How to select fewer but better immigrants:
Why aren't we trying harder to let in the Musks and to keep out the randoms?
On Christmas morning, Elon Musk is worked up over H-1B visas:
We know a lot these days about how to select talent. For example, huge numbers of sports fans follow the NFL and NBA drafts carefully. Similarly, the recent Supreme Court affirmative action case required Harvard to reveal much about how it admits undergrads.
Why not apply some of this wisdom to choosing immigrants?
We ought to want to let in the Enrico Fermis and Arturo Toscaninis and keep out the Lucky Lucianos.
So why not make more of an effort? With the whole world to choose from, why not the best possible immigrants?
Instead, we have dopey systems like Ted Kennedy’s Diversity Immigrant Visa program that randomly lets in 55,000 high school graduates per year. Senator Ted came up with this brainstorm a third of a century ago because he wanted to let in more Irishmen to vote for future Kennedys running for office. So he pushed through a Rube Goldberg scheme that chooses at random among minimally qualified people from all but the 15 countries that currently send the most immigrants.
What would do American technology a lot more good is to cut that 55,000 by 80% and then instead of admitting at random, let in the top 11,000 applicants.
For example, offer a cognitive test in English to immigration applicants that must be taken in person in the United States, with fingerprints and retina scans. Take the top 22,000 scorers and investigate them carefully for criminals records, health, age, character flaws and the like, and then choose the top half.
One possibility would be to auction off draft picks to American firms: you have to pay the US government X dollars to get the #1 pick in the draft and so on and so forth down to #11,000.
There are lots of ways like this to run our immigration system much better. But we do very little thinking about it, mostly because the dominant ethos is to think of immigration policy not as a way to benefit current American citizens, which strikes elites as kind of racist. Instead, the conventional assumption is that immigration is a civil right possessed by all the pre-Americans on Earth.
For the longest time, although I think they've woken up over this... liberals truly thought if you put a poor minority kid amongst a sea of high achieving white students, the minority will be magically transformed and lifted to extraordinary heights. All of the minorities. This seems like the same type of thinking that has guided our immigration policy, hasn't it? Give the lowest the biggest opportunity?
If we start selecting based on ability, then you slide into "tracking"... which still goes on at some schools but everyone acts like it doesn't because it is seen as unfair and judgmental. With more women in higher decision making roles, I don't see how many tough issues can possibly get better. Women are so concerned about "feelings" and not hurting anyone's that hard decisions are all but impossible to get carried out.
The only plausible way to get the best immigrants is to stubbornly insist on restriction at all levels. Mega billionaires like Musk will always find a way to get the ones they really want, but if we offer concessions they will always be used by crappy companies that sell junk products, like Microsoft, to game the system and import cheap labor.
Note that we got our best immigrants when we were most restrictive.
As an aside, as admirable as Musk may be as an entrepreneur and titan of industry, this clearly demonstrates that he is not a great leader of the people. For that you have to put self-interest aside and sacrifice for your people.