You don't have to look far, Canada has already implemented a point based system for granting permanent residence to skilled workers. It assigns scores to applicants based on education, skills, employment offer, language speaking ability, etc. I believe it can be a good starting point for a more objective selection criteria than the current system which is more based on luck.
Isn't Canada full of foreign PhDs driving taxis because they qualify for permanent residence on points but then can't get jobs because employers want "Canadian work experience"?
Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).
Doesn't seem their system works very well in practice. At least the U.S. employer based green card system mostly guarantees that employment green card recipients already have jobs.
"Canadian work experience" is a generic reason often given to people who the company doesn't want to hire. It has happened to people I know. There can be many reasons:
- Racial bias
- Sexual bias
- Age bias
- Candidate's English / French ability.
- Candidate's actual experience isn't relevant enough.
- Candidate's personality.
- Candidate's appearance.
- Candidate's communication skills.
Why would I give you the real reason when I can provide a generic reason and stay out of trouble?
Some people I know went to college to get local credentials. Luckily community college is affordable and respected. Others changed fields. Others started their first business. A few left the country.
I was going to say something similar. I don't believe in points any more. It just reproduces the class prejudices of overeducated people. The US has an abundance of "highly skilled" FAANG workers. It has a shortage of construction workers, plumbers, and electricians. The one "high skill" (really high class) industry where I'd make an exception is medicine, because there are shortages there.
But FAANG stuff? No, these are the companies that just had layoffs.
And we can see exactly how this has played out in Canada. Too many upper class professionals gouging each other's eyes out for $1M starter homes, and not enough people with real physical skills, like building them.
One can just adjust the points towards what you need, like Australia does. Me and then-wife applied about 15 years ago - she studied at the American school in Milan, graduated in the UK, and got a master and PhD in computational chemistry. I'd been living in the UK for a decade, working in IT. They said thanks but no thanks, Melbourne doesn't need you - whereas tradesmen, plumbers, miners etc have no problem whatsoever moving there, year after year.
>They said thanks but no thanks, Melbourne doesn't need you - whereas tradesmen, plumbers, miners etc have no problem whatsoever moving there, year after year.
Well, tradesmen build houses, schools, and hospitals people and a growing society need. There's only so much demand and value for society that (non-SV) programmers add. You could survive in a world with only tradesmen and farmers, but not so much with only JS coders.
Programmers are valued in places like the US because US is the home to big-tech, an industry generating trillions in revenue for the US, but the US is the global outlier here. In other places of the world that don't have big-tech, programmers have much less value to society.
The layoffs were for wage suppression, if anything, they need more H1B to continue that wage suppression. I work in BigTech, we had layoffs and are also hiring like mad.
> Isn't Canada full of foreign PhDs driving taxis because they qualify for permanent residence on points but then can't get jobs because employers want "Canadian work experience"?
Housing crisis is because of unsustainably high immigration levels.
In 2023 alone, there was a net inflow of over 1.3 million people. It's a lot for a country of 39 million. Where will they live?
Another major issue is the suppression of wages this causes.
Also there is a serious lack of diversity in the immigrant population (no cap by country as in the US). This is tearing apart the cultural fabric of communities.
> Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).
I am not sure if this logic is accurate. There can be housing shortage if people move to certain part of the country internally too. USA has 'housing crisis' but houses are plenty and cheap in peoria IL.
Same for the UK, the tier-1 visa, which is how I got my first independent visa there. Unfortunately it also gives high points for income, which biases for privileged peoples and origin countries. But if you can get to the UK on a work permit with a high salary for a couple years, then you can apply it as points when you eventually apply.
The utility of a point system is that it makes the criteria legible—the problem wasn't the fact that it was a points system, the problem was in the details of the system.
The second link you posted lists a large number of anti-immigrant ideas that Trump had. That was the general tenor of his administration as I personally experienced it: rhetoric about unauthorized immigration, actions against legal immigrants.
(I used to be on an H1B and got my green card last year.)
This is a strange comment to read since, as far as I recall, the only details that were ever really shared before the overall plan was killed due to its political backlash are that it would be merits-based considering age, ability to speak English, job offers, and educational background and that it would shift the number of green cards away from being primarily awarded based on family ties to this new merit system. Democrats rejected even discussing the proposal out of hand. Some quotes from https://apple.news/ABYsQ0lE-RFWj_S5pwuFq5w :
On the other side of the aisle, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Trump’s offering a “dead-on-arrival plan that is not a remotely serious proposal.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed it as a “despicable abdication of moral authority” that would have kept Blumenthal’s own immigrant father from entering the United States.
…
Democrats on Thursday also took issue with the White House’s characterization of the kind of immigrants who bring “merit” to the United States.
“It is really a condescending word,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference on Thursday morning. “Are they saying family is without merit?”
The goal of the RAISE Act was to substantially reduce family-based immigration while not increasing employment-based immigration to compensate for that.
I didn't realize Trump had his own plan (that was never going to be law anyway). But based on what I actually personally experienced Trump actually do, my Bayesian prior for it being helpful to immigrants is extraordinarily low.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...