Most immigration debate is about “more or less" which often cleaves nicely to left/right, but the tribes fall apart in the details: who gets in, on what basis, and for what reason?
In the USA: Tech conservatives want more high-skill visas. Bernie Sanders called open borders a Koch brothers idea, and labor unions were historically anti-immigration. This week we’re looking underneath that, at the principles that generate people’s answers:
- What should decide who gets in? Skills (Canada, Australia), family (USA), ancestry (Israel, Ireland, Italy), wealth (golden visas, $1M Gold Card), temporary labor (UAE), cohesion (Denmark, Japan), need (Uganda, Germany)?
- What is immigration for?
- How does assimilation work, and how should it?
- Who should decide: the nation, the towns where people settle, or...?
- What are the right limits? By person, by group, by what a locality can absorb, etc?
As usual, we don't need to have perfect or defensible answers, we're just hoping to get to a more generative conversation, and help each other and the world make sense of what often seems senseless.