Marginal utility.

[ernunnos]

Tsarnaev family received $100G in benefits

Of course, that's a minor cost compared to the lost production and medical costs of dozens of dead & wounded. Not to mention shutting a whole city down for a few days.

But it gets even worse. One of my first jobs was as a grocery bag boy. During orientation, our boss pointed out an economic reality that

Comments

[gwendally]

This is the strongest argument I've seen you make in a long time.

[octal]

But it also takes only one Sergey Brin to make up for hundreds of thousands of others.

There are some simple modifications we could make to immigration which would dramatically increase the odds of letting in Brins while not bringing in Tsarnaevs.

[ernunnos]

I'm not sure one Brin does make up for it. For one thing, creation is much harder than destruction. How many lives has Brin saved? For another, it's not entirely clear that Brin has produced much of anything in a marginal sense, or that he needed to do it here. Search was going to happen. The same engineers would be working on the same problem, just for someone else. How much did Sergey Brin add, in and of himself, and does it make up for multiple cases of mass murder, including the ones that don't get the attention of the Boston bombing?

[octal]

It's probably a philosophical argument about individuals vs. circumstances, but I think a lot of the great entrepreneurs really have been unique in history. Sure, we would have had search, but Google executed better than a lot of others would have.

I think it would be really easy to have a "points based" immigration system, in the Canadian model, which would give high assurance that anyone immigrating would be far more likely net contributors.

The politically unacceptable form is "no Muslims, no Hispanics", although that as a first pass *would* probably give a reasonable result. A points based system which rewarded engineering degrees, some level of cultural fit with the US, wealth, etc. would be fine.