[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.