Once the wage and labor protections are roughly equivalent around the world, then I'll happily take this position. That is not the world we live in today. If you can get dissappeared[0] by capital in your country for standing up for your right to a decent wage, sorry, I don't want to give capital in my country that kind of leverage.
What about people who aren't citizens but happen to live there? Their lot can just be ignored? Is it just to enact rules that harm their interest in favor of citizens?
To be brutally honest: yes, that is how it is in the real world right now. Non-voters are invisible to democratic governments, apart from how they influence voters.
My small 55 person company is survivng thanks to H1Bs. We struggled to find a dba and a critical dev for years, and found a couple of good H1B candidates.
Saying that this program only benefits billionaires is a bit absurd.
You struggled because you couldn't afford the talent you needed, the talent that I'm sure already existed in the country. It's not a talent shortage, it's a cost issue.
Demand doesn't suddenly make new talent appear within a couple months/1-3 years for non-trivial fields. Sure, longer term it might lead to more people appearing on the market. But till then companies need people to fill the gaps - in some areas the alternatives are giving up on projects (great, not what you wanted) or hiring from competing companies till one side gives up.
To me it seems fairly absurd to assume that there's enough american workers in every field to fill every post, even with really "generous" salaries. Even if you only take the "worthwhile" projects into account.
Obviously that does not apply for fields where you can essentially train a mid-level university graduate up to par within a couple months.
You're combining work permits with citizenship. They're vastly different. Do you want neither to be a requirement? How ethical is it to allow someone to work in a country where they have zero civic participation in its government? Or do you immediately get participation rights because you work for a company based in XYZ? Then you vote for things that affect the future, you move, and you're no longer affected by the votes you put in. Where do your loyalties lie?
A lot of municipal debt is a result of people who voted for things that affected the future and then left. It's not just a hypothetical problem.
(Basically, pensions. They were offered to make municipal employment more attractive, which made the cities nicer places to live. They were not totally funded at the time the services were provided, even though the benefits of offering the pensions were largely consumed at that time.)
There's no point in having municipal bonds in the first place. The federal government can borrow at zero percent to bomb little brown children or subsidize wall street bonuses. Flint can't borrow at zero percent to pay teachers or fix its water mains.
What confuses me is why people like you are personally are more concerned with cutting teacher pensions than cutting war budgets when it's fairly plain which one we actually want more (assuming you don't want to live in a country full of dumb people that is...).
I'm in favor of fully funding them at the time of employment.
I guess I would agree that fully funded pensions might not be as large as promised pensions, but it's not like promised pensions have a perfect record of getting delivered.
Fully funded meaning what? Handing over the money to Wall Street and trusting that they can grow it by 2% a year? 5% a year? -5% a year?
There's no real reason why pensions have to be used to pump up stock market prices. Social Security can simply be expanded, cutting out the million dollar bonuses and ferraris from the process.
Yes, the core thing that I have a problem with is funding services on promises that are expected to be met at the local level. How to manage future compensation otherwise is a serious problem, but it's a better problem than funding services with promises.
I agree that a national benefit program is not as fraught as a local one.
I don't see where I mention citizenship. I'm just saying there shouldn't be a restriction on who someone can work for. For instance it's unreasonable that a French guy can just come to the UK and work, but a Brazilian needs to jump through hoops.
As for whether someone can vote, that's a different story. You still have your basic rights such as the right to a fair trial. But the freedom to work shouldn't be restricted.
We have no scientific evidence of the contrary. There are some studies pointing to mass migration being (slightly) detrimental to the wages of low-income natives, but that's pretty much it. You will find a lot of opinions though.
So-called "slight" decreases to wages add up to quite a lot of money over whole careers. I don't see any reason to deliberately institute a policy that helps advantage capital over labor, when it is already so very advantaged.
Hmmm I can invest my capital in 30 countries easily with a carefully selected index fund. If I could move across borders freely, it would be hard (if not impossible) to do the same thing. So I'd say it isn't the same footing that applies.
If you could literally sign an order right now to completely remove any control on who could come and work in your state (setting aside criminal records, diseases etc), would you do that?
I think you would probably not, because you know it would be a war zone within weeks, with the poorest and most desperate people from all around the world swarming to your small part of the world, bringing with them huge social issues.
Does that happen now? There are plenty of poor, desperate people all over America, do they "swarm" the more affluent areas? Do we have poor people from rural Pennsylvania coming to Los Angeles and undercutting hard-working Californians?
I would. With background checks for criminal records.
People who have the wherewithal to move across the globe are not "the poorest and most desperate people from all around the world", they are the ones with the means to pay thousands of dollars to mafias because we have no better system to bring them in.
Letting women vote had downsides for certain people too. That didn't make it less right.
As for stability, you need to consider the benefits of having the best people from around the world in the jobs where their comparative advantage is greatest.
I favor minimal restriction on immigration: let in anyone who has a job or who has immediate family with a job. As a result, there's lots of young people paying into Social Security. Unlike the federal government, the states currently spend more per immigrant than they get in taxes from them, so the states need to raise their taxes, or the feds need to share the revenue.
I've seen an estimate that allowing everyone to come to work in the US would result in about 1 billion people moving to States within very short timeframe. I think it could very well be the end of the country (as even the army + the police could have trouble handling the resulting riots and general chaos).
Your idea is bad for many reasons, but on the other hand I'm sure it'd be nice for a lot of Americans with underemployment and liberal arts degrees to be able to move around the Anglosphere.
It strikes me as ridiculous that it could be illegal for someone to work simply because they were not born near where their employer is based.