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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> It eliminates the per-country cap, which meters issuance of green cards so that they are distributed to applicants from all countries

I'm not an especially pro-diversity person, but won't this just mean Indians will get 99% of green cards with immigrants from all other countries fighting over the remaining 1%? I don't know if that's a good thing necessarily, change my view.

This perception is just based on my own company, in which I (an American) seem to be in a tiny minority compared to Indian H1-Bs.

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The problem is how we define diversity. People from Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Monaco are considered different from each other. But people from Punjab, Kerala, and Assam are not. I’ll argue that people from the latter group of states from India are as diverse as people from the former group of countries from Europe. And because those Indian states have bigger populations than many countries, obviously those states will produce more talented people whom we’d want to keep in USA. For reference, one state in India, Uttar Pradesh, has a population of 200m.

Very well put.

The GC wait times for Indians are insane and it needs to be remedied, but the backers of the bill got a bit too overzealous.

I personally prefer a temporary lift on Quota 2-3 year time frame and capping per country to 49%.

1. The US issues approximately 1M greencards every year - employment based petitions are around 10% of that number 2. The bill does a gradual rollout of eliminating the cap - so most people who have already applied for a green card and are in the US should not be affected 3. Employment based green cards are allocated based on skills - there's a specific allocation of 50K green cards just for diversity every year. That's around 35% of the employment based allocation.

I believe the problem of the "gradual roll out" is it doesn't consider people from the countries that already exceed the per country limit, those people will wait a long time before they can get the green card.

>This perception is just based on my own company, in which I (an American) seem to be in a tiny minority compared to Indian H1-Bs.

The question is, which of these two seems better to you?

* Someone comes to the US, works 10 years on an H1-B, and then goes back to India afterwards.

* Someones comes to the US, works 10 years on an H1-B, get's a green card and stays in the US.

Very politically charged statement. It doesn't matter what the end result of what they do.

It's about who gets the cards in the first place. If India can undercut it'll just be more indians instead of having diverse backgrounds from around the world. As diverse as India could be there are other reasons to pull people from other countries fairly.

This seems exclusively to increase Indian immigration rates and not actually improving diversity of green cards given out. (If you want to play identity politics)

India has ~18% of world population, and still are way less proportionately as immigrant population.

Genetically, Indians are the most diverse ( next to entire African continent ) than any where else. Religion wise (ALL major ones and many, many minor too), linguistically, culturally too.

By any objective measure group of Indians immigrant will be way more diverse as an immigrant population, unless you define diversity incomplete until a favored group of people is not highly included.

In a highly capitalist world, there's no free lunch; surely most of the immigrant must be bringing great value?

Yes, to answer your question, the GC will be given to people from one country for a decade or more.

In the same time, people from Philippines, China etc will EVENTUALLY benefit from it, but before that "benefit", they will suffer more than 10 year wait because of the initial impact of this bill.

The Philippines, Mexico, and China hit their cap as well, so they would benefit as well.

They will eventually, but two things: 1. Before they benefit from it, they will need to wait like 10+ years because of the initial impact from India. 2. Immigration laws change constantly (on the magnitude of 10 years), TBH, who knows how it's gonna change in the next ten years. So, to hope something that will eventually benefit people (in like 10 years) and hurt them now, I don't see much hope in it.

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