Quota? Why?

I was in Spain several years ago. I had a day to kill before my flight, so was driving around just sightseeing. Suddenly, I’m in Portugal. As an American, I was a little freaked out to be in a different country without any warning.

There were probably warnings, I just couldn’t read them. But no border patrol, no stops, just Spain…then Portugal.

If we open the borders, that shuts off most of the reasons people have to hide. It opens up cooperation. People won’t be afraid to ask for help if they’re the victim of crime. People are more likely to become a part of the community. Or, they come across the border to work, then go back daily, weekly, whatever.

Yes, there will still be crime. There always is. I think we criminalize the wrong things.

If literally the entire world decided they wanted to move within the borders of the United States next year, and let the rest of the world return to the wild, I would accept them with open arms. I simply do not understand what assimilation concerns Americans have about immigration — basically everyone at this point speaks a reasonable amount of English and has extensive exposure to US politics, media, and culture. Our whole jam is that our culture is a melting pot, what do you mean that we’re going to lose our culture to dilution by immigrants? There is literally nothing more American than immigrating to the United States from another country regardless of what the current residents think.

Ok this is something I gave a lot of thought about. The mention of “congress” means you want a specific American answer, but I think the same logic can be applied everywhere, because all human cultures function according to similar principles.

• 0.5% per year

Meaning if you have a population of 100 million you can take up to 500k new people every year.

Less than 0.1% it means you country is undesirable. More than 0.5% you will have trouble integrating all the new people. And integration is the main problem, You need an influx of new people big enough so you generate new ideas and new cultures, bur low enough to prevent formation of separate immigrant communities.

Infinity.

Not quite what you’re asking, but up until about the 1870s, the US had effectively unrestricted immigration.

Some economist at the Cato Institute, Alex Newrath or something like that, did some interview with NPR Planet Money a few years back and estimated what potential immigration would be if restrictions were dropped.

searches

Alex Nowrasteh.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/172501563

ALEX NOWRASTEH: My dream setup would be a system whereby only criminals, suspected terrorists and those with serious communicable diseases - like, you know, drug-resistant tuberculosis - are barred from coming to the United States to live and work.

KESTENBAUM: This, he says, it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

NOWRASTEH: The United States had a system like that from roughly 1790 to about 1882.

KESTENBAUM: It was the law of the land for almost 100 years of American history. Open borders would be great for the economy, he says, and you wouldn’t have to worry about people risking their lives crossing the border. If you are wondering how many people would come, Nowrasteh says there are some polls, asking people around the world, would you like to move to the U.S.

There were a lot of yeses.

NOWRASTEH: About five to 700 million.

KESTENBAUM: So that would more than double, triple the population.

NOWRASTEH: That would, but, you know, you have to take a big grain of salt with that.

KESTENBAUM: Nowrasteh figures more like 50 million and 100 million people would actually want to move here and stay. And thought that would be fine. Compared with Europe, he says, we have a relatively big and empty country. What chances do you give this passing in Congress?

NOWRASTEH: About zero. Of, you know, the type of thing I want right now, somewhere near to zero.

It would depends on how much infrastructure they can pass to receive them.

Ideally it would be “unlimited.”

Immigration is just good for the US economy because they tend to skew young and (to be blunt) low wage when they get here, and just look at how far immigrants go here. In most countries, it’s supposed to be a cornerstone of US culture, and the country is freaking huge.

Integration? America was originally a hodgepodge of homesteads; that’s the idea.

The limiting factor is housing, schooling, occupation, just having somewhere for them to go and live.

TL;DR: As many as possible as long as they aren’t forced into poverty.

…Hence, I find it incredible that we, as a country, collectively decided to squander that massive strategic advantage for… what?

It just doesn’t make any sense, even if you set morality aside. Or truly believe in the propaganda that they’re responsible for most crime, which is nonsense.

About 8,000,000,000 people.

As high as is practicable. Have you forgotten that you live on stolen land? Did you think that was just a slogan without any meaning?

What I take from this fact is that we, the current citizens of the US, don’t have any actual moral right to the land of the US. (Except citizens of native descent.) If practicality weren’t a concern, the moral thing to do would be to give all the land back to the native peoples. But practically, that isn’t possible. The 300+ million citizens of the US have nowhere else to go. Trying to give all the land back would create humanitarian crisis of similar or greater magnitude, by raw numbers, to the genocide that wiped out most of the Native Americans.

Instead, I recognize I have a practical, but not moral, right to live and own property in the US. I have a right to stay here simply because trying to kick everyone out would be impossible. Any attempt would likely trigger a civil war and even further violence against native peoples.

This matters because I ultimately don’t have a right to tell people they don’t have a right to come to the US. If we’re going to justify not returning the land based entirely on practical grounds, then it becomes our duty to ensure that the land we’re not giving back is used for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. A random citizen of Somalia has as much moral right to a patch of ground in the US as I do, and I had an ancestor on the Mayflower. That’s how far back my roots here go.

We should accept as many immigrants as is practical. Obviously we can’t let in a billion people tomorrow. We need to be able to accommodate everyone who arrives. But ethnic or cultural identity is completely irrelevant. Hell, if you’re worried about housing, we should offer an unlimited quantity of visas for anyone around the world skilled in the trades and home building. If you know how to do construction, you get a visa. You’ll build your own housing and then some.

In short, figure out the maximum rate of immigration that our systems can handle, and set that as the level.

infinity percent because governments shouldn’t be able to set arbitrary number of people into an area since borders are inherently racist.

I haven’t done any research into this idea, but I was thinking it could be a fair compromise to have unrestricted state visas . As in, the visa is only valid to live and work in that state. This would allow each state to flexibly respond to the labor needs of its economy each year. Then federal citizenship can be a restricted process, and limit migration to states that can’t utilize the extra labor.

But yeah they’ll probably come up with a massively insufficient increase and pretend it’s progress.

-1