The Immigration Reform (Quality over Quantity) Bill

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

1) I actually worked with Ben Madison as Immigration Minister. He decided to keep me out, but he didn't do that through unaccountable backroom shenanigans. He did so by briefing against me with the Uppermost Cort, who had the final say. He wrote a snotty note in his newspaper saying that I could be reconsidered if I learned to toe the line, and of course I was already forming a new micronation by then, lol.

lol okay... so substitute in someone else you don't trust to play it straight.  The point is that you shouldn't put power like this in anyone's hands.

2) I could *already* be throwing half of the immigration applications in the bin and you'd know nothing about it, because you can't see the immigration mailbox.

Except that would be illegal.  You're proposing to make it legal for the MinImm to scrutinize every immigrant and secretly reject some of them based on their subjective assessment.

[Sir Txec dal Nordselvă, UrB]

I hope you noticed that I also identified the problem of "ImmMin getting too much gatekeeping authority", which is why I included the option of an appeal to the SoS.

This appears to be one of those new tasks, Txec. @Sir Txec dal Nordselvă, UrB I assume this came up in discussions?

I missed that, but my day job gets in the way sometimes. I'm really trying to stay out of political discussions, and probably shouldn't even have commented before.

[Breneir Tzaracomprada]

I hope you noticed that I also identified the problem of "ImmMin getting too much gatekeeping authority", which is why I included the option of an appeal to the SoS.

This appears to be one of those new tasks, Txec. @Sir Txec dal Nordselvă, UrB I assume this came up in discussions?

I missed that, but my day job gets in the way sometimes. I'm really trying to stay out of political discussions, and probably shouldn't even have commented before.

See, maybe now @Miestră Schivă, UrN understands my "Single Transferable Obsession." With reasonable takes like this you will soon have multiple transferable obsessions, Txec.

[Sir Txec dal Nordselvă, UrB]

It's late here and I have tired teacher brain @Breneir Tzaracomprada so I'm having trouble figuring out if your mad at me for commenting or complimenting me lol.

[Breneir Tzaracomprada]

It's late here and I have tired teacher brain @Breneir Tzaracomprada so I'm having trouble figuring out if your mad at me for commenting or complimenting me lol.

Txec, that was a compliment by reference to what I think Miestra intended as an insult when responding to a terpelaziun.  I hope you will get some rest.

[Sir Txec dal Nordselvă, UrB]

Gotcha. I'm sure I'll sleep well. Thank you.

[Ian Plätschisch]

It's still really unclear to me why we'd want this bill.  The only benefit seems to be that it will be slightly easier for the MinImm, since they can reject some petitions.  But since they'll now be in charge of scrutinizing all of the essay portions and issuing directions as to their deficiency, it looks to me as though it would increase the workload.  The MinImm job would expand from "process applications" to "be the first judge of applicant worth and then process their applications," which is surely more labour.

Speaking out of my experience processing applications for a while, it takes longer than you would think just to copy the application from the email into Witt. Certainly it takes much longer than observing that someone has submitted a one-sentence essay and telling them to try harder. It can feel like an eternity when the application is so low-effort or lacking understanding of Talossa that you're 99.99% certain the application is going nowhere and that the effort of posting it is completely in vain.

The other side of this, as I mentioned above, is making it easier for Talossans to engage with immigrants that are actually serious. I must admit that I commented on one to many threads of immigrants that could not even be bothered to post once, and I kind of stopped engaging on immigration threads altogether because of it. Shame on me, I know.

To me, this legislation is not about making it more difficult for serious applicants to get through. It's about recognizing that processing blatantly unserious applications makes everyone involved a lot less motivated, which probably isn't a good thing.

Also, as pointed out, this would be an astonishing amount of power for a Government official to have.  The minister is evaluating the worth of an applicant in private, rejecting them based on their subjective assessment of the essay.  Even though I'm sure that this is well-meant, such a power could be abused with great ease.  Unless there's a very good reason, we shouldn't be giving anyone right of first refusal on new immigrants who successfully fulfill the process.

I'm not going to argue that such an abuse would be impossible, but I don't think it would be nearly significant enough to outweigh the practical benefits. Would it make you more comfortable if we tried defining objective criteria for what constitutes a "blatantly unserious" application?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Speaking out of my experience processing applications for a while, it takes longer than you would think just to copy the application from the email into Witt. Certainly it takes much longer than observing that someone has submitted a one-sentence essay and telling them to try harder. It can feel like an eternity when the application is so low-effort or lacking understanding of Talossa that you're 99.99% certain the application is going nowhere and that the effort of posting it is completely in vain.

As mentioned, it will definitely be much more work to subjectively scrutinize each applicant, approve and post some, reject some others, and then explain the deficiencies to those who are rejected.

I have some sympathy for the idea that it could be an easier process in some ways, but isn't that more an argument for fixing the process?  That would solve the problem that's been identified, without the risk of making a government minister the new Judge of All Essays.

I mean, right now the process is just a website form that generates emails.  I think it would not be too hard to tweak it so that it spat out something that was ready-to-post, also.  Then it's just CTRL+C, CTRL+V.

To me, this legislation is not about making it more difficult for serious applicants to get through. It's about recognizing that processing blatantly unserious applications makes everyone involved a lot less motivated, which probably isn't a good thing.

This makes sense.  Maybe if we're going to do this, it makes sense to just do it in the open?  Create a new immigration program -- maybe call it a visa -- which takes notice of those prospectives who have put extra care into their essays?

The Ministry of Immigration has identified this prospective immigrant as particularly energetic and interested in immigrating, and has added them to the RF-1 Visa Program

I'm not going to argue that such an abuse would be impossible, but I don't think it would be nearly significant enough to outweigh the practical benefits. Would it make you more comfortable if we tried defining objective criteria for what constitutes a "blatantly unserious" application?

The proposed law says that the standard right now isn't "blatantly unserious."  Instead, it's the far scarier: "If the Immigration Minister considers that this essay shows an insufficient understanding of what Talossa is."

It would be better to discard this law, since it seems like a solution in search of a problem.  The real motive here is just to make it harder to immigrate.  If the problem of ministerial workload is so bad, then the solution can't be to add on more work.  Fix the actual problems, instead. 

But yes, if it's absolutely necessary to do this, then you guys should at least establish some more objective standards.