Misaligned Priorities
The U.S. immigration system sends the wrong signals.
Helen Raleigh
January 19, 2023 Politics and lawThe Social Order
On December 17, 2022, a group of Indian tech workers staged a protest in Silicon Valley calling for reforms to the U.S. legal-immigration system. Some had already waited for decades to obtain permanent residency (a green card). One said, “What we are fighting for is basic equality. . . . Treat us based on what skills we bring to this nation and not necessarily based on where we were born.” But their protest has caught little media attention. Meantime, President Biden’s visit to a highly sanitized portion of the U.S.-Mexico border has received wall-to-wall coverage. The mismatch in attention suggests a misalignment of priorities.
I understand these Indian tech workers’ frustration because I was once in their shoes. I came to the United States on a student visa in 1996, and my quest for U.S. citizenship was a 17-year-long march. The excruciatingly long wait these workers and I have experienced is a product of American immigration law.
Legal immigration in the U.S. proceeds according to a quota-driven system that prioritizes family connections of current residents over other considerations. The U.S. admits about 1.1 million legal immigrants annually, most given entry based on family relations in the U.S. A citizen or green-card holder can sponsor a spouse, parents, and minor children through family-reunion-based legal immigration (they can theoretically sponsor other relatives, too, though such sponsorships are subject to limits). For those with no family members in the U.S., often including highly educated workers from Asia, their best and often only hope of becoming Americans is through employment-based immigration. But current law allocates only 140,000 employment-based visas annually, and the demand for such a visa far exceeds the limited supply.
Further, current U.S. immigration law sets a per-country limit of 7 percent of the family-based and employment-based categories, no matter the size of the population of the country of origin. (The limit is flexible: if some countries don’t reach it, more visas will be made available to people from other countries.) For example, the annual visa quotas for family-based and employment-based visas are 226,000 (de facto) and 140,000, respectively. The per-country limit will be a fraction of that number, further divided into a family-based limit and a smaller employment-based limit
https://www.city-journal.org/misaligned-priorities-of-us-immigration-system
