John Oliver
On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examined America’s legal immigration system – a bulwark of American democracy touted broadly by many people, including Donald Trump, though its flaws, Oliver said, “often get ignored”.
This results in many misconceptions, Oliver said, focusing on one of the most-repeated and predominant ones, which can be boiled down to: “Get in line.”
“That is an appealing phrase, but it is significantly more complicated than that,” Oliver said. For starters, there’s not one line to stand in, and “the lines that do exist can be prohibitively long or have sudden dead ends,” Oliver argued. “And for many people, and this is very important, there simply isn’t a line at all.” That, or the line dead-ends in a country cap, which mandates that no one country can account for more than 7% of all green cards in a single year – no matter if it has a massive number of potential immigrants (China, Mexico, India) or a tiny one (Malta).
To illustrate the system at work, Oliver introduced his four categories for obtaining legal residency in the United States: family (you’re related to someone already here), employment (someone offered you a job in the US), good luck (you won the visa lottery), or bad luck (you’re a refugee or seeking asylum). The number of people going through each pathway differed greatly, he said, prompting a font change to reflect the disparity – the word “family” towering over a tiny “good luck”.
Oliver then debunked the “get in line” logic for each category. First, the biggest category; two-thirds of legal immigrants go through the family pathway, which allows legal residents to sponsor close family – children, parents or siblings, all subject to the country caps and rigorous background checks. Though Trump has repeatedly derided this process as “chain migration”, his own wife, Melania, used the process to sponsor her Slovenian-born parents’ citizenship.
As for employment, Oliver continued, temporary work visas rarely convert to green cards. Think of work visas as “like getting a backstage pass to see BTS”, Oliver said. “Sure, it will allow you to hang around for a bit, but you’re probably not going to end up becoming part of the band.” And with the country caps, he added, the waitlist for someone from a large country, like India, could be as long as 60 years.
Without family or work opportunities, the remaining two options are, as Oliver termed them, good luck and bad luck. Good luck would be the absurd odds of winning the diversity visa lottery, in which 22 million people entered last year for a maximum 50,000 visas. It’s the “longest of long shots”, Oliver said, in which “your odds of winning that lottery to come into the country are about the same as your odds of getting shot once you get here.” (That would be 1 in 285, according to the National Safety Council.)
Finally, there’s bad luck – being forced from home into refugee resettlement or political asylum. Until recently, America accepted more refugees than any other country each year, but has reversed course under Trump. The Obama administration capped the number of refugees entering America at 110,000 in his last year in office; Trump slashed that to 45,000 his first year, then 30,000 after that.
“If you’re thinking Trump might have a change of heart if he just heard what some of these refugees are fleeing, you’re wrong about that,” Oliver said. He cited the example of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who fled Isis in Iraq for Germany and later told her refugee story to Trump in the Oval Office. As her voice broke over the story of Isis killing her mother and brother, the president responded: “Where are they now?” “They killed them,” she repeated.
“Where are they now?! She just told you three fucking words ago!” Oliver said, incensed. “That is a US president displaying a level of indifference to human suffering rivaled only by robots and house cats.”
Furthermore, Oliver continued, the Trump White House has weighed cutting the refugee number to zero. “And if they do that, please tell me: what is the right way for refugees to come in then?” he asked. “For all of their talk about how fine they are with legal immigration, this administration has worked hard to reduce it as much as possible across the board.”
Oliver provided a non-exhaustive list of examples: Trump supported a bill that would cut the number of legal immigrants by half, and system tweaks have extended the average processing time for a legal immigration case now by 46% from 2016 to 2018, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Just last month, the administration moved to cut legal pathways for immigrants if they are deemed likely to receive public assistance such as food stamps, public housing or Medicaid. “That could profoundly change who gets to call this country home, advantaging the well-off, and disadvantaging anyone they ever think might have greater needs,” Oliver said.
The difficulty of legal immigration was a personal concern, Oliver admitted, since the Brit spent years in work-visa limbo before receiving his American green card. “I am biased here. I have been through this system and I can tell you: it’s rough,” Oliver said.
He was lucky, he concluded – not subject to a country cap and sponsored for work. “But for many people there is literally no way to come in the ‘right way’.”