Why HR392 is not enough
American immigration law are rooted in racism. The last American law that was named correctly was called “Chinese Exclusion Act” where a white majority managed to pass a law to kick out legal residents of the country and forcibly taking over their property. Of course, it is the same country that until recently considered blacks as animals.
But when American leaders pompously talk about “illegal immigration” you need to realise that they harass legal immigrants even more and subject them to more inhumane restrictions.
H1B is a dual intent visa. American leaders talk about H1B fraud but in reality have managed to catch anything but minuscule number of people for fraud. Once Indians started excelling in technology they started using this visa to come to USA and then move to Green cards.
American leaders were quick to come up with a cap on these visas. They used the completely irrational and false argument of job loss (look up Lump of Labour Fallacy).
The cap on H1B was 65,000 and cap on Green cards is 140,000. However out of those 140,000 green cards not more than 7% can be given to people “Born In” any single country. Note that it is not about citizenship but which country you were born into. Something that you could not possibly have controlled.
That means Indians can at max get 9800 green cards a year even though around 40,000 of them arrive each year on the dual intent visa. Basic math tells you that this queue will never converge to 0.
Maintaining Diversity
One of the most bogus argument for the country limits is that we need to ensure diversity. It makes no sense because employment based green cards are only 6-12% of total green cards issued. Around 800,000 green cards are issued each year to the relatives of Americans. Clearly those 800k overwhelmingly go to white people from Europe and others because majority of American population is white with European ancestry.
Indians and Chinese are a minority among minority in USA. If the objective is to maintain racial diversity it makes sense to have much greater cap for these two minority groups instead of peddling diversity of others in employment based category.
The merit based immigration myth
The merit based immigration is a lip service and rooted in belief that non-whites can not have merit. For example all employment based green card petitions are for high skilled individuals as vetted by department of labour after 6 months of careful review and process.
The current waiting period for EB1 category for Indians is “SIX” years. EB1 is defined as category for extra-ordinary individuals who have won things like Olympic medals, Noble Prize, Fields Medal and so on.
How can you ask a person of that caliber to wait for 6 years and let a pastry chef from Brazil come before him ? (Nothing against chefs or Brazillians either, but just an example)
The Jobs Myth
Economics ignorants argue that this will somehow take away jobs. This wont. On the contrary many of H1Bs will be able to quit their jobs and simply retire in country side. Currently you can not live in USA without being on someone’s payroll.
Even with the green card backlog all the H1B holders continue to live USA and will be forced to work for same employer for decades. But if they have green cards they can quit, negotiate better wages and so on.
People can actually leave USA
In a pure racist point of view also green cards are better than H1Bs because people can actually spend most of their time in India and come to USA only few months in the year. Something that a lot of people actually already doing.
In fact India is much cheaper to live in on an American income. Having more green card holder Indians will actually reduce the visible Indian people from the country.
Why HR392 is not enough
HR392 removes the cap but does not do justice to those who are already in the queue. Even after the cap is removed the queue continues to grow.
What HR392 should be changed into is a periodic flushing for this queue so those who are already in the country for more than 5 years automatically should get their green cards.