"You'd only need a handful of people with tragic problems to tug at Cascadian heartstrings. Most people are motivated by vivid stories, not math. And people with tragic problems are easy to come by in a society of tens of millions of people run by a gratuitously horrible government. --I strongly suspect the reason they're agreeing to Amentan-style governance is that they think you are going to convert."

(It's taking him a real effort not to use numbers.) 

"Yes, I've warned them that I don't expect high uptake."

"...Do you have a reason not to expect high uptake?"

"Amentans don't have religion in the sense that humans do and I don't think it will be very popular, especially in such an arbitrarily restrictive form."

"That seems plausible but I'm concerned about a virgin-field epidemic. Religion introduced into a population that has no memetic antibodies. --Maybe we should build two skyscrapers."

"We do have fiction and are not in the habit of believing it to be true."

"Religion is not exactly the same as fiction-- there's a community aspect, there are better arguments that the religion is true, there are missionaries... I'm not saying you're going to have religious Amentans, to be clear, I'm just very uncertain about what will happen."

"I appreciate your cautionary advice."

"Returning to the subject of pollution," the ambassador said, "and I'm sure this is a topic everyone will bring up, we'd be interested in your advice about whether there is some sort of minimal pollution-related protocols that would promote trade and tourism, even if Amentans are unhappy living here."

"As long as things aren't visibly disgusting, the Amentans can shower on their way home, perhaps wear shoe covers and gloves and plastic ponchos while out and about, and patronize hotels and restaurants willing to capture the market share with transparent Amentan-friendly protocols. I confess I don't know how visibly disgusting things might be in a place operated by a population without any pollution instinct or preexisting pressure from a population that had one."

"It's not like there are feces and dead bodies on the streets. But stores do, for example, sell compost." 

"Compost is not formally polluted if you use only animal feces. We do not support our world population without fertilizer."

"My understanding is that you have a caste which deals with polluted-but-necessary things and it was not clear to me that compost fell outside that category."

"Farming is purple. Reds deal with plumbing, corpses of Amentans but not animals, and garbage collection."

"Public restrooms do, in fact, get fairly disgusting but can usually be avoided. Sometimes there is litter on the ground. Both of these facts have been true everywhere on Earth I have been."

"Then you will get somewhat fewer Amentan tourists, possibly zero until there is a line of expensive public bathrooms that manage to stay clean."

"I understand that we should proactively address the issue of population controls if we're planning to take any Amentan immigrants at all. The summaries Gilead gave us gave me the impression that two-per is considered the most humane?"

"I think so, but Voa is the flagship two-per country. Credit systems have some reasonable arguments in favor but mostly not from the angle of being humane. Permissions are an unmitigated disaster in practice. As of now minor variants on these three are the only forms that have been tried."

"I do not think Cascadia should be pioneering innovative new population control strategies. What are the arguments in favor of credit systems?"

"They generate enormous amounts of government revenue without distorting the economy the way taxation can, and to the extent you think earning power correlates with desirable traits they are eugenic."

"The former won't apply to our likely small Amentan population and the latter is... controversial... among Cascadians. We will probably end up doing two-per. Do you think there is anything else we should know about before we allow Amentans to immigrate?"

"It will likely be complicated if not impossible for Amentan immigrants to go back where they came from or to any other Amentan polity unless there turn out to be dozens of planets with separate bottlenecks of their own if any, or we figure out faster than light travel or heavy-duty terraforming. I don't know how much you usually rely on the possibility of people who come to Cascadia leaving again, but if it's usually very much you will need to be a little more careful with Amentans."

"We don't generally expect immigrants to leave. Do you have any questions about Cascadia you'd like to have answered? I don't know what interests Voa has in Cascadia."

"Our overarching interest is living space, but we will also ideally have some trade between our colonies and Earth countries. I am unsure to what extent you can guess what Commander Waterford has told me about Cascadia -?"

"We're a bunch of slutty drug-addicted paranoid sinners with a truly astonishing arsenal of nuclear weaponry?"