[jmyeet]

Just speaking for the US:

- Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only;

- Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently;

- Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth;

- Spouses of green card holders and unmarried children under 21 of green card holders have a wait of 1-2 years generally;

- Married children of US citizens have a wait of 10-25 years;

Additionally, the president has broad powers to limit giving visas (nonimmigrant or immigrant) for consular processing thanks to Trump v. Hawaii [1] that mostly cannot be challenged in court. There are various bans on this for 19, 39 and 75 countries. It is unlikely many of these people will not be able to get a visa at all at least until Trump leaves office.

Immigration has become a political scapegoat for many things from housing prices to crime to unemployment. There's no evidence of any of this. Housing is particularly funny. Migrants (undocumented or documented) aren't the reason your rent is through the roof. Also, migrants of any type commit fewer crimes on a per-capita rate than US citizens [2].

If you want to look at actual immigration abuse, I'll give you two examples:

1. There are credible allegations Elon Musk was out-of-status after leaving Stanford [3]. This matters because, if true, it makes him ineligible to adjust to an employment-based green card and, by extension, it means he can be denaturalized. USCIS under this administration is more aggressively pursuing denaturalization. Do you think that includes Elon Musk? Yeah, me neither;

2. Melania Trump, a model from Slovakia, came to the US on a tourist visa in 1996 and allegedly worked on that visa, which is unauthorized. She later got an EB-1 green card in 2001 [4], colloquially known as an "Einstein visa". Again, unauthorized work here would make her ineligible to adjust status and could be grounds for denaturalization as well. Do you think USCIS will pursue that? No, me neither. Also, she engaged in the Republican sin of "chain migration" by sponsoring her parents in 2006.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii

[2]: https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigra...

[3]: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/11/11/elon-musk-stanford-work...

[4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318

[rayiner]

Immediate relatives is totally uncapped and includes parents. So right there, each skilled immigrant can bring over a spouse and ultimately four parents. And those four people are going to be the least likely to work and assimilate due to their age. On top of that, although the family preference visas are capped, the cap is very high: 226,000 per year. That's triple the number of skilled workers.

I don't care about this or that individual. The problem is volume. When we came to the U.S. in 1989, there were only 10,000 Bangladeshis. Today there are over 600,000. There are "Little Bangladeshes" in many cities. I have a hard time believing highly skilled H1B workers and their kids are going to create these enclaves.

[selimthegrim]

This is about the 1983409258094th time I have to remind you about Vivek Bald's book about Bengali Harlem. There were more than 10k but they would be counting themselves as Black or Latin by that point.

[rayiner]

Do you think the fraction identifying as Bengali has changed? So the 10k to 600k number doesn't reflect actual growth?

Bangladesh got 66 H1B visas in 2025, and 2 O1 visas. Even if that pace was consistent since 1989, that's under 3,000 H1Bs. If there were really 10,000 Bangladeshis in 1989, the population should be under 15,000 people today accounting for natural population growth: https://ile.github.io/population-calculator/#human_age=80&ti....

For the 600,000 figure to be accurate, there must have been hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis already here in 1989 who started identifying as Bangladeshi since then. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. But those figures are shocking for a country that provides the U.S. with a very small number of skilled immigrants.

[selimthegrim]

Here is a recent interview/podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AKGrXQAkKM

You might enjoy Fatima Shaik's books as well (although her forebears were from what is now W. Bengal - which serves to draw out my point - they came like my ancestors before Partition and before 1971, so some were not even aware of what happened or that they were Bengali-descended as opposed to "East Indian" without some research). Remember Bengal and Orissa were joined at a certain point and Bengal was divided at least once before so things were in flux well before 1947.

[jmyeet]

I will never understand not respect migrants whose first instinct is to close the door behind them the second they get to wherever they're going.

This is not a real problem. First we're assuming that migrants only marry foreigners. A significant portion of green cards are issued to people who marry a US citizen or green card holder so there's no spouse there and, at most, one set of parents. Also, it's not like every parent wants to come to the US.

And who really cares if parents come over? They don't get Social Security. They probably don't get Medicare either.

We are in fact completely dependent upon immigration with a fertility rate of ~1.54 per woman. Many industries (eg construction, agriculture) are completely dependent on migrant labor.

[rayiner]

> This is not a real problem.

It doesn't matter what you or I think constitutes a "real problem." The underlying premise of the law is limiting the number and type of immigrants. If a law allows only ~100,000 highly scrutinized skilled workers, but then has a loophole for hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants with no skills and no filtering, then it is broken under its own animating premises.

It's like building a biometric security door and then installing an unlocked sliding barn door right beside it. You can't argue that "well, we don't really need to control who gets access." We went to all that trouble to build the security door, so there must be a reason.

And family reunification is largely unnecessary. Maybe you need a small number of family greencards connected to O and E visas, to attract superstar workers that are well established in their careers. But otherwise, the U.S. could easily fill 65,000 H1B slots just from single college students who don't need to bring family with them.

[selimthegrim]

She's from Slovenia.