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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.
As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports
The US is not an economic zone.
While the implementation is cruel (giving people out of the country essentially 24 hours to return), this had to happen.
The 2008 housing collapse could arguably be blamed on the appraisers. They were going along with the scam and giving 20% annual appreciation to houses, while the rating agencies were fudging the quality of the debt being sold. People were supposed to be watching each other, but they weren't and everybody was getting rich.
In US tech jobs, the blame lies on the HR departments. The obvious fake resumes the obvious nepotism and discrimination between Indian hires, etc.
Everybody who works in this industry has seen how this scam functions. You get one Indian in a position of power in your company, and shortly thereafter, the entire company is Indian, and the quality of work has dropped to 0. HR doesn't understand because the resumes claimed that these were all "high quality" employees with tons of certifications (fake) degrees (fake) and experience (fake).
Yes this benefited many Indians, benefitted India, and may have benefitted some American companies, but it was all at the detriment of middle class Americans.
Again, we are not an economic zone. The H1B system was blatantly abused, specifically by Indians, and now it's ending. Good.
(Although my guess is that this get's reversed over the weekend, I'm still going to enjoy the few more hours where it's real)
What does this mean? Like, policy-wise, this idea would seem to suggest support for social services and doing our best to ensure a minimum standard of living for all Americans. In practice, it seems like the people who say "the US is not an economic zone" are the people most prone to treating the US like an economic zone - indifferent to the welfare of their fellow citizens and primarily interested in making the country a captive market for the purposes of rent-seeking.
Very simply, "A country is not an economic zone" rebuts the idea that policy should be made purely for economic gain above other goods. Specifically, this is used in Far/Alt right circles against Neo-Cons and Liberals as a rebuttal against the idea of importing workers and offshoring work. The point of the argument is that a country is not an economic zone, but a culture, a people, and a land. An "American" is not someone who lives and works in America, or even merely an American citizen, but someone who shares American culture. In the American example, "American people" doesn't really mean anything because Americans are such a mix racially that there's no real such thing as "racial Americans." The point about culture is very real, though. For the most stark example on race, look no further than Japan. A "foreigner" with a Japanese passport who is even born in Japan is not and will never been considered "Japanese."
Consider the example of Japan for a minute. Suppose that in the blink of an eye, all Japanese people on Japan ceased to exist. Then, in another blink of an eye, Every single Japanese person that used to exist was instead replaced by Indians. How long do you suppose it will take before Tokyo resembles Mumbai or New Delhi? At that point, would "Japan" still exist? If you agree with "A country is not an economic zone," you would say that if that happened, Japan would essentially become India, and "Japan" would no longer exist outside of the name and as a number on a spreadsheet. Therefore, the more a country imports foreign workers in search of cheap labor and economic gain, the more that country destroys its own culture. Eventually, this reaches a critical mass where the country would have replaced its original population. This is essentially the death of the original country. Consider again the Japan example. Suppose that the Japanese people, instead of disappearing instantly, slowly went away over the next 20 years. Over the same 20 years, Indians come to settle Japan. I'll ask the same questions again. How long do you suppose it will take before Tokyo resembles Mumbai or New Delhi? At that point, would "Japan" still exist?
I'm partial to this argument as it's something that is not really in dispute outside of the West. I'm Chinese, and if you ask a Chinese person what "China" is, you'll get a very similar answer: Chinese culture, Chinese people, and China as a landmass. It's mainly the West (America, Canada, and the Eurozone) that's done away with this idea, much to their detriment in my opinion. Ask Canadians about how well importing Indian workers has been for them. Ask the British about how well the Muslim population gels with the native population.
Advocates for immigration do not contemplate immigration policy purely in economic terms. At least in the US, and to my knowledge in Canada, Australia, and Britain as well, support for immigration is often pitched as an expression of values or a crucial part of national greatness. More than a few progressive immigration advocates are averse to making economic arguments for immigration, preferring to couch it as a humanitarian obligation.
But, to be more direct: there is a massive unfilled gap between "A country is not an economic zone" and ideological ethnonationalism. The US is more than an economic zone now. It was more than an economic zone in the mid 19th century when it had functionally open borders. There is no actual substance behind saying "a country is not an economic zone". The people who say it are not cultural traditionalists, nor are they concerned for solidarity with their fellow citizens (and are in fact often openly disdainful of their well-being).
I don't find this hypothetical to be interesting or relevant because it has no relationship to the actual reality of immigration policy anywhere. Whereas, "what if we had mass immigration" isn't even a hypothetical. It's American history. About ten million Germans and Irish immigrated during the 19th century. There was a great deal of anxiety about this: they were largely poor, many were (shudder) Catholic, they were uneducated, they were acculturated to despotism and would make poor citizens of a Republic, etc... Spoiler alert: it was actually fine, and nowadays anti-Irish/German bigotry is a punchline to suggest someone is a next-level racist. Similar things were said about the Italians, the Poles, the Japanese etc... and now they're all just Americans. By far the majority of conflict and integration problems that have arisen from large-scale immigration in the US have not been from immigrants but from nativist backlash against immigration.
Now, if you were deeply attached to maintaining the purity of superficial elements of Protestant Anglo-Scots culture, this was probably extremely distressing, but the reality of how humans act was bound to disappoint anyway: culture is dynamic everywhere and American culture had already substantially diverged from its British roots by the time of independence. Obsession with ethno-cultural purity thus strikes me as irrational.
Broke-ass losersI don't really know that that is indicative of much other than liberalism mostly being a western phenomenon. Outside of the West, ethnonationalism/ethnocentrism seems to have very mixed results. It certainly does not seem to promise harmony, stability, or prosperity. Conversely, here in the West it is very normal for immigrants to be scapegoated for issues they have little to do with (e.g. housing, economic stagnation) or simply serve as a focal point of resentment (e.g. Red staters mad that immigrants to Blue states take advantage of social services they don't have in their own states).Before I do a long reply, let me ask you two questions. Are there any differences between the German, Irish, Polish, Italian, and Japanese examples you listed and the Indian and Muslim examples I listed other than just geography (i.e. one example is specific to the U.S. and the others are not)? If so, what are the differences between the examples you listed and the ones I listed, and are they large enough so that the examples you list don't apply anymore to immigration today?
If the answer is no, there aren't any differences, then we should just leave it at that.
Can you clarify what you mean by 'differences'? Because I feel like you are eyeing suggestively in the direction of HBD theories, which I find to be non-credible. Obviously, Germans, Japanese, and Indians are different groups of people, but no, I don't think there is some fundamental, underlying difference that makes Germans assimilable in the US and Indians not.
I'd suggest that all of the groups you listed (barring Japanese, who never existed in large enough numbers to matter) are at least of Christian denomination, and while cultural differences between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant are large, they're nowhere near as large as the differences between any Christian denomination and Hindu or Islam.
Further, the culture in the U.S. in the 18th century was vastly different from even modern day U.S. culture. Integration and assimilation was both expected and enforced. Nowadays, not only is it not expected, but to suggest that some immigrant group should integrate is treated as racist. You say that nativist backlash against immigration was an integration problem, but I'd suggest that it's the exact opposite. Nativist backlash happens when immigrants do not integrate. Without any pressure from natives, why should immigrants integrate? You see this exact problem in Canada and Europe. Do Indians in Canada behave like Canadians? I don't even mean that they need to stop being Hindu, but do they stop throwing their religious idols into public waterways or stop shitting on public beaches? Do Muslims in Great Britain act British? I don't even mean that they need to convert to Christianity, but do they not stab you for burning the Quran or not harass women for not wearing a covering?
a) I think you are underestimating the historical levels of animosity Anglo Protestants had towards Catholicism, especially in the first half of the 19th century. Anti-Catholicism was a major animating force behind the original nativist movement. b) Indian immigrants have assimilated absolutely fine so far c) I would also point towards the current level of animosity being directed towards the overwhelmingly-Catholic, European-descended immigrants from Latin America (despite protestations to the contrary, this is not confined to illegal immigrants). There's not nothing to the cultural compatibility argument, but it strikes me as being very weak, especially in an American context, and mostly deployed as a pretext for garden-variety racism and/or classism.
Immigrants assimilate faster now than they did in the 19th century. I'll admit that I can't speak to the British experience, but here in the US the common critique that immigrants aren't assimilating isn't borne out. Immigrants learn English if they don't already speak it, intermarriage rates are high, etc... This is largely a conflict between the norms/aesthetics of (white) liberal and conservative Americans with immigrants as props, not between natives and immigrants.
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