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Comment by bankim | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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?

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