The promotion of family reunification was codified in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, and the 480,000-plus family-based visas eat up most of the 675,000 immigrant visas that the U.S. grants each year. In today’s global competition for talent and innovation, that’s a blueprint for mediocrity. And changing it isn’t as heartless as it sounds. In 1952, it cost a lot of money to hop on a (propeller) plane to visit your relatives; you couldn’t dial them up on Skype for pennies a minute; you couldn’t read the same local papers or watch the same programs or enjoy the same music as relatives in your native place, much less send them parcels or money as cheaply as you can now. It’s a lot easier to stay in touch, even in effect to live in two countries at once.
With his executive order potentially shielding as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation for up to three years, President Barack Obama took a welcome step toward dealing with what my colleague Frank Wilkinson calls "The Fact" -- the entrenched presence of an estimated 11 million undocumented souls in the U.S.
That’s cold comfort, though, to the 4.3 million would-be Americans hoping to legally join their U.S. citizen or green-card holding relatives on the basis of family ties. They’ve been waiting, in some cases for decades, for their numbers to be called. They found no joy in Obama’s speech. And after hearing it, they could be forgiven for concluding that breaking the law is more likely to pay off than observing it.
If Obama and the U.S. Congress wanted to help them and the country, they could let them all in -- and then blow up the existing framework of family preferences and replace it with a points system similar to what exists in New Zealand and Canada.
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IPO Of The Week: The Habit Restaurants
The promotion of family reunification was codified in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, and the 480,000-plus family-based visas eat up most of the 675,000 immigrant visas that the U.S. grants each year. In today’s global competition for talent and innovation, that’s a blueprint for mediocrity. And changing it isn’t as heartless as it sounds. In 1952, it cost a lot of money to hop on a (propeller) plane to visit your relatives; you couldn’t dial them up on Skype for pennies a minute; you couldn’t read the same local papers or watch the same programs or enjoy the same music as relatives in your native place, much less send them parcels or money as cheaply as you can now. It’s a lot easier to stay in touch, even in effect to live in two countries at once.
IPO Of The Week: The Habit Restaurants
With his executive order potentially shielding as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation for up to three years, President Barack Obama took a welcome step toward dealing with what my colleague Frank Wilkinson calls "The Fact" -- the entrenched presence of an estimated 11 million undocumented souls in the U.S. That’s cold comfort, though, to the 4.3 million would-be Americans hoping to legally join their U.S. citizen or green-card holding relatives on the basis of family ties. They’ve been waiting, in some cases for decades, for their numbers to be called. They found no joy in Obama’s speech. And after hearing it, they could be forgiven for concluding that breaking the law is more likely to pay off than observing it. If Obama and the U.S. Congress wanted to help them and the country, they could let them all in -- and then blow up the existing framework of family preferences and replace it with a points system similar to what exists in New Zealand and Canada.