Reforming the US immigration system to make America attractive again
Vivek Ramaswamy to have become the most popular Republican presidential candidate after Donald Trump. Recently, Ramaswamy had pledged to overhaul the H-1B visa system, advocating for a merit-based selection process, instead of the current lottery system.
The US immigration system is widely recognised as broken. But issues at the US-Mexico border take precedence over much-needed reforms for legal immigrants, including skilled workers, entrepreneurs and students.
In the context of reforms, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had tweeted, ‘One of the easiest policy wins I can imagine for the US is to reform high-skill immigration. The fact that many of the most talented people in the world want to be here is a hard-won gift. Embracing them is the key to keeping it that way.
Hard to get this back if we lose it.’
The need for legal immigration reforms extends beyond H-1B visas. It includes addressing the employment-linked green card backlog, which particularly affects Indian nationals, and preventing family separations due to ‘agedout’ children. There is also a need to create new visa categories, such as for startup founders.
Bills introduced for such reforms have faced challenges in the legislative process.
The legal immigration system in the US is riddled with static immigration quotas for work visas. In addition to numerical quotas, the immigration laws also micromanage demographics with a per-country cap for green cards.
According to a Cato Institute study based on March 2023 data, about 1.07 million Indians are stuck in the employment green card backlog (EB-2 and EB-3 categories), with a processing time estimated at 134 years (or 54 years when considering factors like death or ageing out). In July, Canada seized the opportunity to
