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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> how do we encourage the "right" kind of immigrants for the skills or roles we want to expand

Remove a decade long backlog for Indian nationals coming to work in Skilled fields (STEM, Accounting, Healthcare, Finance, Law) by speeding up processing times by hiring more bodies at USCIS Processing Centers.

And also maybe not forcing every Chinese national who studied STEM in China to go through enhanced background checks [0].

And also hiring more immigration judges (I knew a former Immigration Judge with the DHS - they de facto had a hiring freeze since the 2010s, leading to case backlogs).

Tl;dr - stop defunding the DHS and USCIS

[0] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/06/04/2020-12...

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Maybe we're thinking of different things, but isn't the backlog for Indian citizens caused by a fixed number of visas per year and per country caps? If you track the visa bulletin [0] they call out when a green card number is ready for your category, and India has its own set of dates because their country is so oversubscribed.

0 - https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

Agreed all of those can and should be done. IMO none of those are related to encouraging immigration though, only removing legal blockers.

The incentives exist, we just need to get out of peoples' way and let people immigrate here.

Alternatively, we could alter the statue of liberty and remove the poem if we collectively don't want to welcome immigrants of all skills and situations.

> encouraging immigration though

Skilled Immigration is already encouraged by the salary bump.

The issue is skilled immigration has been backlogged, as the existing system hasn't been reformed since the 2000s.

It's the backlog that pushed Chinese, South Korean, Taiwanese, and now Indian immigrants to consider staying put instead of spending 5-10 years living under the fact that you might be asked to leave in 60 days.

Sure, but that was my point. We need to remove barriers, we don't need to further encourage immigration.

There are plenty of federal agencies that are underfunded or being tacitly defunded, DHS is absolutely not one of them.

USCIS:

https://immigrationimpact.com/2023/01/17/uscis-funding-crisi...

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