US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

Question is - why would anyone with cash immigrate to US? Doing business there does not require citizenship. What is it more than doing business that attracts people if one has a citizenship of just about any first world country? I mean, America is about making money, but those people already have money, what else? Citizenship for kids? Just give birth in US. Question again, is why. Top concern for the rich is taxes. US is unique by forcing people to pay taxes even if they live abroad full time as long as they hold citizenship. Why then?

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This is not the easiest setting.

I became American as a previously British citizen. I had been employed in the UK, by a company in California who wanted to relocate me to the US and did (I was an early H1-B).

I then moved to another company after 18 months. Both my first and second companies were applying for my green card and renewing my paperwork as needed for me.

Later I stopped working for a US company but still had a VISA and married a US citizen. I then handled my green card application, and citizenship, myself without lawyers.

As a highly qualified individual who had already been screened multiple times to get H1-Bs I knew I would pass further screening. I also knew I had no criminal records or adverse history globally.

In short I got my green card and my citizenship without any further professional legal help. I paid nothing but my own costs.

It took a couple of years but it is possible.

The process is torturous and repetitive. You have to resubmit the same information multiple times, and some of the requirements are extremely expensive.

To whit, I was required to produce a “Police letter” from every country I had lived in, signed by the local police, attesting to the fact I hadn’t broken any laws overseas.

I had lived in 4 continents at that point. Thus I had to arrange to send my ID to multiple countries and to pay, in some cases, for letters to be written, delivered as originals on paper and then (hilariously) pay to have them translated for a US government who only wants to work in English and apparently trusts whatever translation you send (this was pre LLM).

So though I could do all this, in one case paying an ex colleague to manage the police in Eastern Europe on my behalf, for many others this would be impossible and require lawyers and the huge markups they would charge for these services. I would guess them hiring another team of lawyers in another country with each stage doubling the costs of the ones beneath them meaning a single police letter ends up costing many thousands.

The system is thus absolutely limited to those with connections, deep pockets or sponsorship.

Also for those who think this is good insurance, I also know Central Europeans who bribed their local authorities to facilitate their green cards, covering adverse information and putting them at the tops of lists. Ie for $50k or so they got essentially instant residency status.

Also the need for people to leave the US before re entering when processing paperwork (so that if rejected you have already self deported) means you need to be able to stop working, or work remotely, and to be able to fund living in your old home country for an indefinite period.

I moved in with my parents but had they not been an option I would have had to rent a place in London - a vast expense - just to comply.

The system is incredibly broken.

Doctorow makes a lot of good points and I get how terrifying the state is when it gets riled up like this. That said...

1) There seems to be an assumption here that everyone in the US agrees there should be brisk immigration. To me, if the laws in-practice make it impossible to immigrate then that would suggest that the polity might not believe that. There also seems to be a common belief that just because the laws are unfair, stupid, counterproductive or destructive that they can be ignored and that isn't how laws work. If the law is terrible it is still the law. If it doesn't let you do what you want to do then that desired course of action is not a legal option.

2) A big part of the reason that the US is engaging in this (rather terrifying) deportation is because of the appearance that process ran, came up with a basic agreement about how immigration would work and then people started ignoring it on the basis that it was inconvenient. I don't see how a country can be run that way, there has to be a hard choice made about open migration vs. a welfare system.

And while I'm commenting on the debacle that is the Trump anti-immigration campaign, I will just upset everyone and note that people have to accept that governments sometimes go on a rampage. It has happened before, it will happen again and it is really quite important to keep the reins on them and try not to give them control of important things like food, medicine, what people can say to each other, control of the financial system, etc, etc. A bit of principled strategic thinking goes a long way on this stuff.

> Judging by the numbers, it’s too easy

I don't see how the numbers support that claim.

What percentage of the population would you like to see made up of immigrants? Would you make immigration harder if the immigrant populating was above 1%?

If it got too high, would you start deporting people or forcing native people to have more children?