The Senate Gang of Eight has apparently considered one sliver of rationality in its daily dose of planning America's national assisted suicide. The sliver of sanity is curbing chain migration.
Granted, the rest of what's come from the gangsters stinks: one-size-fits-all amnesty for 11 million-plus illegal aliens, overall higher immigration from a massive new "guestworker" program, and zero meaningful enforcement.
The one decent idea under consideration (proving that, like the broken clock that's right twice a day, even amnesty zealots can have a periodic thought that's not destructive and reckless) would eliminate some of the extended family visas in favor of "more high-skilled foreign workers", the Washington Post reported:
As it stands, spouses and minor children of citizens are given top priority, followed by unmarried children over 21 and, lastly, married adult children and siblings. The Senate proposal would eliminate the latter two categories altogether, which add up to about 90,000 visas per year. Those people could still apply for entry into the country but would need other qualifications, such as high-tech skills, to be approved for a green card.
The permanent visa preference system presently enables the original immigrant to sponsor not only his or her spouse and minor children, but also elderly parents, adult siblings, and grown children. In-laws and distant relations eventually qualify for a visa. NumbersUSA has created a chart that illustrates how this multiplies exponentially, given the visa preference system that prioritizes "family reunification" over skills and education.
Successive immigration laws have exacerbated chain migration. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act put relatives ahead of most exceptionally skilled foreign professionals and cut skills/education categories way down to just 20 percent of visas (which is further watered down because these two preferences include spouses and children).
The 1990 Immigration Act set up two preference systems, keeping business-related visas at 20 percent and diluting those quotas with immediate family, while more than doubling the overall immigrant quota. It also created the "diversity" visa lottery (for Teddy Kennedy's Irish visa earmark).
While family reunification has long been part of America's immigration system, the preference then strongly emphasized nuclear families. And for much of the 20th Century, prospective immigrants having special skills and education that would advance the United States' economy comprised the first visa preference and accounted for half of the visas.
That explains why immigrants in the early and middle part of the past century often were entrepreneurial. (Besides being especially skilled and educated, there was no American welfare state to reward immigrant dependency. If they became dependent on public resources, such as they were, such public charges faced deportation.)
Today, chain migration leads to a world of harmful consequences. These include America becoming a retirement system for aged parents (with immigrant parents' fiscal drain on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security), setting false expectations of a visa for the lower preference relatives (which can stimulate illegal immigration), and enabling redistribution of wealth through immigrant participation in programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit (which explicitly diminishes the Social Security trust fund).
You can't be a true fiscal hawk and support mass legalization of 11 million (maybe more than that, once all the frauds get legalized, too). And you can't be a thinking person and support the continuation of handing out visas based on nothing more than being someone's cousin, uncle, or grandparent, or the luck of the draw.
