Injustice
The vast majority of Children from India who immigrated with their parents to the United States in the last ten years, via an employer sponsored Green Card, will have to self-deport by the age of 21. These children grew up in the United States and know no other country as their home. Yet, every single child who arrives on the same immigration path in the future will have to self-deport. This is happening to children from one country alone - India. If the Child was born anywhere else in the world, they would not have to self-deport. Country of birth is the only differentiator. These children and their parents are in a century-long wait time for employment-based green cards and most Indian Immigrants who entered the line in the last 10 years will not get these Green Cards in their lifetime.
This is because the United States still has laws that treat equally qualified immigrants differently based on immutable factors like the country of birth - which is just a convenient proxy for the color of someone's skin. In the view of the vast majority of decent reasonable people and the vast majority of our Congress, it is obscene that such laws still exist in 2020.
Bills to remove the racist distinction between equally qualified employment based immigrants are overwhelmingly popular. H.R.1044 - The Fairness For High Skilled Immigrants Act was co-sponsored by an incredible 311 bipartisan Members of Congress before passing the House of Representatives overwhelmingly. The Senate version of the bill (S.386) has 35 bi-partisan co-sponsors. Both the House and Senate versions of the Fairness For High Skilled Immigrants Act are the most co-sponsored bipartisan Immigration bills in Congress.
Despite this overwhelming support, small bills like this can only pass the Senate by a process called “Unanimous Consent”, which requires every single Senator to agree to pass the bill. Put another way, for this bill to pass, we are dependent on there being no racist in the Senate.
Unfortunately, Senator Dick Durbin has shown himself to be exactly that racist. He opposes S.386 - The Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act, which removes national origin discrimination.
To gauge the extent of the obscenity of the situation, consider that there is no reasonable way to enforce the national origin quotas in employment-based green cards short of forcing employers to state in job advertisements, “workers from Country X need not apply”. While the vast majority of Congress thinks racist job advertisements are offensive and wrong, racist job advertisements are a concept Senator Dick Durbin is evidently comfortable with.
Senator Dick Durbin wants to uphold national origin discrimination, so future immigrants born in countries other than India continue to get preferential treatment based on their country of birth.
When we desegregated schools, would it have been appropriate to pander to segregationists whose children enjoyed an unearned privilege in accessing exclusive schools? Would it have been appropriate to condition desegregation on increased funding or resources for white students? No. But quite offensively, Senator Dick Durbin actually went to the Senate floor multiple times to make the removal of national origin discrimination on employment based green cards conditional on a DOUBLING of annual immigration.
When we desegregated schools, we didn’t do racist mathematics on estimates of non-segregated class sizes to justify keeping schools segregated for the benefit of White students. However, Senator Durbin had no problem going to the Senate Floor and also telling our members in person that he was just a “liberal arts lawyer” before proceeding to do racist mathematics of wait times for future immigrants in a desegregated employment-based immigration system.