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Comment by eshvk | Hacker News Reader

> I'd hope they remove country based discrimination in EB visas. And better yet pass immigration reform sooner rather than later.

What country based discrimination? The quotas are to prevent two countries from flooding the immigration markets and making sure diversity exists.

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When employers hire workers, the birthplace of the worker is irrelevant. For people with the same qualification and experience, why would you discriminate between someone from Ireland, UK, India or China. For you it should be the same, and it is illegal to consider otherwise. Now, why doesn't this extend when converting them to a permanent visa?

The same reason we have diversity in work places and that American workplaces are not all filled with straight, white men.

You can't comprise of 90% of any population and whine about discrimination. That is not how society works.

India and China are vast countries, the diversity should also take into account population/area of the country on which limits are enforced.

In which we learn that there is not such thing as non-bias. Whether de facto or de jure, there are always biases. Either a person chooses them, or nature chooses them. There is no universally "fair" distribution over a scarce commodity.

> India and China are vast countries, the diversity should also take into account population/area of the country on which limits are enforced.

It is not clear to me how having a diverse country that is not dominated by immigrants from one or two ethnicities arrives from letting this happen. Or how it is fair to the guy from random tiny country X when he has to compete against two largest sources of immigrants to this country.

> Or how it is fair to the guy from random tiny country X when he has to compete against two largest sources of immigrants to this country.

Compete for what?

It is a bit ridiculous that Iceland and China have the same caps.

Is there an overview of what the per-country caps are, and how long someone from a given country might expect to wait until they get a green card?

The monthly visa bulletin:

http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy...

Applicants from any single 'country of chargeability' cannot exceed 7% of the total number of available employment-based green cards in a year [1].

In practice, someone from Iceland or Tuvalu can get an EB (category 2) visa in about a year, whereas the average for someone from India or China is more like 5-6 years [2].

[1] http://www.uscis.gov/tools/glossary/country-limit

[2] These rough numbers are from observations on http://www.trackitt.com, where applicants self-report application statistics

The diversity argument is turned on its head - esp. when there is legislation to legalize "illegal/undocumented" workers who are mostly from Latin America and primarily from Mexico. Indians are not even 1% of US population. The Green Card caps per country is absolute joke.

There's a separate category specifically designed to diversify the source nation of incoming immigrants -- the DV (lottery) green cards. It has a quota of 50,000 visa per year, as compared to around 77,000 for all of EB-2 & EB-3. The purpose of those visas is supposed to be bringing qualified workers into the United States, additional restrictions just hurt that goal.

Furthermore, it doesn't make any sense to treat each country as if it were equal size. The per country employment based limit is not much less than Tuvalu's entire population.

There is no "per country employment based limit". It doesn't matter if you were born in France or Tuvalu, everyone gets an equal shot at the H1B. The "per country limit" is for a more permanent status. I see no problem in the country deciding that it doesn't want to become a homogenous society dominated by one ethnicity. This is completely different from employment based equality.

Employment based (EB) is the name of one of two major categories of permanent resident visas. It's a term of art that doesn't include H1Bs. Given that what you quoted included the term EB I thought that was rather clear.

As for one ethnicity dominating the country -- the entire permanent resident visa program subject to the 7% rule is only 366,000 visas per year or .1% of the population. Even if all of those visas went only to Indians and Chinese the US would be in no danger of being "dominated" by one (or rather two) ethnicities. In any event on the family based side, which has a larger allocation than the employment based, it is Filipinos and Mexicans who face the longest waits, not Indians and Chinese. Finally the mapping between ethnicities and countries of birth is not one to one.

Thing is, its not even ethnicity that decides the cap. Its 'place of birth'. If you are an Indian citizen, born in the UK, you get to skip the Indian line.

Still, I see no basis for discrimination based on place of birth, ethnicity, race, caste, creed, color etc. when I can do my job right and be good at it. I would agree that if it were a lottery or family based immigration, such caps could prevent chain immigration. However, employment based visas having that cap makes absolutely no sense and blatantly discriminates.

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