Comment by rvo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvo | Hacker News Reader

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Same here man. I'm getting sick and tired of immigration in this country. The whole country is worried about illegal aliens and no one cares about us.

And this is not new with trump. Been on h1b for years. It just got worse over time under obama. Americans dont care about indians. Either we don't get our voices heard too much, or we are just a slightly wrong shade of brown ("people of color" - ha!). Go care about illegals.... I'm just tired of dealing with immigration and then getting shat on by "pro immigration" people who dont care about Indians (and frankly Chinese).

To my american friends, you dont realize how racist the immigration system is currently. Forget refugees and "muslim bans". Those are really nothing compared to how Indians and Chinese are treated. I'll show you: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

Do a search for "FINAL ACTION DATES FOR EMPLOYMENT-BASED PREFERENCE CASES"

See that table. There are a few salient points:

1. That table shows where the queue pointer is right now. "C" means at the head of the queue (no entries, everything being processed). If it is a date, that is the date that is currently being processed (for all intents and purposes).

2. Notice the special columns for the different nationalities. So they discriminate based on national origin. But, only 5 to 7 countries are special cased. Everyone else (including all refugee countries, muslim countries, etc) fall under "Rest of World" ("All chargeability areas..").

3. Now notice the INDIA column. The date is 01Jan07 for EB3. This means, for someone with a Bachelors degree, they have to process people who applied 11 years ago. Let that sink in. No other race has to face this discrimination. EB2 (masters or phd) is not much better either. You have to be a genius (EB1) to get a greencard 'now' without a queue ... at the same level as a Bachelors graduate from Iran, Saudi, Somalia, whereever. .

Anyway, hopefully you can empathize a little bit with Indians and Chinese who did things by the book and stop focussing so much on illegals.

If there was zero discrimination no-one from any other country would stand a chance due to the sheer population size of India & China.

Would have thought this was obvious.

It’s fairer to the rest of us.

That's not true. People from every country would have the same chance. Petitions would be processed in the order they were received regardless of nationality. How would that be unfair to anyone?

Trust me man, you haven't seen the ugly side of many liberal "pro immigration" folks. At least the guy you are responding to is being honest.

It is unfair because it doesn't allow someone to jump the line. A totally unfair system (sarcasm).

There is no "order they are received" for H-1B. You have to apply on the first of April and literally win a lottery.

If you remove the national origin quotas (it has little to do with race and everything to do with where you were born), then it would be the exact same process for green cards except you only have a limited number of chances before you cap out the time on your visa and get sent back. How is that a better, less capricious system than the current one for anyone who isn't Indian or Chinese?

The US political system gives disproportionate power to states with smaller population. The US immigration system is disproportionately more difficult for countries with lots of applicants. That's what the US looks at as fair - giving each state or country a fair shot, not each individual.

> If you remove the national origin quotas (it has little to do with race and everything to do with where you were born)

Yeah, those things aren't correlated at all. Come on.

> then it would be the exact same process for green cards except you only have a limited number of chances before you cap out the time on your visa and get sent back.

No it wouldn't. There's a different system in place for permanent visas than for temporary ones. Viz. a waiting list. The grandparent post linked the visa bulletin which explains how it works. You have the tools at hand to educate yourself, there's no excuse for ignorance.

> How is that a better, less capricious system than the current one for anyone who isn't Indian or Chinese?

Because human being are human beings, not 1 billionth of India or China. It is a bedrock principle of contemporary liberalism (small l) that people ought be to treated as individuals. The remnant of the pre-1965 racist national origin system is a disgusting anomaly of a worse time.

> The US political system gives disproportionate power to states with smaller population. The US immigration system is disproportionately more difficult for countries with lots of applicants. That's what the US looks at as fair - giving each state or country a fair shot, not each individual.

One terribly unjust system originally put in place to protect slavery doesn't define the United States' entire notion of fairness.

In any event it is nonsensical to talk about giving a country a shot. Countries aren't going to immigrate to the US, people are.

Yes, I am aware that there is currently a different system, for green cards. I am aware that your proposal is to process each application in the order that it is received. What exactly do you think is going to happen to go from here to there? On one hand, you need to deal with the backlog. On the other hand, if you are going to "fix" the system, you should fix it in such a way that, in the future, there will be no backlog. How would such a system be different than what I described? The alternative is to turn the green card backlog into a problem for immigrants of all nationalities rather than a problem for immigrants of some nationalities.

You should perhaps learn a bit more about the history of the country which you want to immigrate to. Slavery had nothing to do with representation in the senate. It had everything to do with protecting Connecticut, Delaware, and New Jersey from New York, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

The green card diversity lottery is based on exactly the premise I mention. Applicants from countries with low rates of immigration to the US have a great chance of winning. Applicants from countries with high rates of immigration to the US are ineligible to apply.

> You should perhaps learn a bit more about the history of the country which you want to immigrate to.

Because no one could possibly be opposed to per country caps unless he were a disgruntled Indian.

I was born in New York. My parents were born in New York. Three of four of my grandparents were born in New York. The fourth grandparent was born in Germany. His parents died in a concentration camp because they couldn't come to the US with their teen children. You see they had be been born in Eastern Europe and the racist national origin system was designed to prevent too many people born in Eastern Europe from coming to the US. Kind of like how you don't want too many people born in India or China to come to the US.

> The green card diversity lottery is based on exactly the premise I mention.

With your encyclopedic knowledge of American history I'm sure you are aware of the political origins of that program.

> The green card diversity lottery is based on exactly the premise I mention. Applicants from countries with low rates of immigration to the US have a great chance of winning. Applicants from countries with high rates of immigration to the US are ineligible to apply.

Sure. But that has nothing to do with employment-based green cards.

By all means, choose for diversity when it comes to other types of immigrants (extended family, lottery, etc). But it makes no sense to consider country of birth for skilled worker green cards, where employers hire based on talent - and especially so when the beneficiaries already live here and pay taxes here.

> The alternative is to turn the green card backlog into a problem for immigrants of all nationalities rather than a problem for immigrants of some nationalities.

Sure, but a 3-4 year wait for everyone (while living here) is literally an order of magnitude lower than the current 60-year wait for those born in India. Problems like not being able to switch jobs, kids having to leave when they turn 21, etc, are just less likely to occur when the wait is shorter and more transparent.

In order to prevent a shock to the system, per-country caps should be phased-in over 2-3 years. That way, those currently in the system will all get their green cards in the expected 1-1.5 year timeframe, while future applicants will know, prior to applying, that the wait will be 4 years for everyone. HR392 does this.

Think a 4-year wait would be too long? First, let me point out the hypocrisy. Second, a solution then is simply to increase the employment-based numbers, from 140K currently, to around 220K (these numbers include immediate family: spouses and minor kids). This is hard politically, because Democrats would also want to increase chain migration and other categories.

If the backlog is truly 60 years, then it will take 4.2 years of giving every single employment based greencard to Indians to clear that backlog. This ignores the backlog that exists for Chinese applicants.

The fact is that the backlog will get longer in every year that more foreign temporary workers apply for green cards than there are green cards available. So what might start out as a 4 year backlog in (say) 2020 will get longer each year by as long as 1 year (if there are, say, 280,000 H-1B petitions every year and the worst case of 100% of them applying for greencards occurs).

If it really is a matter of going from <2 year wait for non-Chinese, non-Indians and a multi-decade wait for Chinese and Indians to a <4 year wait for everyone, forever, because there will no longer be an accumulation of a backlog, then it is a no brainer for the US to make that change in policy. I believe that that scenario is a fantasy and the actual result of HR 392 will be a multi-decade wait for everyone. The solution to that will, IMO, turn into a lottery similar to today's H-1B process.

> except you only have a limited number of chances before you cap out the time on your visa

That's not true - anyone with a submitted I-140 can renew their H-1 or L-1 visa indefinitely in yearly increments. See sections 104 and 106 of AC21.

> If there was zero discrimination no-one from any other country would stand a chance due to the sheer population size of India & China.

If there was zero discrimination on country of origin, each qualified individual applicant within a given VISA category would be situated equivalently regardless of nation of origin.

India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines (I may be missing one or two other countries) would see an increased number of total immigrants to the US and other countries less, but that's because the per country of origin limits currently put individuals of those countries in a worse position, not because the present system is fair and removing the per country limits would be unfair.

I think we'd see more from Brazil peh Argentina, Indonesia, fewer from Mexico [unless undocumenteds don't count as immigrants]

India & China make up 35% of the entire worlds population. A fair system will admit a lot more people from those countries than others simply because there have more people.

That’s why the system can’t be “fair”. Someone in the system is always going to be slighted.

The goal of the caps is diversity of immigrants. Making the system "fair" for countries like India and China is not the goal.

Do you know that India is more than in languages, cuisine, culture and history than whole of Western Europe. Just because they have common passport, doesn't mean that they are any less diverse.

If whole of Europe gets a single EU passport, does it suddenly make them any less diverse?

Its hilarious how "diversity" is supposed to be about thinking beyond race/nationality/skin color, yet the measure of diversity is how many different races/nationalities/skin colors you can collect.

If race does not matter, then why does "diverse" mean as many races as possible. Shouldn't it mean diversity of thought instead? If nationality does not affect personality, then why should diversity be about diversity of nations?

Hang on, why should someone from India have less of a chance just because they were born in India? They can't help where they were born, or that their country has a high population.

If there weren't country caps, then someone born in India would have an equal chance as someone from Sweden.

I argue what you're proposing isn't fair at all - it's clear that limiting by country is discrimination, not the other way around.

Now what I will grant you is that it'll skew population statistics for immigrants to the more populous countries. But that's just a function of global population distribution by nation.

Which again, isn't the fault of the applicant.

Or to put all this another way, should someone born in Vatican City have an extremely high chance to get in, versus someone from a country with several million in population? No.

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