Immigration: Removing Per-Country Caps on Employment-Based Green Cards Would Paralyze System

A saying sometimes attributed to George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is, “If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.” The rationale behind the current effort to remove per-country caps on employment-based green cards may well be similar: If there’s a problem with part of the system, break the whole system.

Under current U.S. law, only 7 percent of many types of visas can go to immigrants from any one country. In theory, this is meant to prevent one or two countries from monopolizing all the visas. In practice, one country’s nationals can exceed the 7 percent cap if visas would otherwise be left unused; for instance, Indian nationals regularly use much more than 7 percent of the visas in the major employment categories. For most countries in the world, there is currently a minimal backlog of applicants seeking employment-based green cards. The big exceptions to that are India and China. According to the Congressional Research Service, an Indian national seeking green-card status under EB1 (the highest-priority employment-based visa category) could wait eight years; someone from Kenya would wait a year or less.

FB

About the Author

Fred Bauer

Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

A saying sometimes attributed to George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is, “If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.” The rationale behind the current effort to remove per-country caps on employment-based green cards may well be similar: If there’s a problem with part of the system, break the whole system.

Under current U.S. law, only 7 percent of many types of visas can go to immigrants from any one country. In theory, this is meant to prevent one or two countries from monopolizing all the visas. In practice, one country’s nationals can exceed the 7 percent cap if visas would otherwise be left unused; for instance, Indian nationals regularly use much more than 7 percent of the visas in the major employment categories. For most countries in the world, there is currently a minimal backlog of applicants seeking employment-based green cards. The big exceptions to that are India and China. According to the Congressional Research Service, an Indian national seeking green-card status under EB1 (the highest-priority employment-based visa category) could wait eight years; someone from Kenya would wait a year or less.