How Long Can It Take to Become a Us Citizen?

But if you welcome immigrants so as not to run out of labor or stagnate culturally, rather than simply dislike immigrants, you'd want to improve the bureaucracy.

To anyone who happens to be born on its soil, it actually is. And leaving people on bureaucratic limbo for decades is abusive.

Freedom of speech is though. You're allowed to complain about the process as much as you want.

it's literally in the bill of rights.

I swear, it needs to amended so that natural born citizens should also have to pass citizenship questions like immigrants to retain their citizenship. How can you not know this? Have you never read or heard a recital of the bill of rights?

What did you do to earn your citizenship?

Why not? Why is a bad thing?

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Pragmatically: if you want to enforce the legality of a state-affirmed migration path, it has to be viable. Without a militarized border (which is impractical based on nation size and undesirable for fiscal and moral reasons) and a militarized interior (do you _like_ what ICE is becoming?), the best mitigation for illegal immigration is viable legal immigration.

Fiscally: immigrants have above-average entrepreneurial tendencies. It doesn't take a lot of enterprise creations and resulting tax payment and job creation to offset a _lot_ of social service consumption. Inbound migration also is what keeps the US from having a net-shrinking population, which until we can get away from late-stage capitalism is a death knell for the economy.

Morally and ethically: this is a nation of immigrants. If you claim to be a native, do you speak Navajo? Ute?

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

It is not a right, for sure. However, there are historical reasons why they are county wide quotas. Before the 1965 INA (Hart-Celler Act, which JFK wanted), they had a national-origins quota system: each country's quota was based on the existing immigrant population of that national origin already in the United States, using data from the 1890 census. Because the U.S. population in 1890 was overwhelmingly from Northern and Western Europe (especially Protestants), this formula strongly favored those groups. Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was heavily restricted because most of them are Catholics. Once Catholics got political power, thanks to JFK, this is reformed in favor of what we see country based caps.

The national-origins formula was explicitly designed to maintain the existing ethnic composition of the U.S.--in other words, preserve what policymakers at the time considered the “traditional” American demographic makeup.

In the long run it seems likely enough that it will become mainstream that people don't have the right to enforce borders against others.

Like the real long run, try to use your imagination.

Idk about US, but in Europe we are in dire need of migration. The shortage in for example health care is acute and alarming, at least in Germany.

Our cleaning women is just about to finish her three year training program. However she failed the final exam because of the complicated wording of the test. Her German is good enough but formal German is a different beast. She is allowed to redo the test a single time next week. If she passes, she will have an official German degree but has to leave the country because her visa is based on the training program. She then has to reapply for another visa to be allowed to reenter Germany.

Completely dysfunctional in my opinion. The system should bring people in that will be a net positive for the country while filtering out criminals.

I suspect that the amount of background legwork for each application is fairly limited. It should be possible to triage the vast majority of applications in a matter of days at most, at least the denials. It's wild that it takes years to do this.

I assume it's intentional. And/or profitable.

They are not "in line for citizenship", they're in line for a green-card, that's very different

> The American people have spoken time and again that we want these caps.

Evidence for this, or even that the majority of the American people understand the system of caps, whether or not they support it?

> That immigration policy should support diversity over other considerations.

The people most supportive of the caps are the people most openly hostile to the concept of diversity having value, generally.

> That we want opportunity spread to more countries than just the most populace. That immigration policy should support diversity over other considerations.

There's an unspoken assumption there that India and China are monocultures, containing no diversity within themselves. Or that diversity is neatly defined by a border on a map.

> Those four countries have very different quota problems though: folks from Mexico and Philippines face a long wait in family immigration, mostly to bring their kids & siblings to the US

Mexico faces long wait times in all of the quota-limited family-based immigrant visa categories.

The Phillipines faces a few months longer wait time in one severelly globally backlogged family based category (F4; where there is a 17 year backlog for most countries and its 3 months longer for the Phillipines), but not otherwise.

India and China have long backlogs in most employment-based immigrant visa categories (but generally much less than Mexico has in family-based categories), India also has an longer-than-usual backlog (more than Phillipines, less than Mexico) in the F4 family based category.

What do you mean with "telling"? That they are in tech because that's the demographic of tech folks? Or that men in most parts of the world are responsible to make enough money for the whole family?

It's more rethorical but I seriously don't know how that's telling.

> Europe is facing this right now.

What exactly? War in Syria was ten years ago.

> What are you suggesting? All of India moves to the US?

I find it clear that the suggestion is: Provide a clear and feasible path for people who wish to migrate and will benefit the society. We lack that in Europe/Germany as well and ironically are missing the laws to deal with criminal immigration effectively.

It's sad many people don't even know or think about the difference of regular migration and coming as a refugee. Migration of skilled workers must become much easier in Europe, while refugees are a very different topic.

Combining qualities you oppose into theoretical groups is a common, very human fallacy, but it will poison your mind against humanity. It's the origin of tribalism.

For example, I'm a white non-religious straight liberal US man with a hippy upbringing that I value dearly, and I think the opportunity to immigrate should be as available as possible to all good people. But I also recognize that it must be responsibly controlled, and the native culture and quality of life must be prioritized (for all nations, not just the West), and one piece of that is stopping illegal immigration. And it's not unreasonable to have an opinion that we are, to some degree, failing at all the pieces.

Reverse the order of the crimes in that sentence and you can find that opinion in droves on HN any day of the week.

What we really ought to be ridiculing if not punishing and marginalizing is inconsistency and cognitive dissonance.

There are so many issues possible in a nation of 300+mil that we cannot form opinions on policy based on vibes and emotions, we must have principals and let them inform our opinions.

so glad we have Red people running the country / ICE who obey every law on the books - phew…

From what I can see, sanctuary cities were acting within the law. Their only stance was that they wouldn’t spend precious time and resources verifying immigration status for schools, and city services. As these are paid for and voted on by city residents, that seems fair.

If states, and cities aren’t bound to help the federal government enforce every law, unless congress writes a law to say they must.

CBP and ICE always had the general authority to be more effective, but did not use it. As we can see from actions in this era, enforcing immigration law at all costs has draconian side effects on civil liberties, and general happiness and wellbeing.

While it’s true, the immigration issue has been marinating for a while, the current policy is not a good solution.

These comments are like those dudes that paint themselves silver and gold to convince you they are statues.

> Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.

Many people’s rights are being violated recently while enforcing immigration law

Do you think each person is responsible for enforcing federal laws? Like if you personally are not spending your own time and money to round up those in violation of federal statute then you're doing something wrong?

And if not, is it true of your neighborhood? Of your town? What level of grouping of people is big enough that they are required to help Washington with whatever thing they have asked for? Keeping in mind that our constitutional system is designed around a federal government that is supposed to be responsive to the desires of the people from the various states, not the other way around.

> They're still our immigration laws, we should fight to change them

It’s good advice, but a big hill to climb. The Dem politicians walk a fine line here. The influx of illegal immigrants is truly unpopular, not just with folks on the right, but also many in the moderate left and independents. They dems realize it’s a hot potato which is why you get a lot of immigration rhetoric to try and satisfy the anger, but don’t really get any effort to change any laws even when they held both branches and the presidency through 2021-2022.

Prior to 2016, both parties were pretty aligned on it, only when Trump made it a core issue did the parties start to diverge on the topic.

There is no more blue state ignoring immigration laws than blue states ignoring crimes like federal tax evasion. It’s not the state’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws or to help the federal government enforce immigration laws.

In fact, the Supreme Court actually said states had no standing to sue the federal government to enforce the law.

> Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.

US law enshrined both refugees and asylum seekers as separate categories of immigration specifically to deal with human rights issues observed in the 20th century. While that doesn’t mean any person anywhere has a right to be a citizen in the US, it is closer to true than your statement suggests.

“Sanctuary policies” are about enforcing the 10th Amendment. The Federal government alone is responsible for immigration policy. The states should not have to participate, and sanctuary policies are a public declaration that they won’t (usually because local law enforcement knows that it makes their primary job of enforcing the criminal code harder if residents won’t testify).

The reason we haven’t reformed US immigration laws is that everyone agrees it is broken, but nowhere close to a supermajority agree on _how_ it is broken or the steps needed to fix it. See “gang of 8” negotiations circa 2013. This is the inevitable outcome of the founders making Congress slow/stagnant by default. Also damn near half of the voters being propagandized with immigration ragebait for decades.

When my family came over to what is now the USA, immigration was as simple as paying for your own boat trip and passing a health inspection. It was hundreds of years of very “open borders” before Congress decided to go hyper racist and xenophobic in the 1870s.

It’s worth poiting out that Republicans have long insisted that “we can’t reform immigration laws without _first_ kicking out all illegal immigrants. It’s neither a reasonable expectation that we can do that, nor is it a reasonable precondition for reform negotiations. It’s also hilariously false that all recent immigrants vote for Democrats — that demographic is FAR more likely to be Evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic Christian, which heavily vote towards Republicans (not to mention all of the Socialism/Communism haters from Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela who think Democrats are somehow equivalent to “far left”).

Nullification doesn’t harm US law. It is the escape valve people in the US use judiciously when US law becomes unruly and malicious.

You can also call it undemocratic, not just because blue states are actively subverting them, but because the intent of the subversion is to create new voters and shift demographics into their favor.