Quote:
Originally Posted by saffronleaf
The point regarding Mexico is true but the policy overall has made it more challenging for Indians and Chinese to get a green card. The waiting line for someone applying for an employment based green card from India is something like 15 years. China is predictably second, at around 10 years.
Canada and Australia don't impose such caps and accordingly have a higher percentage of Indians and Chinese as immigrants.
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If the caps are meant to increase diversity, I can't see that it makes
that much of a difference between the US and Canada. In the US, when people think of a typical immigrant they think a Latin American, in Canada, an Asian. In both countries, Europeans from Europe or Africans are not really the face of the typical immigrant.
Looking at the list of top ten
US immigrant source countries (in 2015):
Mexico,
China,
India,
Philippines,
Cuba,
Dominican Republic,
Vietnam,
Iraq,
El Salvador,
Pakistan
Looking at the list for
Canada (in 2015):
Philippines,
India,
China,
Iran,
Pakistan,
Syria,
US,
France,
UK,
Nigeria.
The
2016 list for Canada has similar countries, with the order switched around for some, and with Eritrea rather than Nigeria as number 10.
Maybe it's just me but I don't really perceive
that great of a diversity difference among countries on the list, at least if that's what the cap was meant to do.
The US has more countries from the New World, Canada from the Old World. The major difference I see is the US has more Latin American (which Canada lacks) which makes sense geographically and Canada has still a few developed western countries on the list, probably a testament to the points system favoring them. Both countries have an Asian and Middle eastern presence. In both cases, the continent of Africa is underrepresented if at all.
Just for comparison, here is the
UK in 2015, top senders by country of birth (don't know anything about their policy, whether it's more or less selective than North America and whether or not they have caps):
Poland,
India,
Pakistan,
Ireland,
Germany,
Romania,
Nigeria,
Bangladesh,
South Africa,
Italy,
It's more European-centered, but still includes Asian and African nations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by saffronleaf
I can empathize with the desire to diversify the immigrant pool, but I think doing it on a per-country basis is a rather blunt and coarse way of going about it.
I keeping it open and letting the natural ebbs and flows in immigration patterns do the work is the best way, but if you must impose caps then regional caps are more reasonable (e.g., South Asia, East Asia, Latin America). Otherwise, the penalty on India and China is particularly severe. India, for example, has 29 states with 22 different official languages, has the largest populations of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, Bahaii and the 3rd largest Muslim population. It contains more people than the entirety of the Western Hemisphere. It's about as diverse, too. Yet it will have the same number of visas as Kuwait or Nicaragua, both of which are countries located in regions (the Arabian Peninsula or Central America) that are less diverse than India or China.
That also balances it with the other desire to bring qualified immigrants.
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True and on your point about if countries and regions differ greatly in size, like Asia outnumbering all the other continents population-wise and individually, India and China outnumbering the people on many other continents, then how should diversity be spaced out?
Should Iceland, with around 330, 000 people, a third of a million get the same quota as a country like India, with over a billion and thus, thousands of times more populous?
Add on top of that, that the desire or incentive of immigrants to move from all the various countries is not equal (eg. developed parts of the world like Europe have not sent large numbers for a while). Africa probably has a lot of potential emigrants but only recently has it surpassed Europe in proportion of immigrants received by Canada (or the US).