The family reunification pathway is available to all US citizens and permanent residents. This isn't a "problem with the H1B system" per se.
Bangladesh gets around 50-60 skilled immigrant visas a year, but the Bangladeshi population in the U.S. has someone grown from under 10,000 in 1990 to over 270,000 today. That's the product of family reunification. Voters who supported H1B thought they were voting for a handful of Bangladeshi doctors and engineers, and instead they got Little Bangladeshes popping up all over the country.
There you go. You identified the actual cause yourself.
> the decision to admit one skilled worker actually means one skilled worker plus potentially dozens of other people with no qualifications whatsoever.
"Potentially no qualifications" is doing a lot of work there (strangely). What are the odds that only one person in the family is well-educated? And isn't IQ supposedly heritable? I'm personally neutral on family reunification. It undermines fairness but helps family cohesion. I understand arguments in favor of and against it, and there probably isn't a single right answer.
I'm not convinced family members without any qualifications or a means of supporting themselves in the US would even leave their country. What's the point? And if they're truly useless, their relative who would otherwise sponsor their immigration visa might prefer just sending them some money. It would be cheaper than financially supporting them here.
> instead they got Little Bangladeshes popping up all over the country
From the little research I did, Bangladeshi-Americans have higher educational attainment and household incomes than the median. America has always had ethnic neighborhoods - German/China/Korea/Japantowns, little Italys. What's the issue?
Some people have problems with other people's skin color.
Culture isn’t magic land, it’s people, and their social values and norms. Are mass migrants via family reunification assimilating and adopting the culture of their new home? That’s an important question for those offering residency and potentially a path to citizenship.
Very similar to why many European countries are offering economic migrants a return path to their country of origin when social and economic integration has failed.
That is an entirely different consideration, however, than the economic and social effects of immigration of people like me in sufficient numbers to culturally reshape parts of America.
America has traditionally been excellent at assimilating migrants. Probably best in the world. I don't know why you're suddenly having doubts.
I have doubts because the country and its governance is stumbling towards failure.
It's also worth pointing out that the social infrastructure for assimilation that existed in the early 20th century has since been destroyed. Italians immigrated to a country where there was strong pressure to abandon their foreign culture and assimilate into Anglo norms, attitudes, and customs. Assimilation was also facilitated by restrictive immigration laws adopted in 1921, which dropped the foreign-born population from 15% to under 5% by 1970.
Even then, the evidence we have is that assimilation only worked about halfway: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran.... To this day, differences in social attitudes between European countries show up in U.S. descendants of immigrants from those countries: https://cis.org/Richwine/Still-More-Evidence-Cultural-Persis... ("For example, in Europe, Norwegians are more trusting than Germans, who are themselves more trusting than Italians. Despite over a century passing since their peak period of immigration, those three ancestral groups order themselves the same way in the United States: Norwegian-Americans are more trusting than German-Americans, who in turn are more trusting than Italian-Americans.").
(By the way, Bangladeshi Americans are poorer than the average American: "In a 2013, NPR discussion with a member of the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the book The Myth of the Model Minority Rosalind Chou who is also a professor of sociology. One of them stated that 'When you break it down by specific ethnic groups, the Hmong, the Bangladeshi, they have poverty rates that rival the African-American poverty rate.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladeshi_Americans)
The Wikipedia article is inaccurate. It claims that Bangladesh-Americans have a median household income of ~$59k. The actual sources cited by the article both say it's $78k:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/01/key-facts.... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/asian-a...
I don't know what's up with that. $20k is obviously a big difference.