David J. Bier Profile picture
Jun 13, 2023 12 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Legal immigration is *impossible* for nearly all immigrants wishing to immigrate to the U.S. legally.

You can’t just “get in line.” That’s a fiction perpetuated by those who want to keep immigration illegal.

My latest report explains why. Here’s the summary in 1 pic... 🧵 Image
U.S. immigration law's basic premise is that all immigrants are *guilty* until proven innocent.

Immigration is ILLEGAL unless you prove you fall into a narrow eligible category.

The result is that over 99% of people who want to immigrate legally cannot do so.
No one outside the U.S. is eligible for a green card unless they fall into one of five narrow exceptions...
⬇️
First Option: America’s Refugee Program—Accepts about 1 in 5,000 displaced people around the world, and the percentage accepted keeps dropping year after year. Image
Second Option: The Diversity Lottery—Accepts fewer than 1 in 500 applicants.

Because the lottery excludes the top-origin countries for legal immigrants, a majority of the world’s population is ineligible to apply. Image
3rd Option: Family Sponsorship—Only available to the closest relatives of U.S. citizens & green card holders—and still has a backlog of nearly 7 million thanks to an annual cap of just 226,000.

Most new sponsors in most categories will *die* before their relatives can immigrate. Image
Fourth Option: Self-Sponsorship—Available only to
-those with “extraordinary ability,”
-people with advanced degrees or “exceptional ability” who also have projects of “national importance,” and
-$800K-$1M investors who create 10 jobs in 2 years.

Not viable for many Image
Fifth/Final Option: Employer Sponsorship—Made impossible by red tape and low caps.

The normal employer-sponsored applicant will suffer through this insane filing maze, which can take between 2 and 3 years of processing time and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Image
Very few employers are willing to do this process except for the highest-skilled workers, and even then, only if they can get them an H-1B work visa first to allow workers to work while the process plays out.

But fewer than 1 in 5 can get a visa through the H-1B lottery anyway. Image
Even if employers win the H-1B lottery, no U.S. workers apply, and wait years, there is a backlog that is many times the annual cap.

Half the workers are from India, and thanks to the individual country caps, nearly all new Indian applicants will die without getting a green card Image
AS IMPORTANTLY, there’s no year-round, low-skilled guest worker visa *at all.*

Their employers have to go through a years-long process, hoping they get a worker and hoping that the worker stays with them when they get here.

Vanishingly few even try.
The U.S. historically had a much higher rate of legal immigration than it does now, and the U.S. ranks low compared to other wealthy countries for immigrants per capita.

We’d need over 75 million immigrants *tomorrow* to catch Australia.

The status quo has no justification. ImageImage
This is a very broad overview.

My new #CatoImmigration paper is a detailed explanation of the rules of U.S. legal immigration in as jargon-free language as possible. It is a resource for policymakers & the public seeking to understand the system better.
cato.org/policy-analysi…

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More from @David_J_Bier

Jul 27
Bill said I should read the affidavit. And WOW it shows that everything ICE has said publicly (and Fox and Bill have dutifully regurgitated as fact) about this surgical center case was a LIE. This was not a "targeted" operation, but a racial profiling incident gone bad!
DHS initially claimed that the officers were engaged in a "targeted" enforcement operation--that is, this was not a random racial profiling incident, but the affidavit repudiates this directly, saying the agents were on a roving patrol Image
Image
DHS initially claimed it had targeted them "as they exited their vehicle." The affidavit has them already outside the vehicle while their friend pees on the surgical center. This contradictory piss is legally irrelevant and looks like an ad hoc effort to discredit the workers Image
Image
Read 14 tweets
Jul 18
It appears that an order went out on January 28 of this year that resulted in the proliferation of ICE masking. Image
The irony is that the way this order is portrayed that it is about disclosing their identity, but perhaps this is not how it was interpreted on the ground or there was resistance on the ground to it. cnn.com/2025/01/27/pol…Image
I've actually found an agent partially masking from Jan. 27 but most agents are not. Image
Read 47 tweets
Jul 9
Every American should read this ACLU lawsuit about what is happening in California. It is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. This is not immigration enforcement. It is positively stuffed with videos and articles documenting racial profiling on a scale unseen since Jim Crow. Image
Fixing the link: Citizens being assaulted, arrested, and sent to jails. Military-style sweeps of Hispanic neighborhoods. This is what Congress just gave President Trump $150 billion to do to Americans in every state. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Completely irrelevant. This lawsuit is not alleging that it is illegal to deport Hispanic illegal immigrants. It is alleging that ICE and Border Patrol are harassing, detaining, and arresting Hispanics without any reason to believe they are here illegally
Read 5 tweets
Jun 20
I have obtained new nonpublic data from ICE that shows that 2/3 of the people it had booked into detention facilities this fiscal year had no criminal convictions at all. Less than 7% have violent convictions. Most convictions were for immigration, traffic, and vice offenses. Image
Every time you hear DHS say that anyone who objects to ICE's mass deportation campaign is pro-violent felons, understand that those violent convicts are less than 7% of its work for this year. It's misleading the public about what ICE actually does. cato.org/blog/65-people…Image
The number of noncriminals booked into ICE detention has more than doubled in recent weeks after Stephen Miller ordered them to deprioritize criminals and focus on arresting as many people as possible. Image
Read 6 tweets
Jun 6
Contrary to claims made by its proponents, the mass deportations' components of the Big Beautiful Bill will not improve its CBO score. Indeed, it will make it much worse. Accounting for lost net revenue from immigrants adds nearly $1 trillion in additional cost. Image
Adopting HR 1's flawed assumptions, mass deportations will likely account for 1/4 of the bill's total deficit. This is far more than many other hotly debated costs in the bill. Congressional Republicans didn't let the CBO account for deportations cato.org/blog/deportati…Image
Immigration/border policing already accounts for 2/3 of all federal law enforcement spending. 36 X IRS-Treasury, 21X ATF, 13X DEA, and 8X FBI. These are the most well-funded law enforcement agencies in America by far. Image
Read 14 tweets
Jun 5
The immigration dictatorship just announced a ban on immigration for 12 nationalities with 7 more facing draconian discrimination as well. Horrible policies with no justification Image
Here are the 19 disfavored nationalities, which have produced many Americans of great character who have benefited our country enormously. In 1965, Congress attempted to rid American immigration law of this rank nonsensically national origins discrimination. It should again. Image
Trump uses a slight-of-hand saying he's restricting immigration "from" these places, but the proclamation does not restrict immigration "from" these PLACES but by persons who happen to be nationals of these countries. It's important for him to maintain this fiction... Image
Read 34 tweets

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