This isn't an argument for good or bad, but America was founded by immigrants and they've continued to arrive and build the country ever since 1776. If you think the American state is a good thing, it seems reasonable to favor immigration.
Personally, I believe that no human is fundamentally better than another and that we don't own the planet but merely inhabit it. This means I also believe we all deserve to be treated as equal citizens of a global nation. I realize that in practice you can't just dissolve all the borders at once, but nevertheless less restrictive border controls which includes things like increased immigration push things towards that ideal.
Fundamentally, immigration is a market response. Demand for labor inside of a country exceeds supply -- or, more accurately, the demand for labor in the receiving country exceeds the demand in the sending country.
This trade in labor is good for all the same reasons that any other trade is good: the commodity (labor) goes for the best price to the supplier to those who will most benefit from it, as indicated by their being willing to pay the most. Both parties benefit, it's a clear win-win, no problem. Right?
It gets a little more complicated in the case of immigration, for a bunch of reasons. Firstly: are the suppliers and sellers in this transaction nations, or individuals? You can look at it both ways:
If the parties in the trade are nations, then the benefit is rather lopsided to the receiving country: they get a new, productive worker, and any money they give that worker is mostly spent inside the receiving country, boosting that economy further. The sending country gets nothing -- even though it spent money educating that worker, providing them with healthcare, etc.. In practice, however, many immigrants send money back to family in their home country, a substantial flow of money known as remittances.
If the parties in the trade are individuals, the win-win nature is also obvious: the company gets a worker that they would otherwise have been unable to afford, the worker gets a better-paying job than they would have got in their home country.
But there's a third way of looking at it, and this is where things get tricky.
I could also have phrased the above as "for cheaper than a local worker". In practice, that's not usually how it works. Hiring an immigrant is generally more expensive and inconvenient than a native -- if a company could find a native worker to do the same work for the same price, they would rationally do so. However, the ability to hire immigrant workers at that price does prevent the company from raising the price it's willing to pay.
More simply: while the company wins, and the immigrant wins, a third party worker in the receiving country has, in one sense, lost: they could have got the job if they were willing to work for the same price as the immigrant, but not if they wanted more.
Immigration holds down labor prices, and this is where the trouble starts, because the connection between lower labor prices and greater prosperity for all is indirect and poorly understood.
When labor is cheaper, the goods those workers make can be sold for less (and, in a competitive market, will be). This means anybody buying those products is directly better off -- immigration has saved them money. They will then take that money and spend it on other things, and those sellers will spend it again on yet more things, until eventually somebody gets around to buying the goods being made by the third-party worker. He sells more of those goods, and so makes more money than before.
So any individual third-party worker is worse off because of immigration -- instead, everybody in the country shares a little bit of the benefit, and the total value created is greater than if the immigrant had never arrived, because there are two workers instead of one.
Resistance to immigration is, fundamentally, an acknowledgement of the selfish impulse to be personally better off, rather than making the whole nation richer. That makes it a big good economically, and a tough sell politically.
Immigrants are in no way entitled to social services. If an immigrant on a work visa loses their job, they are required to leave the country within 10 days. However, immigrants on visas still pay full taxes. So actually, immigrants make social services cheaper to provide.
Any other general goods -- roads, fire services, etc. -- are paid for by taxes, and immigrants pay all the same taxes as citizens.
There are no immigrants on work visas. Illegal immigrants, by definition, don't have any visas and legal immigrants, the topic of the discussion, have an immigration visa which grants a lawful permanent resident status upon entering the country.
Diversity visa immigrants are definitely entitled to all the support and benefits. They are also not required to work to keep their status. I have not seen the DV statistics so I would be very happy if somebody corrected me here, but I imagine the unemployment among a bunch of random people who moved to a different country should be pretty high: it should be pretty hard to find a job in a different country without special skills. Often without even basic language skills.
> I imagine the unemployment among a bunch of random people who moved to a different country should be pretty high
They're not random people though. It's a selection of people who have the drive and willingness to uproot and move to another country. I'd expect unemployment to be lower.
Now if you were talking about refugees (an actual random sample of people who don't have a reason for moving), I'd agree.
Well, we can disagree with each other all we want. Without the actual statistics this means nothing. I could not find the statistics for the US, there is one for Canada though http://www.clbc.ca/files/reports/fitting_in/transition_penal... which seems to support my point of view. But as I said, I'd be happy if somebody corrected me with numbers.
The 55,000 STEM visas discussed in the original article are all work visas. They require a job offer and proof that no American is available to take the position.
You are right that the diversity visa holders are eligible for benefits. In practice, however, immigration doesn't happen if people can't find jobs. During the 2007-2009 period, all immigration, including illegal immigration, dropped to zero, and may even have gone into reverse:
The idea that people move to the united states in order to rely on the USA's incredibly shitty welfare system is just laughable.
Finally, this is 55,000 people a year. Do you think an increase in 0.01% of the US population is going to make any appreciable difference to any federal program's budget, even if all of them immediately applied for welfare? You could let in 10 times as many people and it would still be a rounding error.
No, the 55K visas moving from DV to EB are immigration visas. As for immigration dropping to zero in 2007-2009 you're wrong too, over 1 million legal immigrants in the year 2008 same as 2007 and 2009 http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/yearbook/2008/...
Immigration is the single biggest way to increase human welfare. Almost every immigrant into the US experiences a massive increase in quality of life, earnings, and other metrics of success. It's far more effective than charity or foreign aid, and far cheaper.
Prevents inbreeding of ideas. Some of those immigrants may be a heretic monkey. This passage from the anime "Irresponsible Captain Tylor" [1] explains it better.
"Do you know about monkey tribes? Monkey tribes are very organized, with a leader at the top. Now, once every few years without fail, a renegade monkey leaves his tribe and tries to join another one. The members of the new tribe greet the renegade monkey by beating it to a bloody pulp. And yet those renegade monkeys, those heretic monkeys if you will, are a providence from nature. Why? Because they keep the bloodlines from becoming too thick, from too much inbreeding within the tribe. So, you could say that those heretics are essential for survival. Heretics are essential for survival."
