Thread by @David_J_Bier

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... 🧵

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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…