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How many instances do you think are actually IQ 85 citizens inviting "another random person", as opposed to the probably far from random person that they chose to make pivotal to their self-actualisation and life plans? A $200k cash charge would filter out not just 85 IQ citizens with mail-order brides, but the vast majority of native/foreign couples. Do you think your candidate wants to explain to his electorate why they should be denied a freedom that almost everyone in the developed world enjoys?
Plenty of countries don't allow massive runaway chain migration. A wife is probably fine, but when it's 20 years later and a swarm of everybody who she's even tangentially related to are trying to get into the West then it's clearly massively destructive of limited resources.
I've never understood why anyone other than the spouse themselves, and maybe their children if still under 18, would be allowed in via chain migration.
Originally in the US, chain migration was seen as a backdoor way to privilege the relatives of already existing Americans and minimize ethnic change. More right wing Americans backed it while more left wing ones preferred a more skills based system. The hope was that you would have a few, high quality, people come in from the third world but most immigrants would be relatives of then Americans. That was the theory behind Hart Cellar.
That didn’t happen. It turns out once a country gets rich enough, and it doesn’t have to be equally rich, it just stops sending many immigrants. Few immigrants have come from Europe, but tons of people come from the third world.
Immigration from Europe -- including Western Europe -- never stopped. It's limited by visa availability, not desire to immigrate. However, it's generally not worth it for a European to become an illegal alien in the US.
This surprises me; do you have a source?
Best I can do is https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2024/table10
There's a lot more from the third world, but there's still a significant number from Europe.
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They shouldn't be. I'm considerably more pro-immigration than the median Mottizen, and I think that family reunification immigration for extended family members (including for extended family members who are also spouses!) is bad policy.
The legislative history of the Hart-Cellar act suggests that the idiots who wrote the legislation thought that allocating most of a capped quota of green cards to family reunification was a backdoor way of preserving the pre-existing ethnic mix in America without national-origin quotas.
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I feel like a lot of migration policy was set and ideated during the days were there was a Destiny to Manifest, social spending was negligible and Western countries had industrial jobs that needed bulk labor. Being a lot looser made more sense on those terms. Also the transition of University from something that only elite people did, to being widely available, means that a lot of educational Visas are just not really doing what they originally were intended to do.
These days it's pretty clear any common-sense program that's established will be eroded by the courts and politicians till even the tightest Genius-only Immigration policy inevitably gets used to import Deliveroo Enthusiasts 50 years later.
They're being used to prop up schools via higher fees (at least going by Canada's example). They seem to be working quite well in that regard.
Yeah they've transitioned into a University wealth in exchange for Visas program, but the initial idea behind gating immigration behind degrees was fomented when a degree was a top 10% thing to have.
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Yeah, considering my wife is foreign and I had to sponsor her to come to Canada, I am obviously in favor of that remaining an option, but I don't see why not pick the obvious low hanging fruit that would dramatically slow down or stop chain migration: increase the delay between sponsorships, increase the delay between citizenship and first sponsorship. Sponsoring a family member or spouse for immigration is not a right, it's a privilege, even for natives-born citizens, let alone naturalized ones, and it's perfectly proper for a country that feels that this privilege is being abused to change the parameters of it.
The sponsorship process took, for us, about a year and a half. Here it takes 3-5 years from residence to citizenship, that means that within 5 years of securing their way here, someone could be sponsoring another migrant (and their dependants). If there were a 10 year delay period from citizenship to being able to sponsor a family member, the whole process would be 15 years; I think that would discourage a lot of it. It would probably redirect a lot of chain migration towards countries that allow it faster. Even if they still plan to do it, you've reduced by a factor of three the speed at which it happens. Of course, if I could trust the bureaucrats doing the filtering, exceptions on humanitarian grounds could be allowed, but as of now I don't trust them, so I would rather not allow it.
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He’s almost certainly right that chain migration vastly trumps that now. It’s some Colombian family slow immigrating their entire family to the US versus an American bringing a girl home now. Sometimes they even just do it for money and the marriage is fake. There is an active market for that in Miami.
Trump importing a foreign eastern mail order bride is a very small part of the market.
We’ve already imported the 15% of non-Americans who can now bring in their local ties. It’s not foreign brides being brought in any more. It’s Ilhan Omar bringing in her brother.
In which case money isn’t even the right metric but it would filter out a lot.
The parent post was only talking about spousal visas, not whatever process there is for other relatives. I don't see why bringing in parents/siblings shouldn't be restricted.
(Quick Google search, on that matter, suggests that annual number of spousal visas issued is about 15% the number of annual naturalisations in the US, so it can't be that big a factor.)
I'd also imagine it'd fall even further when you filtered for people of Multi-generational US ancestry bringing in partners, versus recent immigrants bring in diaspora spouses.
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