Immigration Challenges

Citizenship lotteries

Immigration Challenge: Be fair, not random.

U.S. citizenship is one of the world’s greatest treasures; one that scores of millions – foreign and domestic – have sacrificed and suffered to attain over the past 200 hundred years. Yet our current system literally treats citizenship like a lottery. The U.S. government holds a lottery every year to give away 55,000 green cards (i.e. a permanent U.S. work permit and a path to citizenship) every year. Is this the way to run an immigration system?

The lottery was originally conceived by Irish-American lawmakers to grant green cards to Irish who were in the country illegally. Eligibility for the “diversity lottery,” as supporters of the raffle call it today, is determined by national origin (i.e. you are eligible – or not – based on the country of your birth).

Chain reactions

Immigration Challenge: Prioritize the family in a manageable system.

Over a quarter-million green cards (i.e. a permanent work permit and a path to citizenship) are issued every year based on nothing but the fact that the recipient has an extended-family relationship with an earlier immigrant. Each of those quarter million can go on to sponsor additional relatives, who sponsor theirs, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.

Like any chain reaction, the system is all but impossible to manage or control, contributing to unrecoverable backlogs, frustration, and diminished faith in legal immigration itself. The lawmakers who set the chain reaction in motion promised this would never happen, but “chain migration” remains at the heart of our immigration system today.

Birth Tourism

Immigration Challenge: Preserve the integrity of our “birthright”.

Citizens of other nations can enter the U.S. on a tourist visa (or cross the border illegally), take a weekend vacation, deliver a baby, and the U.S. government will automatically bestow “birthright citizenship” on the newborn. When the child turns 18, the whole family becomes eligible for green cards, setting off a new “chain migration” (see above). The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was intended to enfranchise former slaves and their descendants, not create the global “birth tourism” industry that we have today.

Rewards for not hiring Americans

Immigration Challenge: Meet our obligations to our national community.

There is a government program that offers employers a saving of 8.25% when they hire foreign workers. The most popular white-collar temporary visa program – supposedly created to fill urgent labor shortages – allows employers to hire captive foreign workers “even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job.”