Same reason you can’t get a green card through the lottery if your from Canada - it’s only open to under-represented countries.
If you only receive immigration from only one country, it is easier for these newcomers to associate and become a political force that can change your status quo. Whereas if immigration is diverse, this situation is more complicated.
>Texas
>USA
>All of South America?
All of the Americas?
That sort of thing could honestly be in the minds of the Powers that Be.
The positive spin for diversity in where your immigrants come from is that it is better for the culture if the participants have diverse backgrounds.
This does not make much sense. People get green cards, not countries. Imagine if you were at the DMV and each region of your city had its own queue. People coming from the smaller parts leave in 5 minutes, and people hailing from the larger parts have to wait 8 hours for their turn. It's their fault for living in a more populous place?
What did the people in the smaller areas do to deserve their faster queue compared to others, except being born at a certain place?
Work visas should be about the person who passes the interview, is selected and is able to hold said job.
Imagine if there was a company with a white CEO who was only hiring/putting other whites into high level positions because they happen to be in a majority white area. If that makes you cringe, you should have the same reaction regarding this.
Diversity = various countries/peoples around the world getting a fair chance
Not diversity = Only Indians get work visas
If 90% of a town is white and 10% is black, 9:1 is a fair ratio for executive boards on average. Anything else would mean that the probability of a person holding a board position given their race would be different for different races. Imagine if every company in Mombasa was required to have an even split between white and black: being born white would guarantee you any job you wanted because you would be competing with less than 1% of the population, while in contrast every other ethnicity would be crowded in to half the number of jobs. In fact if racial quotas were instituted in Kenya and every race was given the same percent quota, 98% of Kenyans would be forced to be unemployed.
Diversity is generally considered a positive thing for companies and countries. Also there have been complaints that US is poaching the best people from other countries so diversity helps moderate that.
The US sets US law to serve US interests, so I don't see how that would be a motivation.
India is easily the most internally diverse country in the world. There is also the fact, that literally 15% of the world's population resides here.
The current "diversity" heuristic is too naive to promote any real diversity.
>Countries like the United States and Canada are far more heterogenous
That's only in the media and big cities.
It was done so that countries with large numbers of eligible immigrants don't dominate the immigrant mix in any category (it's per category, not global), which is a really stupid idea (it systematically prevents legal supply and demand from aligning, even as far as they could within the aggregate limit, by artificial restriction, which as anyone whose studied price controls know, creates illegality.)
https://scholars.org/brief/how-legacies-racism-persist-us-im...
US immigration law has always been racist.
Even if Congress kicks out all the rest of nationalities and gives 100% cap to Indians, the wait times will drop only once but then keep growing indefinitely. (And this does not yet account to how many more will be inspired by that, as right now long wait times presumably deter a lot from even trying.)
There is no fix for this that does not involve a huge lot of Indians failing at their immigration attempt. The core problem is that they are just trying too hard: India applies 8.5x more people per %population than France, 14x more than Germany etc. No Congress can fix that.
Sure, 7% cap for a country that makes 17% of the world seems a bit unfair. But increasing it to the fair 17% or even to unfair 100% will still be peanuts in the long run. The reality is that a person born in India is being screwed not as much by bias in immigration policies but only by other persons born in India.
This is not correct. The 250k includes people who got their first H1B in 2006 till date but have to renew every 3 years. Those are work visa renewals while they wait. The yearly demand is much lower. There is a 85K cap on all new H1Bs. Only 70% go to tech sector. However some governments and nonprofits are excluded from the cap, but the nowhere as high as 250k. Which is why the rest of your comment is wrong.
>Even if Congress kicks out all the rest of nationalities and gives 100% cap to Indians, the wait times will drop only once but then keep growing indefinitely. (And this does not yet account to how many more will be inspired by that, as right now long wait times presumably deter a lot from even trying.)
>There is no fix for this that does not involve a huge lot of Indians failing at their immigration attempt. The core problem is that they are just trying too hard: India applies 8.5x more people per %population than France, 14x more than Germany etc. No Congress can fix that.
Not true again. After 8 to 10 years it will fix itself because the system is first come first served. i.e If a French or German person apply on January 1 2029, they will get their GC before everyone from India that applied after Jan 1 2029.
Actually that would be true even today if the law passes. The French citizen who applies on Jan 1 2020 will get his gc before the Indian citizen who applies on Jan 2, 2020. It's just that if the law passes, they won't get to cut ahead to directly in front of the line, before people waiting since 2009.
It's like going to a DMV. Regardless of how bad the crowd is or where you drove from, you get a token number and no one that came after you gets a GC before you can. The initial wait for some will be high initially because there are people waiting for a long time.
100% of the total cap is used every year. The cap is not changing, the number of applicants is not changing (grows, actually), so the backlog will keep growing with no change at all. How exactly the cap is allocated to nationalities is irrelevant.
You can write a simple simulation of a DMV office that gets more new people every day than it can serve per day, and prove that the line grows indefinitely regardless if it's FIFO or capped or whatever.
The only true fix to the indefinite growth of wait time is to change the spammable lottery/FIFO system to something like merit-based (like Canada) or salary auction, which grants all the cap to highest scored people and rejects everyone else.
It's very relevant actually. It drives hiring decisions - plenty of reasons to hire people born in India (and to some extent China) because they won't get full employment rights for a long time. And this has a feedback loop (the longer the wait time for some people, the greater the incentive to seek and hire those people). This is actually bad for people born anywhere else and want to find a job here, including US-born.
There can be no "true fix" because the legislative process involves compromise. There was plenty of criticism of the 2013 Senate bill (S. 744) for example. Perhaps there will be another such attempt a decade from now, but it's stupid to wait for speculative future compromises instead of fixing one issue at a time.
In any case, fixing the country cap issue is not incompatible with any of the points based proposals - AFAIK Canada does not make people wait longer based on where they were born.
https://www.sanjoseinside.com/2019/08/07/house-passes-zoe-lo...
“For the next 10 years, more than 90 percent of the employment-based green card will go to citizens of one country”
This is so unfair to citizens of other countries.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Indian immigrants. What they've been through is not tenable in the slightest. I think lifting the cap all together will be a better solution for everyone?
Why should a person get priority just because they are from a certain country?
Instead, everyone should be treated exactly the same.
There is a saying about how treating people equally, looks like oppression to the people who were at the top before.
Not sure how it's unfair. The bill has a clause that anyone currently waiting will not be impacted.
>I think lifting the cap all together will be a better solution for everyone?
Not sure if you're serious. Even adding a few new green cards is politically impossible in the current climate. Just imagine the attack ads on TV for the next election.
1. The system is unfair in the first place -- Indian's quota is not in proportion to their population.
2. The bill tries to flush the queue, that leads to:
2.1 The perpetuation of this unfair system.
2.2 Other people who will still use this system get unfairly treated.
https://www.lanereport.com/115492/2019/07/the-bottom-line-bu...
Really wonder who thought this was a great idea.
Of course the cap should be abolished altogether, but while it exists the system is deeply unjust.
The El Paso shooter mentioned that proposed law in his manifesto as letting in many more new foreign workers after listening to fake news from Fox News and Breitbart, when it does nothing of that sort. Also that the Senate passed it.
The last thing we want is more bad information.