is itself the problem, and it's a problem that is solved by shutting the doors, repressing foreign language and culture, and forcing intermarriage. The third generation Italian in America, who has six different people all choosing to inbreed instead of intermingle, is also the problem. Third generation isn't even that old, we could be talking about the grandparents who immigrated in the 1950s or 60s. The Italians are more like five generations, which again, you couldn't have found a few mixed marriages among thirty people?
We're talking in generational terms already. I'm hoping my sons and grandsons think more this way, and act like it, too.
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The left has been kept in control of the culture so long they've torched and salted the immigration motte so hard that for the longest time even just very moderate positions like "reduce immigration" made right wingers sound racist to even their own side. The bailey is all that was left, because of its almost tautological nature (you can't really formulate many good arguments against the government stopping the immigration that the government decided wasn't allowed to legally happen).
Now the right are timidly coming out of the bailey, seeing the invading army mostly gone with only a skeleton garrison and cardboard cutouts in their place. And they're seeing some sprouts in the motte, give them time.
I hate to be that guy, but you're using motte and bailey backwards.
You're absolutely right! *slaps forehead*
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I remember having this same discussion of illegal vs legal immigration 2 decades ago during the Bush years. Back then I was in a high school debate class, and I had all the studies lined up and arguments together about why immigration is good. And once I finished my opening remarks they said "oh we are only talking about how we don't want illegal immigration". My rebuttal of "well then my side is arguing for making all immigration legal". They didn't like that and insisted I needed to argue for illegal immigration.
And no the left did not completely dominate the media landscape back then.
They wrote the movies, tv shows, books, music and ran the schools. Has there ever been a time in a millenial's life where popular Western media depicted someone who thinks there should be less immigrants in his Western country in a positive light?
Stan was presented as a voice of reason in the South Park Goobacks episode.
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Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings adaptation presenting in a positive light the struggle of white Middle-Eartheners agains the swarthy Orcen hordes attempting to immigrate to Gondor and Rohan.
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There was a conservative business approach to immigrants of "they are cheap labor". So yeah there was a pro-immigration consensus for a long time. But it was a bi-party consensus.
Was this a conservative party view or was this a conservative constituent view?
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The people most statistically likely to have their wages suppressed through employer ab/use of the H1-Bs are Blue tribers.
And the people most statistically likely to make anti-immigration the core of their politics are Red tribers. Funny that.
The same is true in the UK, except that the UK culture war is more generational than tribal. The people who benefit financially from immigration are homeowning pensioners, who are also the core demographic for anti-immigration politics.
Hardcore immigration opposition is driven by culture, not economics.
Not so funny; Red Tribers have their wages suppressed and employment prospects reduced by immigration, just not by H1-B abuse in particular.
Sure, but red tribers get along much better with Mexicans that compete with them for jobs with some regularity than with Indians who mostly don’t.
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Yes it is.
Mostly ignoring the American context, I think it's important to be explicit about this so that nobody gets any funny ideas about calling the job done when illegal immigration is finally consider not-actually-OK again. Mass immigration is a problem in and of itself, illegal or not, and arguing that the problem is merely the legality of it just invites pro-immigration actors to game the system by changing or subverting the laws.
Trying to play cute motte-and-bailey-games by tactically condemning illegal immigration because you think it an easier target when what you really mean is to condemn mass immigration or even any kind of immigration just sets you up for failure further down the line.
It's kayfabe on both sides. Both Left and Right governments in the UK prefer talking about illegal immigration to talking about mass legal immigration. Criticising illegal immigration is easy, makes you sound tough, and everyone knows there's not much you can do about it so under the rhetoric expectations are low.
What politicians on both sides refuse to discuss is that they have total control over legal immigration which is 20x the number. And with every 600,000 people per annum it gets harder to discuss.
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You know, unless I had some independent reason to think theyre crazy, I would take that as strong evidence that its in my interest what theyre saying.
And since were doing credentials: My family has lived within an hour of here longer than europeans have been to america.
I knew I shouldn't have included the lifeboat one. Its a terrible immigration metaphor. Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent. So its more like some guy washing up on the beach from a ship wreck and then saying "don't let anyone else come ashore".
But also part of the point is not what he is saying, but how he is saying it. "we can't let anyone else on". Like when did "we" become a "we".
I assume you don't live in America? In that case I say "go for it" whatever immigration policy floats your boat. I don't think most countries have a strong enough culture to assimilate immigrants. American culture dominates the world, so most of them come halfway pre-assimilated. And America is generally rich enough to have economic opportunity for them.
Really? Because I don’t see too many “refugees” clamoring to get into Mexico (except as a by station to get into America) or heck, how many are settling in the arctic?
Im not a fan of the lifeboat metaphor either because its not about limited resources per se (although crowding is a real concern and net negative - see mouse utopia experiments) but the real problem is obviously the culture fit issue. If you are privileged enough to travel, you can’t help but notice how absolute shite every other non western country is on multiple levels. Pollution, littering, poverty, corruption, crime, the list goes on. Do you truly think you won’t be importing any of those issues? Do I need to bring up my FGM rates in the UK?
Mexico has a far higher standard of living than elsewhere in Latin America and IIRC is a destination for immigration for that reason.
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What makes the standard of living? The people or the institutions? Which of the two are fungible? You and I probably share an opinion on this, but it is not the politically correct opinion.
Institutions are made up of people. You can’t switch the people out of the institutions and have them remain the same. Look at the ACLU for a recent example.
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Count Canada too and central America is basically a rounding error.
I have been to India. Some of it looked better than Northern Virginia. At least the area I was working in when I was there.
Much of it was worse. But that's why I said middle class immigrants are great.
My daughter is in public school, less than half the kids in her class are white. She is also in girl scouts. It's about 1/3 each of White, Indian, and Hispanic. In both cases it's been fine. In the case of girl scouts I can't imagine a more American organization for little girls to join.
There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].
Poppycock. I've seen plenty of enclaves, both urban and rural, with distinctive ethnic and cultural differences despite having immigrated over a century prior.
No thank you.
I specifically claimed that there are enclaves where people don't assimilate. Often it is in cities. Your response: "poppycock [exactly what I just said]"
Honestly if you hadn't included the "poppycock" or the "no thank you" I would have thought you were just pointlessly agreeing with what I said.
The rural enclaves all end up speaking exclusively American English within a generation or two. They all heavily consume American culture. Many of them volunteer for the military at higher rates.
The urban enclaves I have a sense of "who gives a shit". They stay in a city and live out their lives in a weird half-in-half-out state. And their kids slowly abandon them to the wider much better culture and economy that is all around them. They have all the vibrancy and threat of a museum.
Is this where we ignore how Urban areas tend to have a great amount of political control over a state as a whole? Not exactly something I'd describe as 'vibrancy and threat of a museum'.
I don't really care how you think those rural enclaves act. It was my experience with them combined with looking at history over the past hundred years or so that shifted me more toward an immigration hardliner - you import the culture, you get the problems, regardless of what environment they're in. Import good culture, you get good outcome. Import bad culture, you get bad outcomes. That simple.
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Ah, the universal cop-out of "That's not true, except for the places it is, but I've decided they don't count." Speaking of Northern VA, I've seen unassimilated conclaves multiply exponentially over my 4 decades living there. Unassimilated Vietnamese pockets in Seven Corners, unassimilated South Korean pockets in Centreville, unassimilated Mexican pockets in Manassas, unassimilated Indians in Herndon. At certain point there is nothing to assimilate to anymore. In most of those towns native born whites are the minority. All of Northern VA in the 2020 census has a foreign born percentage of nearly 30%, far above what I believe would facilitate any sort of assimilation.
All I'm saying is, you done fucked up using my back yard as your example.
To me the question of assimilation is primarily about second and third generation immigrants. Obviously a bunch of people fresh off the boat are going to seem foreign, whether they're Europeans a hundred years ago or Asians today. To use a fictional example, Tony Soprano would count as unassimilated because despite being at least two generations removed from Italy, he does not consider himself American (he even uses the word madigan i.e. the dialectal Italian word for American, as a term of derision for WASPs), his speech is peppered with dozens of foreign expressions, and he is involved with a dysfunctional social practice from his ancestral homeland by being a mafia boss.
By contrast, the American-born children of Vietnamese from Seven Corners, Koreans from Centreville, or Indians from Herndon (all of whom I went to school with and know quite well) do not typically speak their heritage languages to anyone their own age or younger (i.e. they will die out within a generation), self-identify as American (hyphenated, of course), and are under the majority of circumstances culturally indistinguishable from their white neighbors (Indians insisting on traditional wedding ceremonies being the biggest exception that I can think of). Now, the culture they all share is cosmopolitan urban liberal culture, so anyone who has a problem with said culture will have a problem with them, but plenty of heritage Americans are part of it too.
In practice it's harder to maintain a distinct enclave in the suburbs compared to the city due to a lack of third places or walkable neighborhoods for people to congregate outside and do whatever activities are part of their culture. The ethnic neighborhoods in Queens (e.g. Flushing and Jackson Heights) are the most non-American feeling places in the country to me for this reason, and even there many immigrant children get out by testing into Stuyvesant or other selective high schools.
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See my girl scouts comment.
I think there is a reason the "anti-immigration is racist" argument has lived on for so long. Ultimately it feels like no metric is ever good enough to convince anyone when there are just too many brown people by their approximation.
I went to George Mason, I've lived in the area for over a decade. My parents grew up in Northern Virginia (but neither stayed there). I grew up in a slightly rural area of Virginia. I only really know the English language. Aside from the area not being as white as where I grew up it still feels very American to me. I've been to India and multiple countries in Europe, so I know what a foreign country feels like. There is a discomfort in not knowing the language, in missing so many of the basic cultural understandings of everyone around you, and of not having the grounding feeling of knowing people around you. Its a feeling, I acknowledge you can feel differently about things. But if we are just gonna go on vibes, then I'm telling you where my vibe is at.
So its not just "your" backyard. Its at best "our" backyard. Though I don't claim any form of ownership over the area despite having lived here and had parents that have grown up here. That is one of my ongoing frustration with anti-immigration viewpoints and woke viewpoints. You don't solely own the common spaces. You don't own the right to determine who and what is acceptable there. So much of what they said is kind of status jockeying to be like "well I am the ultimate american, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look" or "i am the ultimate oppressed victim, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look".
So, you are committed to just skipping over all the unassimilated pockets I mentioned? After you claimed they only exist in "New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name]"? This isn't a dick measuring contest about who's more American, it's a "You've point of fact lied" problem. I get why you want to just ignore that to the same degree you wanted to handwave away unassimilated pockets in the first place. But I'm not going to let you.
Yes, and that's exactly the feeling I get in the Eden Center at Seven Corners. In large sections of Manassas, and Centreville, and Herndon. It's bizarre having the place I grew up literally become a foreign country out from under me. I don't understand how you can look at those place, where they don't speak english, all the businesses aren't in english, nobody is dressing, speaking, or conducting themselves like Americans, and then say "Well they're selling thin mints so it all looks good to me. Nothing is as American as getting fucking fat."
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Obviously if you have prior disagreements with it, that is what it is. My argument is that him thinking so is a significant bit of evidence, and thats independent of how high the prior is.
Presumably when you let him on (oops, turns out there are downsides to that). Or are you trying to argue that even more immigration is bad for him specifically but not you?
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The country has limited space. It cannot absorb everyone who wants to come. That's why the lifeboat metaphor works in the first palace.
America is one of the least dense countries in the world. It is a net exporter of food. The US is about three times larger than India in size.
"The country has limited space" is only true in the trite and meaningless sense that it is not actually infinite. But it is certainly not running out of space or even getting all that tight.
The lifeboat metaphor is the ultimate "their is a fixed pie of resources" perspective. And if I believed that "fixed pie" story to be true I'd agree on immigration restrictions. But it's objectively not true and I'd have to lobotomize all the parts of my brain that know anything about economics to believe it.
I don't want strangers and foreigners in my space, regardless of how dense it's already populated. That space is the inheritance of my great grandchildren, and I'm not willing to give it away in a profligate manner, for any reason.
Go live in a treehouse in the woods and own all the land around you. Why should you get to dictate who is in public spaces? Strangers are a necessary part of civilization. People with foreign cultures, beliefs, and genes are a natural consequence of an expansive market that can provide nearly anything.
China, Japan and South Korea say otherwise. You can't just throw out vague platitudes like that like they are iron laws. Countries exist that have figured out (or preserved the knowledge) how to take the goods off the market, and leave the people that made them.
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The US has been a net importer of food for a few years now (starting just before COVID)
Most of that unused space is useless for living; the rest is off-limits for various reasons which aren't changing.
Then we need to sell off all the parks. And I don't need to tell you who does most of the farming.
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The big areas where the resources are pretty fixed are university admission slots (especially prestige universities) and homes within commuting range of our most productive cities. I think it's fairfir Americans to view a society where they have more cheaper, crappier goods and can't afford a home or a shot at a good degree to be worse than one where goods are more expensive but they can all afford to live where they choose and their student loans are more manageable.
Those problems exist without immigration. They are in fact active policy choices on the part of cities and universities respectively.
Yes, they do, and so it's better to deal with those problems inside the family rather than inviting in a bunch of strangers to make it worse.
You haven't acknowledged that part of the reason for the problem is the last sixty-two years of immigration policy, either.
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I've read that several times and I still don't quite understand what you mean. That the guy who wants to shut down the lifeboat is acting in your interests?
If Im on the lifeboat, and we pull up a guy and he says the lifeboats full, leave the others in the water, then its propably in my interest to do so. Obviously that also calls into question whether bringing him on was a good idea, but it might be too late on that front.
Perhaps. If the lifeboat starts sinking and we have to move onto another one, though, it would be a bad idea to let that guy go in front.
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Careful when pushing people back into the water, lest the guy behind you decides that he would be safer yet were you too out of the boat?
No particular reason, just that this is potentially a different case and the otcome there not necessarily an argument for treating the swimmers a certain way.
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