
Invitation Only - sarvesh
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/invitation_only/
======
msluyter
I know the article is sort of toungue in cheek, but Thomas Friedman actually
said roughly the same thing (minus the eugenics) recently:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/opinion/11friedman.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/opinion/11friedman.html?_r=1)

From the article:

 _"Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to
stimulate our economy: immigration.

'All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and
Koreans,' said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. 'We will
buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We
will immediately improve your savings rate no Indian bank today has more than
2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered
shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs
for more Americans.'"_

~~~
peregrine
Sounds perfect lets do it.

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jadence
This is/was already done to some degree. I don't have all the details but
relatives on both sides of my family had to prove "their value" when applying
to enter the United States (from China). The application process is a long (on
the order of years) and tedious one with no guarantees.

A bit off-topic: Some of you may recall the hoopla in California a couple
years ago regarding granting amnesty/citizenship to illegal immigrants who had
been in the country long enough. One angle the media did little reporting on
is how upset those who played by the rules and went/were going through the
actual immigration process were that they were being bumped by those who broke
the rules and entered the country illegally. It's not all that different from
how financially-responsible people are upset today that the irresponsible
receiving bailouts.

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tjmc
This is (mostly) how the Australian immigration system works. It's a point
system which is weighted towards the young, healthy and skilled. People with
certain in-demand professions (eg doctors) can get in relatively easily.

~~~
tomjen
Perhaps, but isn't Australia generally very racist? That would definitely be
something that would hamper immigration.

~~~
tjmc
Not _generally_ no. There is certainly some racism in Australia and some areas
that you'd roughly compare to parts of the American "Deep South" in terms of
backward attitudes, but overall Australians are pretty tolerant.

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jrockway
I don't really get why people would _want_ to come to the US. Your taxes buy
you nearly nothing; you are own your own for education and healthcare. There
is no public transportation.

(But oh yeah, there's a tax break for buying a new car, but not one for using
your bicycle every damn day. God bless America!)

Anyway, I would appreciate it if Europe made it easier to migrate there.

~~~
andreyf
_I don't really get why people would want to come to the US._

Because there is more money here. In Russia, a biologist with half a century
of experience working at Moscow State University (best university in the
country, arguably Europe) makes about $120/month?

~~~
jrockway
Why the US and not Europe, though?

~~~
sarvesh
Even with all the problems with immigrating to the US, it still is one of very
few countries that is welcoming to the immigrants in general. People in the
US, a lot of them, have always put aside everything about where a person is
from and look at him as a individual. This doesn't happen in a lot of places.
Europe for most parts has been, so far, protectionist. When I decided to move
to the US there weren't really a lot of options for me, Europe would have been
a lot tougher.

~~~
jrockway
Yeah, I've noticed that Europe and Japan are almost impossible to move to. I
think this is kind of dumb... if I am going to pay taxes in a country, who
cares where I was born?

~~~
ido
> Yeah, I've noticed that Europe and Japan are almost impossible to move to.

Why do you say that? I've moved here 4 years ago, it was a bit of a hassle to
get the work permit, but it wasn't _that_ bad.

Basically if you can earn the equivalent of more than about ~45k usd/year, or
are a student (and one of a few specific professions- like artists and
musicians) it's not that hard to get into the EU.

And coming here with a tourist visa and staying until you manage to get a work
permit is much easier than in the US - even getting a tourist visa can be
quite difficult in the US, where as as long as you are from a 1st world
country you don't even need to apply for one to come to the EU.

------
mhb
Becker and Posner have somewhat more to say:

[http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/archives/2008/02/selling_i...](http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/archives/2008/02/selling_illegal.html)

[http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/archives/2008/02/what_if_a...](http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/archives/2008/02/what_if_anythin.html)

------
nazgulnarsil
IQ tests are considered racist because the results are not perfectly uniform
when you collate with racial demographics. since IQ is the best measure we
have for future success we are handicapping ourselves.

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chiffonade
Immigration policy by the US is, and has been for the past 200 years,
determined by populist racial attitudes.

~~~
mynameishere
<http://www.npg.org/facts/us_imm_decade.htm> [<\--illegals are not included]

Around 1900 most of the immigrants came from Europe. Increasingly, this was
Eastern and Southern Europe. Resistance started increasing, at one extreme by
the KKK, but in a general sense throughout the population. Policies changed,
the depression hit, and it dropped. 1965 came and the closet Marxists were in
charge. Ted Kennedy sponsored new legislation:

 _"Out of deference to the critics, I want to comment on … what the bill will
not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants
annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains
substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be
upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S.500 will not inundate
America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated
and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia. In the final analysis,
the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected
to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. Thirdly, the bill will not
permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with
contagious disease or serious mental illness. As I noted a moment ago, no
immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public
charge … the charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and
with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of
responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage."(Senate Part 1, Book
1, pp. 1-3)_

If a Senator mentioned the importance of ethnic mix today, he'd be strung up
by his balls. But even Teddy did it in 1965--things have changed utterly. At
any rate, _every single word_ was a total falsehood. The above quote has the
greatest concentration of mendacity that I've ever read.

Look at the numbers in the link above. The United States is being turned into
a _different country_ , a Latin American country, an Asian country, an African
country all at once, many, many times faster than it turned European after
1492.

Obviously, some people have reason to be happy about this, but _drop the
bullshit_. Policy is not guided by "populist racial attitudes". If it was, the
immigration level would be NEGATIVE six million/decade. Numbers don't lie.

~~~
danteembermage
"Look at the numbers in the link above. The United States is being turned into
a different country, a Latin American country, an Asian country, an African
country all at once, many, many times faster than it turned European after
1492."

I think the appropriate metric for measuring becoming a different country
where different is defined as dissimilar along arbitrarily racial lines is to
use percentage change in ethnic mix due to immigration per year.

In other word, if you deflate the raw numbers in your table by the total
population of the United States at the time, you get really low numbers for
the last sixty years relative to their historical averages. Basically think
"what's the chance my neighbor is a first generation American?" and you get
much lower probabilities today than you would through most of American
history. Some people have reason to be happy about this.

~~~
chiffonade
In other words, by simply ignoring out of existence the non-white population
of the US before 1965 (which is what white people loved to do back then), you
can make it look like the country went through a rapid transformation and is
rapidly being taken over, when in fact the minority population has always been
there.

