> FWIW: I personally politically support PRs being given the political right to be voted into office as well.
Why? I'd go the other way and only allow political office for natural citizens. After all why would you welcome someone into your country when their goal is to change it - then maybe they would fit better into another country that already works like they want.
Because if the will of the people is for person A to serve in office X, then the will of the people should be absolute. I'd even allow election of minors and other currently non-eligible persons.
The only requirement should be that you are politically member of the given area, which typically means you actually physically live in the city/state/country.
Note, in Switzerland, you can already be voted into office _against your will_. And then you MUST serve. And this has actually happened in recent past, in remote villages to be fair.
Are (native) citizens a net positive? Do you ask each one of them how they contribute culturally? What does "spiritually" and "emotionally" even mean in this context?
People should be afforded basic rights because they are people. People who live long term in a place, do the same (or different for that matter but analogous) work etc should have the same basic rights. In this context I interpret "net positive" as basically fulfilling jobs/roles in the society. This alone should (in the long term) afford basic rights, not cultural and other tests.
edit: Regardless that, cultural contribution does not really require a specific language. You can paint, you can play music from your own culture/home country etc. You can even write things in english anyway that many will understand.
First of all, _basic_ rights should be afforded to _all_ humans. That's not what the discussion here is. The discussion here are non-basic rights, like the right to enter a geographic area without restriction or the right to state welfare.
You saying "job/role" is where the argument falls apart, because job and role are not the same. Yes, I absolutely agree that people who fulfill roles in society should be afforded protection of that society.
There are roles in society that have nothing to do with your job: neighbor, volunteer, person you ask for direction on the street, parent, parent of your child's friend... Those are also the roles that typically have some form of emotional, spiritual and cultural work associated with them.
Refusing to fill those roles and filling only the role of "high-income immigrant" isn't necessarily a net positive to the society and should not on that fact alone be provided permanent residence.
I will say however, I think parents of children that attend public school in a country should have almost automatic PR. Not fully automatic, but 99.99% of such cases are net positive, much more than high-income immigrants.
> the right to enter a geographic area without restriction
No, the discussion was about the conditions of staying, not entering.
> the right to state welfare
If one pays the same taxes for several years why shouldn't they have access to the same state welfare?
> Refusing to fill those roles
Even assuming it is meaningful to set rules about stuff like that that are basic life stuff and most people do to some degree, how do you know or check for these? For once, language is def not a good proxy, esp in a place with a very big international community and where most speak english anyway. How do you imagine this? I have never seen a check like this that makes any sense. It is worse than even the economic checks where people move money from an account to another and screenshot them to show they are not too poor so that their applications are not rejected. If anything, immigrant communities ime are much higher in solidarity because they need to. And in any case, it is not either fair to punish a person for just being introvert or not having many friends or sth.
> high-income immigrant
No I did not mention high income, and imo it has nothing to do with this discussion. Maybe it was a misunderstanding with OP who mentioned "net positive". I interpreted "net positive" as working consistently rather than high income necessarily. I do not think people with high income should have more rights to PR than people with low income, though this is sadly the case in many ways.
Just because somebody pays taxes, it doesn’t necessarily make them a net positive.
For example, do you contribute culturally? That can be quite hard to do without speaking the language.
What about defense. Would you fight for the country? Hard to do if you don’t understand the orders.
What about spiritually? Emotionally?