naked capitalism

baychev says:

Yves,
a bit socialist in tone but sobering as well.

http://www.kpfa.org/cgi-bin/gen-mpegurl.m3u?server=aud1.kpfa.org&port=80&file=dummy.m3u&mount=/data/20081015-Wed1300.mp3

Fred says:

Here is the link to the audio of the above interview with Obama:

Audio of Obama Comment – Will Bankrupt Coal Industry

Yves Smith says:

One Salient Oversight,

First, my application was rejected twice even though I clearly satisfied the requirements for my category. My visa consultant had to get someone from Canberra to call the immigration officer (in the embassy in Washington DC) to tell him he was misapplying the standards. In theory, the fellow in Canberra had no authority over the officer in DC, but it did seem to do the trick.

Second, even though standards had been made more restrictive post 9/11, they were again tightened (apparently to everyone’s surprise) again in 2003. This made the odds of my getting permanent residence lower.

Third, since I returned to the US, the category under which I applied (entrepreneurial) has been completely eliminated. Australia, at least when I lived there, was the ONLY OECD nation to have a declining number of small businesses. The entrepreneurial category required that immigrants reach a certain level of revenues and generate a certain level of employment (three full-time equivalents beyond their self employment) to get permanent residence. Why would anyone decide that was a bad idea and get rid of that sort of visa?

Separately, it is simply nuts that a low savings country like Australia does not have a proper retirement visa (the one they have is so silly you can only stay 6 years max, that barely anyone avails themselves of it, and even then I have heard of completely reasonable-sounding people being rejected). Make the net worth standards high, do extensive criminal background checks, and require a high payment to the government to protect against Canberra’s perennial fear, that the only reason people really want to move to Oz is to become parasites and live off the social safety nets.

Quarrel says:

Unfortunately the Howard government was completely fucked in pretty much every respect as to immigration policy.. Not that we’ve seen any significant changes yet under Labor.

That said, I’d always assumed someone like yourself would get in under one of the various skilled categories. Says a lot about *us* that you had trouble. Very sad.

–Q