Despite Liberal Meltdown, Immigration Overhaul Could Boost Diversity

The RAISE Act, short for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment, would reduce immigration by low-skilled immigrants by curtailing the ability of newcomers to sponsor extended family members for permanent residency and by giving preferential treatment to people with work skills, education, and English abilities.

CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta suggested during a faceoff with Trump adviser Stephen Miller that it would result in immigrants mainly from Great Britain and Australia. Igor Volsky, vice president of the Center for American Progress, tweeted, “To be clear: if u support a policy that YOU KNOW will disproportionately impact ppl of color & KEEP THEM OUT OF U.S., you are a racist.”

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Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Calf.) called the proposed law on Twitter “cruel and inhumane.”

Mark Silverman, a lawyer with the San Francisco-based Immigration Legal Resource Center, told HuffPost, “Maybe they should change the inscription on the Statue of Liberty to ‘give me your computer engineers and your high-paid professionals yearning to increase their rate of return.'”

Despite the hyperbole, some immigration experts said the bill hardly would produce a monolithic white, English-speaking stream of immigrants. The bill would continue to allow Americans to bring in their spouses and children younger than 21.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that would ensure that a disproportionate share of the family-based green cards for the foreseeable future would continue to go to people of countries from which past immigration waves have come, albeit in lower numbers going forward.

Mehlman said accepting more immigrants based on merit would reorder the distribution of immigrants.

[lz_table title=”FY 2015 Green Cards” source=”Department of Homeland Security”]Where immigrants come from
|Original country,Share
Mexico/C. America,29.3%
Africa,9.4%
Europe,8.6%
China/Hong Kong,7%
India,5.8%
Rest of Asia,25.8%
South America,6.7%
Rest of world,7.4%
[/lz_table]

“Because of the nepotistic nature of our system, about a dozen countries control most of the immigration here,” he said. “And that shuts out the rest of the world.”

Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that the bill does not require English — contrary to some news coverage on the issue. Instead, it is one of six different factors in which green card applicants can earn points.

[lz_table title=”FY 2015 Green Card Categories” source=”Department of Homeland Security”]Type,Number
Family-sponsored,213.9K
Relatives of citizens,465.1K
Employment-based,144.1K
Refugees,118.4K
Diversity lottery,47.9K
Asylees,33.6K
Other,28.1K
|Total,1.05 million
[/lz_table]

“Canada’s immigration isn’t all English speakers, and they have an English component,” Camarota said.

Indeed, the 2006 Report to Parliament from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship agency shows that the top 10 countries sending immigrants to Canada in 2015 included China, Iran, Pakistan and Syria.

What’s more, Camarota said, relatively few people from first-world English-speaking countries such as Britain, Australia and Canada even want to come to the United States. But English is the official or second-most spoken language in a high number of developing countries.

[lz_table title=”Most Common Occupations” source=”Department of Homeland Security”]Most common occupations of FY 2015 permanent residents
|Type,Number
None/no outside work,456.5K
Students or children,251.7K
Management/professional,151.8K
Homemakers,139.5K
[/lz_table]

“English is widely spoken throughout the world,” he said, adding that many folks learn the language in East Asia and through much of Africa. “These are all countries where English is spoken and understood by educated classes.”

In 2015, according to the Department of Homeland Security, 29 percent of green cards went to people from Mexico and Central America. Another nearly 7 percent of green cards went to South Americans. Immigrants from those areas disproportionately get into America by way of family-based green cards because current policy favors family reunification.

Restricting chain migration likely would reduce immigration from those regions, where U.S.-bound immigrants disproportionately lack the skills and education to be competitive for green cards under the proposed system, according to experts.

Camarota said China, India and Nigeria — where immigrants to America are more likely to come on employment-based visas — likely would gain. That would make for a “somewhat more diverse flow” of immigrants, he said.

Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, said that the RAISE Act likely would increase diversity in one sense and reduce it in another.

“You won’t have one region of the world dominate like Mexico and Central America do now,” he said. “Instead of having one region dominate, you’d probably have several regions that are really dominant.”

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On the other hand, Beck said, eliminating the diversity visa lottery — which awards about 50,000 green cards each year to applicants selected randomly from across the world — likely would significantly reduce immigration from many small countries around the world that have few family connections to the United States.

Beck said polling his organization sponsored over the summer found overwhelming support for the idea of giving preference to English speakers, because they are more likely to assimilate.

“Almost everything about this bill is popular, but the English thing is the most popular,” he said, adding that people have a visceral reaction to experiencing situations where they cannot communicate with people in their own communities.”You really feel like you’ve lost one of your senses.”

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Grand Canyon National Park)