How does S386 impact diversity?
By: Supporting Equality
Tags: S386, Legal Immigration, Discrimination, Hr1044, Immigration

There are many opponents to S386. Primarily those are people who currently benefit from the discriminatory laws in one or another. And in their opposition, they make many incorrect claims. One of the claims frequently made is that S386 is bad for diversity in the United States.

The claim goes like this: because a greater percentage of applicants in the employment-based immigration backlog are from India, removing country caps will be bad for diversity in America. There are many flaws with this logic.

Employment-based (EB) immigration is not a diversity program. There already exists a diversity visa lottery that grants 50,000 visas every year without regard to skills of those who are selected. Employment-based immigration is employer sponsored immigration and it is illegal for employers to discriminate based on country of birth. Employment-based immigration is employer-sponsored immigration. That means, it is the prerogative of the employer to decide who they sponsor for a green card through employment-based process. Further, according to US employment law, employers cannot discriminate who they hire based on many immutable characteristics, one of them being country of birth. Expecting employers to not sponsor employees based on their country of birth is illegal. The number of India and China-born immigrants in EB backlog is high because they are countries with larger populations. It is not a surprise that these immigrants have to repeatedly go through H-1B visa renewals due to the discriminatory country caps. This is a double whammy — first being discriminated against for being born in a specific country and second because the same person is having to go through H-1B renewals, the percentage of people from India and China on H-1B remains high. This is again turned against the same employees to say that they are misusing the H-1B visa. They are not misusing the visa. In fact, they are being discriminated and forced to be on H-1B visa longer than any other immigrant due to their country of birth. Now, finally, let us look at hard numbers on diversity. Does the US have too many immigrants from India? Will the ending of discriminatory country caps lead to a flood of immigrants from India? The short answer is no. These are just lies that have no basis in fact because the number of EB immigration is just 14% of the overall legal immigration number of 1M. No matter what rule comes, legal immigration from one country cannot exceed 140,000 per year. In reality, it is going to be much lower than this number.

Here is the data and analysis on how diversity in the US will be impacted if #S386 becomes law — that is, discrimination by country caps is removed from employment-based immigration.

According to the US Census, the total US population was 318.7M in 2014. It is projected to be 416.8M in 2060.

Asian population was 17.1M in 2014 and projected to be 39M in 2060.

Indian population in 2015 was 2.4M, which represents just 0.7% of the population.

Assuming the same rate of growth as the overall Asian population, Indians’ population in 2060 will be 5.5M (1.7% of total).

For comparison, Hispanic population will grow from 55.4M (17.4% of total) in 2014 to 119M (28.6%) in 2060.

Now, let’s assume S386 is passed and country cap discrimination ends. This could lead to Indians getting up to 50% of total world allocation. This number will be ~50,000 per year.

Over a period of 40 years, 50K x 40 = 2M additional Indians will get a green card. As a result, Indian population in the US will be 7.5M in 2060 or 2.3% of the total.

Net impact of S386 to US population = 0.6%

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