UK around Brexit time thought kind of similar: let's keep the "riffraff" immigrants out by applying higher criteria. The narrative also changed this way: we don't want immigrants in general, but you, with your highly paid PhD-requiring job, you can go in, on a 2 year rolling basis. Then everyone's a winner, except for unwanted, unskilled labour.

But a lot of skilled labour left anyway. Partly because the general atmosphere got unpleasant. But also highly paid people have spouses, children, parents and other relatives. Once you are told you barely cleared (very high) criteria, you can be pretty sure your retired parents won't, if ever you need them to move in with you.

So the effect may well be that the kind of people whose productivity and tax bracket makes a 100k fee justifiable simply choose to go elsewhere.

Especially when the administration makes their contempt for any rights they have so obvious.

Immigration exploded after Brexit. While the official line was "Let's keep the riffraff out". the reality was that the Tories used Brexit to bring in plenty of cheap labour from specific countries, and the income requirements are applied very selectively.

Foreign students were also encouraged to study here and remain after studying. Initially even family reunion immigration was encouraged, although that's changed now.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/5579/live/8ea3a...

The UK has been playing this game for centuries - bringing in cheap foreign labour on the quiet, then using that as political leverage with "We will protect you from the foreign invasion" messaging.

Polling in the US has swung in favor of immigration:

> a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.

It’s hard to separate what’s supported by the public and what are random hobby horses of the far right once they get in power.

Because the US has historically been relatively more positive to immigration I am skeptical that we would see the same reaction as in the UK or other countries in the long run (in the short term, it’s all a sht show)

https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...

> But a lot of skilled labour left anyway. Partly because the general atmosphere got unpleasant. But also highly paid people have spouses, children, parents and other relatives. Once you are told you barely cleared (very high) criteria, you can be pretty sure your retired parents won't, if ever you need them to move in with you.

Chain migration is an anti-immigration argument in the US - even if some particular immigrant is highly-skilled and would benefit the US from being a legal resident, that immigrant's family is probably not as impressive. Nonetheless, once the government gives legal residency to the highly-skilled immigrant, they will be highly motivated to try to get the rest of their family to the US as well. So the US should be careful about granting legal residency even to prospective immigrants whose credentials make them individually look good.

Yep, skilled people have options. When you are treating them as circus animals that constantly need to prove that they are worth the cage they will be put in and the food they will be fed, they just leave the circus.

Smart professional people desire non-hostile space where they can build a life. When a Russian scientist or Iranian doctor left their countries for London or Paris, they were't calculating for a net income increase, they were running away from an environment that didn't show a promise to allow them realize themselves. Lot's of white collar people are paid well below what they will make if they learn a JS library or do construction work because of their desire to fulfill themselves in a peaceful life and be respected. It is kind of similar to game devs being paid very little in respect to the complexity of the programming they do. If you break that magic, they aren't going to stay.

It wasn’t that similar though, because there was a long long period of transition, not “we are doing this on two days time and if you’ve not got £100k hard luck!”

It should be the most obvious thing in the world that whether you take a fundamentally welcoming and positive mindset towards people vs. a negative and unwelcoming mindset, the effects of either will propagate and magnify themselves over time.

But when you're insecure the feelings you get from the latter are more comforting in the short term.

This is probably a good thing for nations providing the bulk of high skilled labor, namely India and China. Their best and brightest will tend to leave less.

Much has been said about Trump, but his main quality is this: he's a foot-gun artist.

> But a lot of skilled labour left anyway

The UK has had a "brain drain", but it's as much UK citizens as migrants. Economic migrants migrate.

> But also highly paid people have spouses, children, parents and other relatives. Once you are told you barely cleared (very high) criteria, you can be pretty sure your retired parents won't, if ever you need them to move in with you.

Skilled immigration is sold in almost all of the West as a necessary demographic cure. The classic "we're getting older and there is a labour shortage of working age people". The retired parents were never a part of the deal, and are of no interest to almost any Western country. Obvious given that it completely annihilates the justification for bringing people in in the first place.

So if these skilled workers aren't moving to the UK because they can't bring their retired parents, then presumably they aren't also choosing the US, Canada, Germany, etc., given the same situation.

Canada does have a family reunification program but it is not only spectacularly unpopular among the Canadian public and likely to fade away, it allows for a tiny number per year.

There are not "high criteria" to immigrate to the UK post-Brexit. The minimum salary threshold is £26k, barely higher than minimum wage. The list of eligible occupations is a joke and includes such desperately understaffed occupations as "homeopaths" and "reiki healers". The skilled worker visa only requires B1 English, at which level you'll struggle to communicate in many professional settings. Net immigration (legal and illegal) exploded after Brexit and is still higher today than it was in 2016 when we had the vote.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

This, so much. Not the UK, but another western-European country that has slowly succumbed to right-wing rhetoric and fear-mongering. There, legal immigration has continuously been a boon to the economy, but each politician having had to "one-up" the previous one in terms of "tightening immigration" and "looking tough" has only made legal immigration increasingly miserable, and put off skilled/high-earning global workers whose presence was desired.

Of course, nothing has changed for the illegal ones: they haven't (and won't) see the increased burden of legal migration of which they are oblivious. Overall things are only getting worse, and I hate that there's no attempt to having a honest and transparent debate and discourse on the matter.

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> you can be pretty sure your retired parents won't, if ever you need them to move in with you

The immigration system should be designed to block retired parents from moving country to live with their working age adult children who have migrated.

One reason to have immigration is to improve a country's dependency ratio: the ratio of working age population to children and retirees.

The ideal immigrants are young well-educated parents that can stay in the workforce for 40+ years with healthy children that are just about to enter the school system.

That way the receiving country didn't need to invest in educating the parents originally, don't need to pay the healthcare costs of very young infants, and it provides the best possible addition to the the receiving country's demographic structure so the host country benefits from a whole working life of tax payments and all the value created by their work output.

The economic case for even skilled immigration is far less compelling for a receiving nation without such restrictions on immigrating retirees.