Hacker News Reader

Comment by bstx | Hacker News Reader

No. It has become significantly easier for Europeans to immigrate since 2005. Labor certification alone now takes less than a year rather than multiple years pre-PERM. EB2 and EB3 priority dates are current. Europeans can expect to get a green card within a couple years (even accounting for the new mandatory Adjustment of Staus interviews for employment based applicants). It has become significantly harder for Indians where the green card backlog approaches a century (!) for EB2/EB3. The only thing that has become harder is getting an H-1B visa due to oversubscription.

View on HN

I was curious about the backlog being a century so I did some googling around and it looks like a user on quora did a bit of reading and math and figured that an Indian person applying today can expect a wait of 100-150 years to get a GC.

https://www.quora.com/Why-have-the-final-action-dates-for-th...

My understanding from Indian coworkers is that most who did not marry into a favorable immigration situation expect their children to sponsor their green card when they reach adulthood. As somone born and educated in the American system, this is a travesty as we deprive them of basic rights such as voting. Another hypocrisy of modern America, I suppose.

The reason for this delay in getting citizenship is an effort to promote diversity among immigrants to the US. No single country can get more than 5% of the permanent resident visas in any given year.

If this wasn't done, the vast majority of immigrants to the US would be from China and India at the expense of other countries.

> The reason for this delay in getting citizenship is an effort to promote diversity among immigrants to the US. No single country can get more than 5% of the permanent resident visas in any given year.

7%, and note that this applies separately to employment-based and family-based immigration, not just in total, which is why the backlogs (and which countries have backlogs) differ between countries.

> If this wasn't done, the vast majority of immigrants to the US would be from China and India

Mexico, actually, by a very, very, very large margin (and that may understate the size of the margin.) The annual quota for family-based immigration is nearly double that for employment-based, and Mexico dominates the waiting list in every family-based category (as well as showing up on the waiting list in several employment-based categories.) Mexico has more people on the waiting to lost for Family Fourth Preference alone than (1) the total annual US immigratiom quota for all categories, (2) twice the number the next two countries have on the waiting list in all categories combined, (3) three times what China has on the waiting list in all categories, combined. They also, aside from waiting lists, have a huge number of immigrants in the unlimited “immediate relative” category (which is uncapped itself, but effects the allocations to the other categories), about 9% of total US immigrant visas of all kinds issued in 2017 were for immigrants from Mexico in that category.

India and China have the most applicants annually in most employment-based categories, but they don't come anywhere close to dominating total applications or total visas that would be issued if the only change was eliminating the per country cap.

Using countries is a very inaccurate way to measure diversity. The EU is many countries, but is less diverse than India, a single country.

If India reformed itself as a union of states, suddenly the backlog of Indian immigrants would be cleared!

> Using countries is a very inaccurate way to measure diversity.

It's a perfectly accurate (fraud aside) measure of diversity in country of origin. Whether that's a meaningful kind of diversity is a different question.

> The EU is many countries, but is less diverse than India, a single country.

Less diverse in what?

> If India reformed itself as a union of states, suddenly the backlog of Indian immigrants would be cleared!

That assumes that the sourcing of qualified prospective Indian immigrants to the US is basically uniform across the succesor states India would be a subdivided into.

It'd only be at the expense of other countries if you keep the current quotas, which haven't moved for decades. Let's not pit immigrant vs immigrant when congress could double the number of Green Cards if they had any interest in the matter. It just happens that they do not.

India has diversity(and population) comparable to the average continent. Of course, Indians who have the means and motivation to apply to emigrate to the US are a significantly less diverse group.

I understand the diversity and the huge numbers India/China have, but shouldn't it be based on merit too? It's similar to hiring, everyone wants a diverse team, yet half the engineers are Asians/Indians. It's because there are more people who go to school from those ethnicities.

By displaying the diversity card, you are just keeping people who has high paying jobs worrying about their status all the time, it's not good for them or the economy they are supporting.

Also, to consider India or China as single countries, when they have a vast array of sub-countries/cultures within them, is to say the least, not an ideal situation. India, China, US are "super" countries with wide geographical, cultural and other differences within the countries.

It already is merit based but if they were to rank people based on merit very specifically, it would be extremely subjective and likely highly inaccurate. People already lie / stretch their case and it would just be 100x. The gov shouldn't spend its time on that.

> I understand the diversity and the huge numbers India/China have, but shouldn't it be based on merit too?

The system of defined-in-law preference categories are a system of merit, though of course merit is subjective and one may disagree with the assessment of the merits of particular immigrants that goes into that system.

You can have both, you can have merit based within a group and promote diversity overall.

Doing what you describe and assuming an even distribution of merit throughout the world, limiting 1/3rd of the world population (India + China) to 10% of immigration slots by definition means lowering the average merit of immigrants.

Keep in mind this was in response to the US basically blocking all non-European immigration for quite a long time.

And yes, not basing it on population side means you are screwed if you come from a big country, but at a huge benefit if from a small country.

> And yes, not basing it on population side means you are screwed if you come from a big country, but at a huge benefit if from a small country

What the actual system does is make it so you are screwed if you come from a country with a large number of qualified immigrant applocants in a similar category (employment or family) subject to numerical limits. Population is loosely associated with this, but the biggest negative impact by far, on a country level, is to qualified immigrants from Mexico, and specifically to those in limited, family-based categories. India and China have bigger populations, sure, but much smaller total backlogs of qualified applicants.

Yeah, but US immigration policy should be constructed for maximum benefit to the US, not to the rest of the world minus China + India.

And I would go one step further and say that it is probably in the best long term interest to the US to have a large population of ethnic Chinese, for the same reason that Israel has benefitted so greatly by the US having a large and influential Jewish population.

I strongly disagree with this. I am a WASP whose family came to the US in 1620 and diversity in America is imperative. I don't think any racial group should particularly have a majority. If I've learned anything recently, a muslim man was lynched in India for killing a cow, it is illegal to eat in public on Ramadan in muslim majority countries or the chinese treatment of Uyghurs. We are strong through diversity and secularism, as much as I want economic prosperity that a pure merit based system can potentially bring. I think we can have a diversity oriented immigration system that works in tandem with being merit based, we must also remember that people of some backgrounds may be more disadvantaged but would similarly work hard given a good opportunity.

I have a very nuanced view on immigration and I tend to be more republican in my views. i.e. Curbing illegal immigration and moving to a merit vs. lottery based system. America is strong through diversity, but it needs to be controlled in an intelligent way.

I'm not sure that we disagree. The person I was responding to was framing things in terms of how US immigration policy benefits people who are not US citizens. I was just pointing out that the US government is morally obligated to attend primarily to the interests of it's own citizens (IMO; I realize this is a controversial opinion in some circles). I tend to take a pretty expansive position on what constitutes the best interests of US citizens and generally think it's good for the US that most countries have significant expat populations in the US.

> And I would go one step further and say that it is probably in the best long term interest to the US to have a large population of ethnic Chinese, for the same reason that Israel has benefitted so greatly by the US having a large and influential Jewish population.

That doesn't seem to follow, unless you left out a “not” before “in the interest of” or meant “China” the first time you used “US”.

(I'm not endorsing the result of either change as a correct statement, just commenting on the internal coherence of the statement, and particularly the disanalogy between the juxtaposed situations as presented.)

The analogy is not that the two sets of countries are related to each other in the exact same way, but that they can enjoy the benefits of a significant shared ethnic population.

> limiting 1/3rd of the world population (India + China) to 10% of immigration slots by definition

They are limited to 14% of, separately, the limited employment and family-based visa categories, not 10% (the per country limit is 7%) and not of total immigration.

Yeah, I defer to your knowledge of the matter. I was responding to the person's assertion that you can optimize for both diversity and merit.

> You can have both, you can have merit based within a group and promote diversity overall.

You can. For instance, you can set limits to the total share sourced from one country, and create a system alongside that where visas are allocated among preference categories based on assessment of the relative deisrability and need for immigrants in each category.

This does not justify the 10 year wait time for having a green card application processed. There are far better, efficient ways to throttle inflow. Also, in the process you’ve lost control of the ‘quality’ of the 5% that makes it through.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com