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Europeans democratically vote for politicians who pursue pro-immigration policies. The immigration is, roughly speaking, the expression of Europeans' collective preference. One can make an argument that "they vote against immigration but get immigration anyway" - however, the reality is that if people consistently voted against immigration as one of their absolute upper-echelon top priorities, they would get politicians who actually stop immigration. This is because then it would become clear to politicians that being for immigration or running against immigration and then doing nothing about it means the end of a viable political career. I think that allowing mass unfiltered immigration of people from violent and backwards cultures is a very bad idea for Europe, but Europeans, as a group, do not vote like they see it as being critically important.
I believe that to fundamentally fix Europe's approach to immigration you would have to either change voters' minds or end democracy. I would much prefer the former, since in my view ending democracy to fix immigration would be replacing one major problem with another major problem.
Wrong, they vote for politicians who campaign on reducing or reforming immigration and then pursue pro-immigration policy once in office. There isn't a single EU country that doesn't have a clear majority of voters demanding less immigration.
It’s not so clear cut. Yes, voters often vote against mass immigration but not always. The votes for Hollande and Macron in France were for center-left candidates who had at most the mildest dislike (if at all) of mass immigration. In England, the Labour Party destroyed the Conservatives in the election campaigns of 2001 and 2004, in which the top Tory message (in both cases) was about stopping Labour’s mass immigration experiment. Carney won in Canada recently.
The electoral record shows that the public is occasionally betrayed, yes, but it also has not consistently voted against mass immigration for 30+ years as some in the right say. Even since 2015 the most anti immigration candidates haven’t consistently won.
Public polling has generally been against immigration even if they don't always vote singularly on the issue.
The median voter (remembering that the old and rich vote more often than the working-age and poor) likes the consequences of mass immigration, apart from crime. Almost all voters like their noncriminal immigrant friends, neighbours and co-workers and want them to stay. To make mass deportations a winning issue at the ballot box, you need to convince the median voter that the people you are deporting are disproportionally likely to be criminals - which turns out to relatively easy, particularly when they actually are.
Dominic Cummings always said that the idea of competently managed mass immigration (i.e. a Canadian/Australian points system) focus grouped as popular in the UK.
I dunno about Australia, but the main issue with Canada's point system is chain migration and alternative pathways. Coming to Canada saying "I want to immigrate here because I want better opportunities" is appropriately hard, but what often happens is getting accepted by a school that's mostly a facade (it's rarely recognized schools, it's "mall campuses" that are nominally linked with real institutions) then after moving and "studying" (usually working most of the time, then doing whatever the minimum is necessary to keep qualifying as a student; the "school" doesn't care, it's in on the grift) they leverage easier immigration pathways for people who have studied here, because that too polls well (and sending back students polls badly). Because it sounds reasonable to say that since someone was able to study and work part time to support his studies here, they are probably a good fit to stay here if they want. If that's what it was, if it was only people who truly studied and integrated, and worked alongside Canadian nationals, as opposed to moving here under false pretense and working "immigrant jobs" (Uber, delivery, immigrant dominated fast foods like Tim Hortons), then I'd support it.
Then there's chain migration, once one person gets their citizenship, they can start sponsoring family to go through a pathway that also bypasses the points system.
As someone with direct experience of the Canadian immigration system, this is not inherent to a points-based system: it's a product of deliberate choices, mostly by Trudeau.
The fraud problem, for example, became exponentially worse after COVID.
And a lot of this could be easily solved by things like a country cap. It's not that difficult to make it harder to coordinate fraud.
Yeah, I know, but the problem is that the population want to limit migration but they never want to have to be the meanies who say "no" to people, especially sympathetic cases (real international students who integrate, equivalents to america's H1Bs who are really filling unresolved gaps in the job market that locals cannot fill, genuine refugees from wartorn areas...) So a points system seem like a good solution because it takes the decision out of their hands but on its own, it isn't all encompassing, and unless you're also willing to say "no" to people in those alternative pathways, immigration will simply route around the points system into those pathways.
The problem, as usual, is bad-faith people. People who game the H-1B system... but more importantly, officials who don't stop it. Or immigration judges who rubber-stamp asylum claims. Points systems would be gamed by such people also, as Tanista suggests occurred in Canada. In the presence of such shameless bad faith, no pragmatic solution is possible. For example, if I were a good-faith pro-immigration person, and I wanted to win over good-faith anti-immigration people, I certainly would not object to the ending of a temporary asylum program with "temporary" in its very name, when the reason it was instituted is no longer in place; it would prove bad faith and would make it hard to get such temporary programs authorized in the future, assuming the anti-side was still around. Yet that's what happens. So it's all irreconcilable conflict theory, war to the knife.
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