I think it’s just that people believe in the Veil of Ignorance. Why must I be given access and others excluded merely because of an accident of birth? Perhaps all citizenship should be tested into. You put everyone in an immigration queue, including people born in the country. Then you select the best according to a pre-existing rubric.
> I think it’s just that people believe in the Veil of Ignorance
That's a wonderful thought, but do you truly believe that's how most people think? I see few signs of it even on relatively intelligent forums.
> Why must I be given access and others excluded merely because of an accident of birth?
Framing it as "must" is a big part of my complaint. Immigration and similar issues are extremely complex, the idea that there is a knowable "correct" answer seems absurd to me. Taking your theoretical approach for example, to where shall we export the domestic people who fail the test? We can't even remotely agree on how to handle the existing system that has essentially been in place for generations, getting other countries to agree to accept people from other countries who've failed a test is just one of many complications in that approach.
So that solution is to sort humanity and get best specimens to live in one place and send all the undesirables to somewhere already supposedly worse off?
I think if we go all the way into dystopian solutions, a fair one would be to run a lottery for every baby and send them to a random family in a random part of the world.
Wait...
(that's an honest "wait...", I set out to write a fair but very dystopian example and got to where we are now :))
