Chain Migration and Legacy Admissions
By Andrew R. Arthur on March 22, 2019
The recent college-admissions scandal, which as NBC News reported was uncovered by the FBI as part of an investigation captioned "Operation Varsity Blues", has brought to the fore many different complaints about the college-admissions process. U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Andrew Lelling has framed it as an egalitarian morality tale, stating: "There can be no separate college admission for the wealthy, and I will add there will not be a separate criminal justice system either." It has also subsequently prompted criticism of so-called "legacy admissions", the favoritism in some college admissions shown to the children and grandchildren of alumni. The same criticisms, if not more, could be directed toward our chain-migration system.
The U.S. immigration system is the ultimate "legacy" admissions process. For example, from the January 7, 2018, "Weekend Edition Sunday" on NPR comes the following colloquy between host Lulu Garcia-Navarro and John Burnett:
https://cis.org/Arthur/Chain-Migration-and-Legacy-Admissions
