13 minute read
Uncapped Potential by Sarah Roberts
Uncapped Potential
A case for ending country-based green card quotas
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by Sarah Roberts ’24, an intended Philosophy concentrator and an Associate Editor of the magazine at BPR
infographic by Jiahua Chen ’24 and Madi Ko ’21
In 2016, John Doe, an Indian national who earned a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, founded a US-based computer vision company. For three years straight, Doe participated in the United States temporary work visa lottery while pursuing permanent residence. Doe’s lottery entries were unsuccessful, and the delays in the green card process prompted Doe to leave the United States for his home country and take his company with him, resulting in the layoff of 20 American employees.
Today, millions of high-skilled immigrants are stuck in this frustrating limbo, waiting years to become “green card holders,” or permanent residents of the United States. Currently, there are annual limits and per-country green card quotas based on the applicant’s “state of chargeability,” which is most commonly their country of birth. These quotas create enormous backlogs that bring uncertainty about immigrants’ future status and discourage many international students, professionals, and entrepreneurs—some of the United States’ most talented immigrants—from building a career and a life in America. Failure to solve this problem threatens the competitiveness of many domestic companies and undermines US innovation, resulting in preventable economic losses. Moreover, the inequitable distribution of per-country green card quotas for highly educated immigrants is blatantly discriminatory, as it privileges nationality over merit. Congress must reevaluate its green card limits based on state of chargeability, especially as the demand for green cards continues to soar.
In the US, applying for a green card is a multistep process. First, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approves an employment-based immigrant petition. The beneficiary of this petition can then apply for a green card only if the quota set for their state of chargeability has not already been reached for the year. If the quota has been filled, the applicant enters the green card waitlist, where they are stuck in limbo until a green card becomes available. In a supposed attempt to democratize the share of green cards, the US prevents immigrants from any individual birthplace from receiving more than seven percent of issued green cards in a year. As a result, the backlog consists almost entirely of immigrants from countries with the largest number of petitioners, such as India and China. Indian immigrants have the largest backlog, making up 75 percent of the total waitlist, with a hopeless wait of up to 50 years for talented (and often US-educated) professionals and entrepreneurs. At the current rate of increase, the US’s total green card backlog will surpass 2.4 million people by 2030.
The US’s current green card system generates both overt and hidden economic losses. Many immigrants waiting to become permanent residents have skills in short supply in the US labor market, particularly in STEM fields. The largest number of backlogged applications for Indian and Chinese immigrants occur in the EB-2 and EB-3 green card categories, which are the primary green cards given to foreign doctors, skilled workers, and other professionals with undergraduate and graduate degrees. On average, Indian and Chinese immigrants receive wage offers that are about 30 percent higher than the average offer for other EB-2 and EB-3 petition beneficiaries. Clearly, these individuals are in high demand in the labor market and are filling much-needed positions. There is no sound economic reason to uphold policies that make these higher-paid immigrants wait longer for green cards because of their birthplace. It is also worth noting that over 92 percent of EB-2 and EB-3 individuals from India who receive green cards are already in the United States working with temporary status, mainly under the H-1B work visa or F-1 student visas. Unlike green cards, H-1B work visas and F-1 student visas are issued without regard to nationality, with the former only having an overall annual cap instead of a per-country cap. H-1B workers can renew their visas indefinitely as long as they remain on the green card waitlist, which underscores the arbitrary nature of the state of chargeability rule.
Although these individuals can continue to work in the United States while they move toward the front of the line, there are many restrictions during the wait that prevent them from fully contributing to the economy and society as a whole. Primarily, H-1B workers waiting for their green cards cannot easily change positions or employers. If an H-1B holder changes jobs, their new employer needs to restart the green card process from scratch, something many employers—and employees—are reluctant to do. There is also the potential for the new petition to be denied, causing these immigrants to hesitate to change jobs regardless of what this new opportunity may entail. If H-1B employers go out of business or downsize during the waiting period, the visa holder needs to find a new position within 60 days to remain in the US and the green card queue. It is also extremely challenging for these visa holders to start their own businesses, which limits their potential to innovate and create more jobs within the US.
Another harm of the green card process is that the US loses many skilled immigrants to other countries. The H-1B restrictions and the absurd wait times drive billions of dollars in investment and thousands of skilled workers abroad to countries with more open employment-based immigration policies, such as Canada. In 2017, the number of skilled workers in STEM fields that received an opportunity for permanent residence from the Canadian government exploded, with accepted applications from Indian citizens increasing from 9,584 in 2016 to 26,340 in 2018. Recognizing the flow of immigrants from the US, the Canadian government has said it will grant permanent residence to 195,800 economic migrants in 2020.
Beyond the economic impact, these per-country quotas are fundamentally inconsistent with America’s stated values of equal opportunity. Though those who support these quotas claim to support giving a fair shot to immigrants from every country, the hard cap of seven percent of issued green cards does not account for the variations in population of foreign nations. As previously stated, this disproportionately affects immigrants from India and China. It is a basic American principle that hiring decisions cannot be based on race, religion, or nationality. However, these policies and quotas allow the US government to filter the workforce based on nationality rather than merit. Although diversity is often a motivation for the inclusion of people with different backgrounds, in this case, the same argument is used to discriminate against people from certain countries.
In many ways, the most effective solution to this problem is simple: removing per-country caps. With the current system, immigrants in similar employment situations end up with wait times that diverge wildly for no reason other than their country of birth. Removing the per-country cap would balance out the wait times for immigrants, making the average time to process everyone in the EB-2 and EB-3 categories approximately six years. A caveat is the possibility of increased wait times for people from smaller countries, though these would not compare to the current decadeslong wait for Indian nationals. This reform would allow for a flood of immigrants from India and, to a lesser degree, China, at the expense of moderately long wait times for everyone in line, which is something all Americans should reasonably support. This change should also be coupled with an increase in the annual green card quota. Congress should link employment-based immigration quotas to economic growth, as rigid caps make little to no sense in the dynamic economy of the United States.
Congress must reevaluate and increase the green card limits based on birthplace due to the inequitable distribution of immigrant beneficiaries in the backlog. It is important to remember that this issue has existed throughout American history, and the American response has consistently been discriminatory. This issue is not simply about fairness; immigrants have been and continue to be the engine of the American economy, and the government should facilitate their entry into the US workforce rather than prevent it.
Interview with Keith Beauchamp
by Gabby Smith ’23 illustration by Nicholas Edwards ’23
Keith Beauchamp is a civil rights activist, filmmaker, and criminal investigator. When he was just 10 years old, he saw Emmett Till’s battered face while looking through Jet magazine. Determined to continue sharing Till’s story with the world, he released his groundbreaking Emmynominated documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, in 2005. His film not only launched Till’s story back into the national spotlight, but also spurred a reopening of the case by the Department of Justice over 50 years later. Beauchamp is now the executive producer and host of Investigation Discovery’s reality crime series, The Injustice Files, and a producer of the upcoming feature film Till.
Gabby Smith: How did you get into filmmaking?
Keith Beauchamp: If it were not for the death of Emmett Till, there would not be a Keith Beauchamp filmmaker. The thing about my whole life and career was that it was all unintentional. I thought I would be a civil rights attorney. I’m not an entertainer; I’m not one of those filmmakers who produces stuff to entertain. Filmmaking is my activism tool. I won’t touch a project unless I’m able to make change through it. After I was able to see the power that an individual can have with just a simple tool of a camera, the whole world changed for me. I learned with Till that there is a way to get justice for these families.
When families who lost loved ones to racist violence during the civil rights movement come to you to tell their story, what kind of justice are they looking for?
When I started off, I used to be bloodthirsty. It was all about putting people in jail and frying them. There’s a quote that I like that I feel captures it well: “There’s no justice in America, but it is the pursuit of justice that sustains you.” Even if you had courtroom justice, you would never be able to bring the victim back. There is no justice in America. That’s what drives me every day. Oftentimes when a family contacts me it is because they have exhausted every other avenue. In many of these unsolved cases, you will never really see courtroom justice. The families know that already. Many of them don’t even know what happened to their loved ones, and that’s where I come in. All these families want is a platform to tell their loved ones’ stories, as well as find out what happened to them. That’s very important towards the healing process. People want justice, and not just courtroom justice, but truth. Till helped me do that: He gave me the ability to help other families and I am forever grateful for that.
What role did Emmett play in your life after that point?
When I got to high school I began interracially dating. I went to a predominantly white school. The first thing my parents would tell me before I left the house at night was, “Don’t let
what happened to Emmett Till happen to you.” Emmett’s story became a tool to teach me about the racism that still continues in this country today. But it wasn’t until two weeks before my high school graduation that I really had my wake-up call. I was at a pre-graduation party for the high schools in my area. At the party, I saw three white girls, classmates of mine. One of the girls told me to come over to dance with them. We were having a good time, no issues whatsoever, until all of a sudden I was pushed hard from behind. I turned around and discovered it was a bouncer at the club. He said, “N*****, mess with your own kind” and continued pushing me. Of course I was enraged and pushed him back, and we started fighting on the floor.
The bouncer made a gesture to someone on the side, and he started running over and throwing punches at me. I threw punches back, and my best friend joined in. The next thing I know, two uniformed officers come in, grab me, and begin to pull me out of the establishment. The second guy throwing punches at me ran outside and began attacking me again, hitting me with an iron keychain. I fell to the ground as the uniformed officers took me to a secluded office in the back of the nightclub. They handcuffed me to a chair and walked out. One of my attackers, who turned out to be an undercover cop, came in and kicked over my chair and kicked me in the chest and face. I was defenseless. But I wasn’t thinking about the pain. All I thought of was Emmett Till and what my mom had said. The officers tried to charge me with assault and battery on a police officer. I was sitting there trying to figure this out, extremely angry because I knew why I was attacked. I explained what the bouncer said to me and how he started attacking me, but they were trying to convince me it wasn’t about race. That was my wake-up call—I realized then I had to do something with my life. It was at that point that I said to myself: “I gotta put myself in a position of power to never let anything like this happen to a person of color ever again.”
again been brought back to the national spotlight as the country faces a new racial reckoning in the wake of murders at the hands of police. Do you see the legacy of Emmett Till reflected in current calls for justice?
I feel like a lot of people have gotten their wake-up call like I had mine. With George Floyd’s case, for instance, when I first saw that video it brought me back to when I was 10 years old. The whole symbolic aspect of a white man’s knee on his neck—that’s a metaphor that we often use when we talk about living in American as Black men. To visually see something like that touched me, but even more so when I found out that he was screaming for his mother. When I heard that, the only thing I could think about was Emmett, because Emmett did the same thing. I know that for a lot of people, that was their Emmett Till moment.
I believe that there are really some people out there doing the work right now, or trying to do it. But I don’t want people to have this illusion that things change overnight, because they don’t. Emmett Till’s murder wasn’t a fluke, it wasn’t an accident. The movement was carefully planned and we don’t realize [it] today. My mentors, many of them civil rights activists in Mississippi, helped me understand the importance of not just moving towards the future hastily, but understanding the past so that we won’t repeat it. When we come to this point, with the Black Lives Matter movement—I love the movement, it’s needed, I support it—in order for us to understand how to fight the enemy, racism, we must understand how we fought it the first time. There’s no other movement in our history that’s been as successful as the civil rights movement. Every generation is obligated to fight the good fight. That’s the only way change is going to happen.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
