Why the Legal Immigration System Is Broken: A Short List of Problems

By David Bier

JULY 10, 2018

In no particular order, here is a list of a few problems that comprehensive immigration reform should address

1. A far too restrictive system overall. Since 1820, the United States admitted on average 30 percent more legal immigrants per capita (0.45 percent of the population per year) than it did in 2017 (0.35 percent of the population), so the current rate is low historically. More importantly, the U.S. net immigration rate − legal and illegal − ranks in the bottom third of the 50 countries with the highest percapita GDP in the world, and the U.S. share of foreign-born residents is also in the bottom third. This is at a time when population growth is at its lowest levels since the Great Depression, and the U.S. birthrate is the lowest on record. Congress should make it far easier to immigrate legally.

2. Static immigration quotas. Since 1990, Congress has not updated the quotas for the legal immigration system. During that time, the population of the United States has increased 30 percent and the economy has doubled. Quotas − to the extent that they exist at all − should be linked to economic growth (in the case of employment-based immigrants) or population growth (in the case of familysponsored immigrants), so they don’t immediately become antiquated.

3. Quotas on nationalities − the law micromanages immigrant demographics. Congress treats immigrants differently based on where they were born (literally their place of birth − they can’t even escape this system by getting citizenship in another country). No “country” (i.e. nationals or former nationals of that country) can receive more than 7 percent of the total green cards in a category. These per-country limits are why Indian immigrants sponsored by their employers may have to wait decades for a green card, while other immigrants sponsored by their employers don’t have to wait at all. Congress should repeal the per-country limits and ban discrimination based on nationality.

4. Immigrants wait in line for decades. The symptom of the low quotas and differential treatment for individual nationalities is that nationals from certain countries must wait a long time to immigrate. Siblings and adult children of U.S. citizens from Mexico and the Philippines who are receiving their green cards right now waited two decades. Those who are applying for their green cards now will die before they reach the front of the line because so many applicants have piled up in the backlog since 1998. Immigrant workers from India have had decade-long waits, but those applying right now will wait more than a century. Such wait times are not reasonable. Congress should raise the quotas, but at the same time, it should also limit wait times to no more than 5 years.

5. The president can end the refugee program unilaterally. In and of itself, the fact that the president can permit more refugees is no problem. That is important when a crisis breaks out somewhere in the world. But the idea that the president can unilaterally shut down the entire refugee program, as President Trump has almost done, is absurd. Congress should establish a floor for refugee admissions, and it should permit private refugee sponsorship by individuals, as Canada already does. The easiest way to implement private sponsorship would be to expand family sponsorship categories to extended family members and exempt immediate family of citizens and legal permanent residents who are refugees from the green card limits or, alternatively, create a new category for sponsored refugee immigrants. This category would enable U.S. citizens to have a role in the number of refugees and allow them to target refugees for aid with whom they have a personal connection.

(Adapted from www.cato.org)

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