If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. From purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, and there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. From purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, and there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting.
Ultimately, any system of merit based immigration, besides needing to stop illegal immigration, is also going to run face to face with family re-unification.
Let's say you have a smart third world computer programer. He's got a wife and a cousin and a nephew. They are going to have cousins and nieces too, etc. He's going to have kids one day who revert to the mean, etc.
What we find in practice in the first world is that we get chain migration. It's just very hard not to unless you are going to have people live in dormitories are second class citizens on temp visas that get cycled back every five years, and most high IQ productive people aren't going to put up with that.
It could be done in theory, but in practice it's just very difficult to say "no". The sob stories write themselves and the immigrants, who are citizens with rights and votes now, have a strong incentive to push policy in that direction.
Perhaps LKY had that iron in him but western democracies do not.
Yes, that is a good point about family reunification. However, not that long ago immigration did not used to be run that way in western democracies, so the problem seems to be with the lack of counterweight to the sentimentalism which makes sob stories work politically rather than western culture or democracy as such. E.g. I gather (I have not studied this in detail so any of this may be wrong; please correct me if so) that there was no such thing as family reunification in the Ellis Island period: you could bring your wife and children over only if you could prove you could support them and even then they had to pass muster at the immigration counter. Men came alone, worked and saved for many years in order to be able to bring their immediate family over. They routinely spent a decade or so as non-voting aliens, assimilating to the American way of life, before they were allowed to naturalize, and for that they had to have behaved and acquitted themselves reasonably well. The strong pressure to assimilate, together with the earnest desire of most immigrants to become Americans, combined with American individualism to reduce the problem of voting for more relatives to be allowed to come over. Japan's skilled immigration policy is run on similar lines today. They do have the temp visas cycled every five years thing, too, but that is for menial labor and these are not allowed to bring even their immediate family.
If we assume legal immigration (ha ha but bear with me), Rocks could just give applicants IQ tests, say the ASVAB. From purely practical perspective it's trivial to do, and there would be no need for any contentious lumping or splitting.
Ultimately, any system of merit based immigration, besides needing to stop illegal immigration, is also going to run face to face with family re-unification.
Let's say you have a smart third world computer programer. He's got a wife and a cousin and a nephew. They are going to have cousins and nieces too, etc. He's going to have kids one day who revert to the mean, etc.
What we find in practice in the first world is that we get chain migration. It's just very hard not to unless you are going to have people live in dormitories are second class citizens on temp visas that get cycled back every five years, and most high IQ productive people aren't going to put up with that.
It could be done in theory, but in practice it's just very difficult to say "no". The sob stories write themselves and the immigrants, who are citizens with rights and votes now, have a strong incentive to push policy in that direction.
Perhaps LKY had that iron in him but western democracies do not.
Yes, that is a good point about family reunification. However, not that long ago immigration did not used to be run that way in western democracies, so the problem seems to be with the lack of counterweight to the sentimentalism which makes sob stories work politically rather than western culture or democracy as such. E.g. I gather (I have not studied this in detail so any of this may be wrong; please correct me if so) that there was no such thing as family reunification in the Ellis Island period: you could bring your wife and children over only if you could prove you could support them and even then they had to pass muster at the immigration counter. Men came alone, worked and saved for many years in order to be able to bring their immediate family over. They routinely spent a decade or so as non-voting aliens, assimilating to the American way of life, before they were allowed to naturalize, and for that they had to have behaved and acquitted themselves reasonably well. The strong pressure to assimilate, together with the earnest desire of most immigrants to become Americans, combined with American individualism to reduce the problem of voting for more relatives to be allowed to come over. Japan's skilled immigration policy is run on similar lines today. They do have the temp visas cycled every five years thing, too, but that is for menial labor and these are not allowed to bring even their immediate family.