I wonder what the emigrating demographics look like. I have looked more into emigration lately as my demographic is 'replaced' and productive workers are increasingly used as fodder for parasitic attacks in favor of the ever growing benefits towards the non-productive class. The USA is increasingly becoming a place where it is best to be either be either a rich capital holder or to own nothing and get ~everything provided as long as you pop out enough kids or meet the right benefits criteria.
If you're in the middle getting squeezed you can earn more in places like Singapore or Dubai and at lower taxation rates, and the immigration scheme might be fairly simple. If you're going to live under the whims of an insane ruler you might as well get the upsides of such monarchy like you do in places like Dubai. 'Free' speech and easy access to guns are basically the only remaining gambit USA has to offer me that ~nowhere else does.
The report itself is interesting [0] and I recommend reading it for good context.
Here's a couple things that stood out to me:
- Measuring net migration is difficult. The report from TFA estimates a net migration between –295,000 and -10,000 for 2025. Some reports estimate much lower numbers, and some reports actually estimated a positive net migration for 2025. In any case, it's certainly trending downward.
- While there *has* been a decrease in the number of green cards and work visas (H1B's), it seems that the majority of the drop off has been from refusing to take refugees (from ~100k in 2024 to ~10k in 2025), basically eliminating asylum petitions at the border (from ~1.4M in 2024 to ~70k in 2025), and reduction in "Entries without inspection", aka illegal crossings that do not encounter law enforcement (~270,000k in 2024 to ~30k in 2025)
Given these numbers, I'm actually surprised the estimated net migration wasn't lower. I'm not sure if there's another component that made up for it, or if their estimates are just on the conservative side.
It has occurred to me that one of the key drivers of the tensions around migration, stems from the undignified arbitrage of human beings resulting from the discrimination to free movement across borders.
Global corporations are permitted free movement[0].
Global capital is permitted free movement[0].
Global elites are permitted free movemen[0].
The overwhelming mass of humanity is constrained to very limited movement.
The ability of enterprises to benefit from pools of constrained humans without those benefits being similarly constrained to flow in that pool, but instead freely exfiltrate those benefits - is the source of most of the world's inequality, and consequently stokes the demand to migrate (legally or illegally).
[0] - not quite completely, but near enough as makes little difference.
This is incorrect. This constraint both profits off of and provides some benefit to the constrained population but it is not the source of inequality. The source of inequality is country/region level policies causing growth differences over time. The labour price spread caused by that drives the secondary arbitrage you identify above that profits the wealthy but also benefits the people living under crap government policy that caused lower produxtivity because their low wage factory job pays better than their alternatives.
constraining the labour is just a smart move when the majority of your population is a net cost to tax payers.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] threadIf you're in the middle getting squeezed you can earn more in places like Singapore or Dubai and at lower taxation rates, and the immigration scheme might be fairly simple. If you're going to live under the whims of an insane ruler you might as well get the upsides of such monarchy like you do in places like Dubai. 'Free' speech and easy access to guns are basically the only remaining gambit USA has to offer me that ~nowhere else does.
You can just say "billionaires".
Here's a couple things that stood out to me:
Given these numbers, I'm actually surprised the estimated net migration wasn't lower. I'm not sure if there's another component that made up for it, or if their estimates are just on the conservative side.[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implication...
Global corporations are permitted free movement[0].
Global capital is permitted free movement[0].
Global elites are permitted free movemen[0].
The overwhelming mass of humanity is constrained to very limited movement.
The ability of enterprises to benefit from pools of constrained humans without those benefits being similarly constrained to flow in that pool, but instead freely exfiltrate those benefits - is the source of most of the world's inequality, and consequently stokes the demand to migrate (legally or illegally).
[0] - not quite completely, but near enough as makes little difference.
EDITED to fix formatting.
constraining the labour is just a smart move when the majority of your population is a net cost to tax payers.