Sure, an indigenous Guatemalan highlander who has 2 years of formal education and doesn’t even speak Spanish as a first language is realistically going to get an advanced degree in a technical field, which is generally the most straightforward route to an employment-based green card. Even if you have a U.S. master’s degree or higher, your shot at getting an H-1B visa this year was about 1 in 2.
Green cards? If you can decipher this chart, it essentially means that even if you pass all the hurdles and get an employer to offer you a permanent job in the U.S., you are likely to be waiting years before you qualify for a green card. Those dates mean that applicants have already survived labor certification (the test of the U.S. labor market to show that there are no qualified U.S. workers available to do the advertised job at the prevailing wage for the position, level, and geographic location, as determined by the Department of Labor).
There are vanishingly few employers who are willing to spend years and thousands of dollars on the labor certification process, which is just stage 1 of the employment-based green card process, unless the applicant is already working for them and they have an idea whether the person is worth it. Less than half of the people who apply even get a shot at an H-1B, the primary category of professional work visa, because in recent years 2 - 3 times the annual quota of petitions has been received in the first 5 business days that petitions are accepted for the next fiscal year. And of those who do, if they were unlucky enough to be born in China, India, or the Philippines, and their positions require a bachelor’s degree, the people whose approved labor certifications were filed on June 1, 2004 or earlier are just now eligible to apply for the final stage of permanent residence. That means they have likely been in the permanent residence process for 12 years or longer, not counting any time they might have spent on work visas (or student, or any other kind of visa) before that.
And nothing has really changed. We still have no border controls except for our oceans, which is very convenient for Latin Americans and has a very discriminatory impact on everyone who can’t take advantage of a land route to the USA.
The boot. Through a revolving door at the border. They can come back in and be documented if they’re not wanted for any crimes. Add increased legal immigration to that. And a wall. A wall composed of the military, drones, fences, and directions to the legal entry point. I don’t know where we’ll put all the people that come in, not a lot of localities are begging for immigrants right now.
As far as Canada, based on an op-ed in the Times by an illegal Canadian immigrant, nobody notices. He was here illegally for years and never got hassled.
What’s in the priority worker category, btw? I know the others. There was at one time (don’t know if it is still in force) a program to get certification for those considered as experts. I wrote a letter in support of someone for this program once.
I suspect many or most of those ranting about immigration would never make it through the screen.
Hey! don’t abuse the [del]Batsignal[/del] Salvasignal!
A curious bit of history: Mexico did threaten El Salvador once and El Salvador petitioned the United States to become a US state rather than being invaded and absorbed by Mexico.
So the issue was not pressed and not taken seriously after that, but one wonders now after El Salvador decided to use the Dollar as currency. (I do have the pet Theory that the US treasury has a very convenient place to put all those dollar coins that are used a lot over there, much more than I see then used in the USA)
I can say though that we Salvadorans* immigrants and Mexicans immigrants are uniting against abusive people like Trump.
We did agree on disliking Guatemalans for a long time… I I
*Salvadoran-American in my case to be precise.
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