The Indian, Chinese, and tech lobby are threatening immigrants from other countries
A new bill called H.R. 1044 (really a repackaged version of H.R. 392 which failed to pass last year) is threatening immigrants who are filing green cards from countries other than India, China, and few other countries with the most applicants. Being a legal immigrant from Malaysia, I have been relatively silent on this issue, but no longer.
This bill promises “fairness,” but only to immigrants from these countries. The issue is that only 140,000 green cards are allocated every year, no matter how many applications there are, and only 7% of the total green cards are allocated to any one country. However, as you can imagine, the vast majority of legal immigrants come from these two populous countries, and so they have been on the processing backlog for years, some as long as potentially decades. For more details, I highly encourage you to read this well-written article from Forbes:
The problem is that this bill promises to resolve the issue by clearing the backlog, particularly for India and China. Unfortunately, it doesn’t remove or increase the annual 140,000 cap on green cards. This means that green card petitioners from hundreds of other countries, like myself, could be delayed for decades.
This bill simply doesn’t solve the pressing legal migration issue that no one wants to talk about. Yes, it is unfair to Indians and Chinese who are talented, and have worked hard for years. However, an open secret is that there are far too many Indians and Chinese who game the system, at the expense of even other people from their own countries who are far more deserving.
This bill is simply not fair: it is just the majority rule threatening the minority like myself and countless others. It is being backed by more than two hundred cosponsors at the time of writing (including Tulsi Gabbard, which I’m very disappointed about), and tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and IBM. Yes, we need fairness, but we need a better solution than this blatantly unfair bill. I do not write this with any animosity towards my friends from these countries, but I have worked hard to make things better in this country for close to twelve years now, and people like me deserve fairness, too. Please share this far and wide: legal migrants like myself are in the minority, and do not have a voice.
