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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It’s not weird when you understand that Americans never voted to have a skilled immigration system: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... Had someone tried to get one through Congress, they would have lost elections.

The system we have is one that was politically feasible to implement. On paper, we have a system for “non-immigrant” temporary workers. Employers sponsor green cards for skilled workers because the theoretically temporary job is the only avenue for most of these workers to get to the U.S. in the first place.

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I know you post this canon of "but acktually, Congress didn't want skilled immigration" in all threads, so it's useful to point to the actual legislative record, AC21 (American Competitiveness in the 21st Century), which is the most recent passed legislation that covers a lot this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_in_th...).

Yes, that’s useful:

> summary, the provisions of AC21 did the following:

> They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers")

All of this is done under the pretense that these are temporary workers who will eventually go home. That’s the only way Congress could get away with it, and it seems like people are now wising up to it.

There is no pretense. You can read past the line that confirms your world view. "They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers") acquired by filing Form I-129, as well as the employment-based immigrant categories for immigration (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3, acquired through Form I-140), thereby increasing the number of people who at a given time could be in that status." The bill acknowledges that there is a massive backlog in the H-1B->GC pipeline and while it's hard to get bipartisan consensus on supply side reform, it makes incremental progress in making lives of people in the backlog a little better.

I was literally just quoting the first two sentences in the section describing the provisions of the law.

I was talking about your claim that there is pretense or there is some ruse and that people are wising up now. If you read the entire bill, it covers all sorts of classes of non-immigrants and immigrants and the path from one to the other. If you think Congress was duped, I don't know what to tell you.

> but acktually

Did you need this to get your point across?

That’s just a weird modern view tainted by recent nativist and populist sentiments. If you go back 20 years, in 2006, it would be utterly not controversial for a republican politician to support issuing green cards to anyone who completed a PhD in America.

You should listen to the NYT podcast I linked! It describes decades of exactly what I’m talking about, and the NYT is neither nativist nor populist. Yes, the Bush-era GOP was shilling for cheap labor for big business. There is a reason a Bush can’t even get elected dog catcher in Texas anymore.

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