Ok, let me rephrase it differently then. Can you sustain your claim that
The complexity of all this expands exponentially as more people get involved.
That seems counterintuitive to me. On the contrary, I'd expect economies of scale.
Well, the example he's using is the US, which is managing to by all appearances underperform* any number of other countries (like germany, or canada) to varying degrees despite having massively larger resources and body count to throw at it, and often a comparatively smaller problem (lower net migration, et al), if larger in the raw.
Interestingly, the numbers comparison between germany (the one with the next lowest raw immigration numbers, and who is roughly on par in regards to stuff like net migration and whatnot, iirc) and the US in regards to their governmental immigration services? Which is about what I'd expect you'd be looking at regarding efficiency. The USCIS employs about 19k (this is spread all the fuck over the world, though; that's split between 223 offices). The BAMF (which is a hell of an acronym), the german equivalent of it, employs 3.5k (split... between 22 branch offices? Can't read german, and it's annoying to find the numbers otherwise. Maybe one of our german forumgoers has a better idea?). Comparison of the amount of the population that equates to? .06% vs. .04%. Note that is the US is just a bit shy of four times germany's population, and has an immigrant population roughly in the same ballpark. Note that .06% is not four times .04%, and that 19k is only about 5 times that 3.5k. That seems pretty indicative of either dead on or fairly close economies of scale, not exponentially increasing ones. And quite possibly a notable amount of effiency, even -- the US is not 10 times the size of germany, it's
28 times the size of germany, which means if those BAMF office numbers are correct, the US is managing something like double the area coverage per office and barely budging by the metrics that seem particularly applicable. Only about matching in apparent throughput and whatnot, but still.
If anyone's curious about the budget numbers, the USCIS's was ~3.2b, and that was apparently 99% funded by the immigrants themselves (user fees).** I'm not sure how much the BAMF got that year insofar as federal funding goes, but considering I saw a 1.08n investment in something related to them while failing to find those numbers, I get the distinct feeling their government is investing something over 1% of 3.2b.
Seriously, the more I'm digging the more it looks like there actually
are pretty serious economies of scale going on, and we're mostly using them to just tread water instead of ramping up the funding and manpower to take advantage of 'em and start kicking ass and taking names.
*Credit where it's due, there's still plenty we're out performing, including the next two countries up in population.
**Thiiis, however, may explain some of the problems we're having. Go figure, give an organization a strong incentive to drag a process out and you
may just happen to see some inefficiencies pop up. I'unno if we've found
the problem with the US immigration system that's holding it back from kicking everyone around in regards to efficiency and crap, but I rather imagine it's not helping :V
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1576027 times)