Immigration To The Us Based On Family

Why does immigration based on family reunification make sense for the host country?

The host country gains voters and taxpayers without introducing more ethnicity or minority problems. It will not only be the immigrants who will favor the government who allowed them to come home but their whole family. They will happily vote for them, and the opposition would not question this practice of population increase as questioning a family reunification is not a nice thing. Of course there are particular cases where the family members could be different ethnicity, but a marriage has more assimilation power than simple immigration with no ties.

How likely is it that the US will implement a merit based immigration? If it gets passed, how likely is the next POTUS to repeal and replace it with family based immigration?

-Who knows?An immigration policy that favors people who bring a lot to the party would be sensible.If passed a Dem President would likely do his best to dilute it and go the other way.A lot of people who come in now — legally and illegally — are nice people and that is about it. Some are definitely not so nice, but we give them the benefit of the doubt and undergo all kinds of procedural contortions as if they were accused US citizens in a US court.I hope Trump is gone in two more years and that Earth opens to swallow him (figuratively speaking). But enough Americans (Dem and Brand-X) have signalled their unhappiness with the open-door, come-one-come-all, America-belongs-to-everybody-by-right immigration policy need to take stock.Also get rid of the dumb rule saying once sb. who wants in is home free the instant he steps on US soil. We are not playing baseball here! WTF dreamt up that dumb rule?We have enough people here many generations whose needs have been ignored too long:1 American Indians who would trade the reservation for the mainstream.2 Blacks whose kidnapped ancestors were brought here generations ago.3 Po’ rural whites, willing to work to join America’s mainstream.

Will Trump end F4 family-based immigration? If so, will it affect people who are already waiting in line?

The POTUS says he wants to end family visas. I'm not sure if we will see a complete elimination of these visas, but I think we will most definitely see a much narrower definition of what family members qualify.The F4 visa is already very limited and is only available to a sibling, their spouse and children. Anyone else is excluded. The sponsor must also be a citizen, lawful permanent residents can't sponsor siblings on an F4.Present waiting times average 6 years to 23 years for admittance on an F4 visa. Waiting times vary by country as only a certain number are allocated to each country, each year. Seniority is based off of application date alone.The President wants to remove chain migration and the visa lottery. He favors merit based visas and I support that. Still a very narrowly defined family visa program such as the F4 isn't the worse thing in the world. I also wouldn't have a problem for parental visas for parents of single child households.The lottery needs to be eleiminated, it is if little benefit to America.

Why do most "liberals" I encountered oppose merit based immigration and support family based immigration instead?

I support both family-based immigration and employment-based immigration, but I do not like open-ended points-based “merit” systems. Here’s why.Family-based immigration prioritizes the interests of US citizens. A family based system allows a US citizen to live with their non-citizen parents or adult children. Aren’t conservatives big on family values too? (I have no country of citizenship in common with my parents. Wouldn’t it suck if there was no country on earth where we are allowed to live together?)Employment-based immigration allows the economy to import workers that are difficult to find on the domestic market. Care has to be taken to ensure that these foreign workers don’t take opportunities away from American workers (which they currently do). For example, we could require that foreign workers be paid SIGNIFICANTLY MORE than the prevailing wage for US workers and that work visas are not available for entry-level positions. When there’s no readily qualified US applicant available, I would want companies to preferentially invest money into training Americans and only hire foreign workers as a last resort.Points-based merit systems lack safeguards to protect the domestic labor market. In your late 20s, speak fluent English and have a university degree? Welcome in! Let’s flood the labor market with cheap Indian labor…Finally, I also believe in larger guest-worker programs for low-skilled labor and a crackdown on employers of undocumented workers. Let’s heavily fine companies found to hire undocumented workers and imprison managers and executives who hired them knowingly. (How about a fine of 10 years’ worth of the prevailing wage for every single undocumented worker?) You may be surprised how quickly our undocumented population would dwindle if there were no more jobs for them…

What is best way to stop illegal immigration to the US?

A2A:As others say, there is no way to stop illegal immigration in toto. Other nations (e.g., Singapore - where illegals are subject to arrest, caning, and deportation in that order) have far more draconian rules than the US does, and still cannot “stop” it.So, let’s set to the side the idea that it can be stopped, and answer the implicit, real question as to how to reduce it to a small, manageable problem.IMHO, the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants to the US come to the US not to commit crimes, smuggle drugs, or sponge of the government dole. Of course, there are some who do these things (some, all of them), but it’s a pretty small minority I suspect.The reason most illegals are coming falls into two categories:They are coming to join family members who are already living in the US (some legally, some illegally)They are coming to find work that pays better than what they get at home, or has better working conditions, or both.For the first item, one could, I suppose, define the problem away by simply making it easier for family reunification. If one is a legal citizen, make it easier for immediate family (children, parents, single siblings) to join them. There are of course problems with this - such as the often cited “chain” migration, but if we allowed family members to be reunified with the explicit requirement that they be sponsored 100% (no “free” health benefits, for example), then it would perhaps encourage people to become citizens rather than sojourners, strengthen ties to our nation, and reduce the problem.For the second one, I suggest that fixing VERY HIGH fines, if not criminal punishments, to people who knowingly hire workers without proper papers, that would quickly reduce the demand for illegal workers. We already have, e.g., systems to verify the status of people seeking work - simply strictly enforcing these rules would deter most illegal immigration.But if we are being honest, Americans in many cases actually want illegal workers in the economy - this they think drives down costs for them. Certainly, the big businesses that give money to the Republican party have no interest in seeing the flow of cheap, pliant workers stemmed.So, the problem never gets fixed.