Higher-paid Immigrants Forced to Wait Longer Due to Per-country Limits

In America ’s strange legal immigration system, every country receives the exact same quota for green cards—7 percent of the number issued—regardless of how populous it is. When immigrants—mainly Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, and Mexicans—hitthese “per-country limits,” nationals of other countries may pass them in line. This createsmassive wait times for some immigrants, while cutting the waits for everyone else.In 2018, for example, employer-sponsored immigrants with bachelor ’s or master’s degreeswaited more than three years for a green card if they were born in China, and about a decade if they were born in India, while those from other countries waited less than a year. Going forward, the Indian wait will stretch onfor decades. The system is unfair, and for that reason alone, Congress should end it.But the per-country limits are also economically senseless. They prioritize the right birthplace over the right skills. In the employer-sponsored categories, businesses could decide to pay Indian or Chinese applicants much more than other immigrants, yet Indian or Chinese employees would still suffer the same pointless discrimination. Discriminating based on nationality, rather than skills, undercuts the productivity of the United States and lowers the average wage of new immigrants to the United States.To see if this was happening, I reviewedthe data on approved labor certifications submitted by employers in the EB2 and EB3 employer-sponsored immigrant classif...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 22, 2018 Category: American Health Authors: David Bier Source Type: blogs