Tag: fairness

“The lived reality of immigration is much less like a line and much more like the forking paths of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Make the right choices (marry an American, get hired by a U.S. firm at the executive level, win a Nobel Prize, secure an H-1B visa and parlay it into a green card) and you can make a life in the United States! But make just one wrong choice (marry a Canadian, fail to achieve tenure, get hired by a foreign company, don’t have an employer that will sponsor your green card application), and you’re out of luck.

And most people don’t have the opportunity to make any of these choices. A low-education, working-age Mexican male—that staple of blue-collar employment in the American Southwest—does not qualify as a permanent immigrant under any of the visa regimes listed above. There is simply no path for many people in the world.”