This is a subjective estimate, I wasn’t literally counting, but I think it’s reasonable and at least an honest impression. At the risk of being slightly pretentious, my 95% CI would be 20-50% of the cases were there to make a return. I have not actually checked official figures yet.
(Maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about being nerdy or particular, this is LessWrong after all. If we won’t tolerate it, who will?)
Just to add: oh, the number isn’t quite what I thought. It’s not “a third of people renew”, because the people who renew have to go through a first time first. It means “mean number of times a person renews” is 0.5. When someone renewed, I don’t know if you knew how many times they’d been. But I’d guess the distribution looks more like “half of people renew once” than like “a quarter of people renew twice”?
(I know it’s a rough number, and this is also making assumptions like “this is a steady state” and “the people you see aren’t selected for renewal”, but this seems like a useful order-of-magnitude calculation.)
I think that the records I had access to would have given me information regarding prior applications and stints, but I was quite busy and did not check regularly. Take my subjective impressions with an RDA-approved pinch of salt.
(If the exact proportion of returnees was load-bearing on my ethical arguments, I would have checked them more rigorously, and maybe I should have anyway)
While my particular workplace catered to a very large proportion of India, I do recall there were other visa centers, and circumstances and demographics could vary. I have no particular reason to think my situation wasn’t representative, but I will not declare so with strict confidence.
Most of the time, my recollection is that either I directly asked, or the patients mentioned it unprompted. I might even be underestimating the number of returnees, now that I consider it, it’s a distinct possibility.
I do think that a steady-state is a reasonable assumption. There is significant background demand for labor in Qatar, but I would assume that the boom before 2022 had died down for some time and things were back to “normal”. “Normal” still meant hundreds of applicants a day, a third of them seen by me personally.
Oh, that’s much more than I would have guessed!
This is a subjective estimate, I wasn’t literally counting, but I think it’s reasonable and at least an honest impression. At the risk of being slightly pretentious, my 95% CI would be 20-50% of the cases were there to make a return. I have not actually checked official figures yet.
(Maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about being nerdy or particular, this is LessWrong after all. If we won’t tolerate it, who will?)
Just to add: oh, the number isn’t quite what I thought. It’s not “a third of people renew”, because the people who renew have to go through a first time first. It means “mean number of times a person renews” is 0.5. When someone renewed, I don’t know if you knew how many times they’d been. But I’d guess the distribution looks more like “half of people renew once” than like “a quarter of people renew twice”?
(I know it’s a rough number, and this is also making assumptions like “this is a steady state” and “the people you see aren’t selected for renewal”, but this seems like a useful order-of-magnitude calculation.)
I think that the records I had access to would have given me information regarding prior applications and stints, but I was quite busy and did not check regularly. Take my subjective impressions with an RDA-approved pinch of salt.
(If the exact proportion of returnees was load-bearing on my ethical arguments, I would have checked them more rigorously, and maybe I should have anyway)
While my particular workplace catered to a very large proportion of India, I do recall there were other visa centers, and circumstances and demographics could vary. I have no particular reason to think my situation wasn’t representative, but I will not declare so with strict confidence.
Most of the time, my recollection is that either I directly asked, or the patients mentioned it unprompted. I might even be underestimating the number of returnees, now that I consider it, it’s a distinct possibility.
I do think that a steady-state is a reasonable assumption. There is significant background demand for labor in Qatar, but I would assume that the boom before 2022 had died down for some time and things were back to “normal”. “Normal” still meant hundreds of applicants a day, a third of them seen by me personally.