To understand the American immigration system today, we must understand the history of the system. Before the 1965 immigration act, the US had a quota system that gave set amount of immigration visas to each country. The quota was set with the idea that the Northwestern Europeans are racially superior than other Europeans, let alone people of color. This is the same idea as Nazi Germany’s ideology. Before 1965, Northwestern European countries like Germany got about 65000 visas per country per year, Italy and Poland got about 1500 each, while the whole Asian continent was barred from immigration.
In 1965 America tried to pretend it’s better than Nazi without taking in too many non-white immigrants. So the lawmakers invented the current system that more than 80% of immigration visas are family based. (By comparison, 2/3 of Canada’s immigration visas are given to skilled immigrants last year.) They thought with the racial make up of 1965, this setup would ensure most of the new immigrants are white. “Unfortunately” as we know today, this approach backfires by bringing much more Latinos than whites because Europeans are less interested in immigration and they are not having extended families now.
Another thing is the 7% national quota. This still works pretty well for the racists: undesired group, like Mexican will need to wait more than 20 years for family visas and Indians need to wait more than 50 years to get an EB visas. And they can still claim that there is no racial discrimination because every country, no matter if it’s Luxembourg or China, gets the same number of visas.
The third thing is the diversity visa lottery, it was first designed for illegal Irish immigrants in 1980s. After giving green cards to most of the white illegal immigrants, they modify this program according to the 7% quota system. By claiming this visa is for diversity, it can exclude Chinese, Indians and Mexicans from this type of visa. As we all know today, this backfires too because African has a lot of small countries as well. It became the most important source of black immigrants.
What Trump want to do is to make America white again. To achieve this goal, there are three things he could do: cut family based visa, cancel the diversity visa program, and decrease the number of refugees and asylees. That’s exactly what he is trying to do right now. The H1B/EB visa system is the only thing that work well for him: Chinese and Indians are blocked by the 7% quota; other undesirables like blacks and Latinos don’t produce many engineers; whites from Europe and Canada can still get green cards easily during their OPT. There is no reason for him to alter this system.
Another reason why he won’t increase H1B is he want to punish California and all the tech companies for our overwhelming support towards Clinton. The taxation and the net neutrality things are examples of his punishment. There is no way he will do something for the tech sector.
Sometimes I feel sad when I see some Indian or Chinese people believing Trump wants to make America great again and setup a merit based immigration system. If you know the plot is to make America white again and you know how he retaliated against the whole tech sector, you will know that Trump will keep H1B/EB system as is if not making it worse.
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comments
I think I don't agree with your point of 'punishing' tech tho. I think it's the tech industry (owners) that actively work to keep H1B and EB the way it is, to have a steady supply of immobile hard working individuals. Free mobility increases the amount you have to pay, and the single biggest expense for any software company is 'people'.
You were just lucky to be born here as a citizen or immigrated in a few years (probably) How are we law abiding Indian people/workers different than our Uruguayan or Turkish H1B colleagues who got their green cards in <2 years. H1B is misused and should be fixed. I'm not an IT engineer or a CS guy so don't know much about the abuse but in my industry of wireless hardware they're aren't many "Americans" to begin with, not many getting laid off and replaced by "cheap drones from India". Stop stereotyping all Indians as visa abusers or unskilled. Visit a grad school of any engineering school and then you'll know it's all Indians and Chinese. Your people don't wanna study and bitch a lot.