It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it's hard to find a good number, but I've seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it's not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you're right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
It is interesting to look at how the US already handles IQ testing on this scale. The United States Military Entrance Processing Command administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to 460,000 people "during fiscal year 2011" at exam sites around the country, plus "658,000 high school students [...] under the Department of Defense Student ASVAB Testing Program during the 2010-11 school year."
...So it's not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone
Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.
My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).
What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.
Here it is; I hope you enjoy it