> What is the chaos in the immigration system in the US that benefits you?

Sorry I was not clear. The immigration system is absurd and it appears that all the plans are to make it worse for the US (All the announcements I've seen are of enormous benefit to Europe, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore et al). It's a major liability to trying to do business in the US.

I mean the general chaos of life in the USA. Day to day life here is a grind (you just have to spend so much time on useless shit that you don't deal with in other advanced economies) but in exchange you get people willing to adopt something new at the drop of a hat, who don't give a shit about credentialism, are willing to take outlandish and ludicrous risks, etc. Think of it as the social or meatspace equivalent of Black-Scholes: options with huge fluctuations have higher expected value than more sedate ones. It has made it worth putting up with the dreadful lifestyle crap of the USA. In terms of QoL, Australia, Germany and France (despite everyone being miserable) are much much nicer and a hell of a lot more fun. But for the work environment, hell, you just can't beat San Carlos<->Sunnyvale.

As for the "illegally cross the southern border" part: Of course it is a net positive. Sure. I used not just "legal" labor but union labor to build my house (had my construction supervisor check everybody's paperwork among other things). My housekeeper and gardener are US citizens, unlike me. H1B people are very difficult to get because of the arbitrary crap and uncertainty, but the fact that hiring a foreigner for a startup costs so much more than hiring a local doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

But it's a net positive because those folks who come here "illegally" are the private sector working around a fucked up immigration system: not only are they a huge economic net addition to the economy (one that's integrated across the border in a massive conurbation) not only by doing jobs that go otherwise unfilled (the whole point of the bracero system) but because they pay rent, buy iPhones etc, but they add spice with great cuisines, music, art, etc. They do tend to be very conservative (heavy on "family values", fiscally conservative etc).

You bring up a great example of the fucked up immigration system. Before the Obama-era border crackdown people moved back and forth more freely across the border. Over the past couple of years, despite the net emigration south, the number of people leaving would be even greater without the border crackdown (the human equivalent of a wall). yes, as with east Germany, increased border surveillance increases the risk of crossing (or the risk of returning) so people simply stay put. An already visible example of what the East Germans got.

> I didn't think the Berlin part of the wall was ever claimed to be for security; the other inner German border was.

Indeed the Berlin part was considered an integral part of the security system. Which it was -- it's just that the sign was reversed from how it was described. My wife grew up next to the larger internal border, so as a kid she liked watching East German late night TV shows that came across -- they showed soft porn on TV allegedly in the hopes of increasing the birth rate.