Well, it's true that they aren't quite the same units, but I was ignoring that. The cost is that the State Department pays attention and applies a penalty to the highly nontransparent visa process. These are qualitative claims. In principle they could be measured by outside observers. In fact, my best measurement is zero: they don't pay attention nor penalize nonimmigrant visas.
Ah, okay. That is good to know, and could help people's calculi. Thanks! I only retracted because if my initial understanding had been right, then the tradeoff could be calculated really unambiguously, whereas now it's less clear that looking up the numbers and doing straight comparisons would be as much use.
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