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Comment by gopi | Hacker News Reader

For Engineers and Doctors from India, its takes more than 20 years to get Green card now. Its because of the arcane country quota system which assigns the same numerical quota for each country regardless of population, so India and Monaco get the same number of Green cards.

This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.

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It has nothing to do with Racism. It's a quota.

If there were more people from New Zealand than India trying to apply, it would be harder for New Zealanders.

I've lived aboard and had residency in two other nations. The overall amount of people applying is outrageous. That's the real problem. 22,000,000 apply for 50,000 green cards.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/23/application...

Btw this thing is based on country of birth and not country of citizenship. So basically even a person who is a European citizen and born in India cant get a green card before 20 years. Does that change your view?

IIRC it's based on the number of immigrants from each country, not their race? As an example, a black person from Jamaica will have a much easier time than someone from India or China simply because there are fewer applicants from their small country.

there is no racist element to this; all countries have the same quotas.

India, China, Mexico, Philippines etc have backlogs because more people try to get in from these.

FIFO is a fairer strategy.

Applicants from Oceania have 5% to 10% chance of winning the green card lottery in a given year. India is like 0.01 percent or something silly like that.

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