1) Rich, educated countries have low population growth, but we need a growing population to grow economically (we need to grow economically for our current debt/prosperity scheme to function) 2) People in poor or war torn places want to come to places with more opportunity and less risk of random murder.
Cue the SpongeBob meme “take the people who want to come here and work and put them over with the people who want people to work for them.”
Didn’t the US drastically reduce their H1B visa count recently for no real reason? Wouldn’t we be better off increasing and expanding that sort of program rather that reducing it?
How many asylum seekers are trained in medicine, engineering, dentistry, carpentry or any of a dozen occupations in short supply? Heck, if we wanted we could pick while cohorts of refugees with complementary skills, plop them down in depressed midwestern towns and have thriving communities immediately.
I’ve know software engineers with master’s degrees from Scandinavian universities who had to leave the country because their visas couldn’t be transferred or renewed in a reasonable time. I know a Korean asylum seeker who has had a pending case for literally years. she’d be thrilled to take any job. She’s an educated, capable white collar worker. She can’t work because her case will be another couple years churning through a system that could literally be replaced with 20 lines of if else statements.
There are plenty of skilled, capable, interested people just waiting for permission to come solve the problem. All we have to do is stop blocking them.
I’m curious, what do Koreans need to seek asylum from? Doesn’t South Korea have a pretty good human rights record? Presumably those coming from the North have a very easy time in the South?
Also, the "Tax Payers Alliance" is an opaquely-financed group with zero membership, which has existed for decades for the sole purpose of getting cited as a 'low tax pressure group' when newspapers feel the need to get 'the other point of view' for some story. Being an astroturf group obviously doesn't make it wrong in any given case, but it has neither a reputation for honesty, nor for actually being anti-tax (it's very loud about taxes mostly paid by the rich; much more quiet about VAT for example).