I’m glad to see that immigration got divided into legal and illegal, this was needed. Unfortunately, I feel the execution is lacking.
I had brought up before that immigration lacked depth, as all immigrants were framed as the boat loads of impoverished masses, with none of any other kind of immigrant represented. Rather than addressing this problem, the new system doubles down on it. None of the outputs of immigration changed to reflect that illegal immigrants are no longer in this group. Immigration still raises health care demand, depresses wages, and raises unemployment. Only now there is a second block doing all this a second time over. What I’m realizing even as I’m writing this is that what needed to be added was not illegal immigration, but legal immigration. The original immigration bubble effectively modeled illegal immigration already.
The addition of this second bubble has also exacerbated another problem that exists in a few places, which is double dipping. Wages have been run into the ground now, as the new illegal immigration bubble directly depresses wages, and also increases unemployment which depresses wages. I would recommend taking out the direct link to wages, and use the impact on unemployment to model this.
Another addition I would like to see is policies which promote legal immigration somewhat reducing illegal immigration. Take refugee policy for example. Some of these refugees are determined, which is understandable given the desperation driving many of them. They are going to find a way in legally or otherwise. Offering a legal channel into the country would mean they didn’t enter illegally. This is a similar line of thinking to legalizing sex work decreasing crime, it’s not a crime if you say it’s legal.
Another problem I’m having is a lack of ability to do much of anything about it. In addition to border controls, deportation is another method of dealing with this. Policies that make it more likely for illegal immigrants to be caught, whether by increasing police budgets or more specific measures such as I.D. cards should be modeled as well. Btw, 48 PC for I.D. cards? I’d never tried to implement this one before, but that seems unmanageable, and strange that it is more controversial than a one child policy.
Beyond law and order approaches, there seems to be nothing I can do to address the root cause of this desperate illegal migration. Participating in military aggression and refusals to assist after disasters would both drive up the numbers of people looking to resettle, some of whom would pick my country as a destination. Beyond actions I have direct control over, events like a powerful nation entering a proxy war would drive up the number of refugees in the world. Overall, I think the game would be improved if there were less static pressure on illegal immigration, and instead it were something which happened in bursts.
Final note, this is something which geography plays into. I would primarily pick Australia and Canada as being simply more difficult to get to, and therefore should have less illegal immigration.