Comment by calvinbhai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calvinbhai | Hacker News Reader

This article is short on facts. As a high skilled temp immigrant in US (from India), I follow these stories very closely and it is sad to see such scare mongering articles based on pure imagination!

1) Diversity lottery needs to go. IMO it's purpose was to find low skilled immigrants who'd often become taxi drivers or food cart owners. Most of these industries that relied on DV immigrant labor have been disrupted and the new incoming DV immigrants have fewer jobs. If not stopped, the US itself has a brewing problem with unemployed new low skilled immigrants.

2)for people from India and China, abolishing h1b and EB green cards and replacing it with merit based system will be a zillion times better. Current system of giving 20,000 green cards to Indians, 20k to Chinese and 20k every other country, is highly discriminatory and leads to many many sufferings that Americans don't (want to) realise. Hope Trump admin abolishes h1b, L1b, EB green cards and replaces the whole thing with a merit based immigration system.

3) iirc Trump's rhetorics against legal immigration that his voters are concerned about, is primarily the h2b visa, which was expanded under the Obama administration, thus regularising the illegal immigration from Mexico into legal one (correct me if I'm wrong here). Either his voters liked it when there was more illegal immigration so the labor would be cheaper, or just that right now there's a lot of competition they face for their jobs and want to reduce h2 b visas.

US economy is changing a lot in terms of automation, AI, and machine learning, thus reducing the need for a lot of cheap immigrant labor, while increasing the need for high skilled labor to stay competitive with Tech giants from China. Which means, the US immigration policy needs to adapt to it ASAP.

I wish politico and alcorn.law dug into these points instead of writing click baity articles to score points against Trump.

I must call BS on your first point: it's not just false, but also quite naive to think that an immigration program would purposely target low-skilled individuals.

First, DV is supposed to use random selection (lottery) - so the resulting distribution should reflect the statistical makeup of the applicant pool.

Second, one of the DV requirements is a high school diploma - so the pool is biased towards higher education from the start.

Third, the rest of the process (documentation, online application, English/affidavit/liquidity requirements) again favors educated/affluent individuals.

So I posit that the opposite is true: DV is selecting from a highly-skilled applicant pool, and the benefitting immigrants are better educated than the average population.

Anecdotal evidence: all DV immigrants I know (including myself) hold at least a bachelor degree, and work in high-skill professional fields.

How did you meet all these DV immigrants?

Some at work, most in the extended circles (being an immigrant myself).

The account @dazilcher created just for this reply. They also hijacked the top comment for visibility.

Treat with skepticism.

Questions for you:

1) can you reply without an account?

2) how did you skip your first post?

3) what makes a reply "hijacking"?

4) where is this "visibility" thing and how do I cash in?

5) do you always judge posts based on the author instead of content?

My apologies if my point came across as condescending. That wasn't my intention.

High school diploma is not exactly high skilled. But I agree with the rest of what you say, that there are a good number of immigrants on DV who are high skilled, including you.

But the problem of basic skilled immigrants getting DV lottery over highly skilled immigrants from certain countries getting shafted still remains as is. Most taxi drivers I have spoken to in north east either come through DV or family based legal immigration path.

With a merit based immigration system, you and I can immigrate to US with way fewer hassles and uncertainties while less skilled people will need to skill up to be eligible.

DV, as its name suggests, is an immigration program, not an employment program. I happen to believe it tends to filter applicants educated above the local population average, but that is not its primary purpose.

And that's a good thing - prioritizing immigration based on the hot job du jour seems quite dangerous and guaranteed to produce the opposite of "diverse".

I believe, the Immigration program intends to make up for the lower TFR in US, so that there is a consistent rate of increase in the population.

Until now, immigrants who were not highly skilled (with graduate degrees) were needed to fill the space, but increasing levels of automation and AI, its dangerous for US to not tweak its immigration program to factor this in. If immigrants coming to US have no job prospects, it can only lead to more abuse of immigrants and / or rise in crime.

Immigration need not be prioritized based on the "hot job market", but needs to be prioritized based on those who can remain employed with increasing levels of automation and AI.

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