United States Immigration

            One of the first things I found when looking at the United States immigration policy, is that there is a limit of 675,000 permanent immigrants. I found this rather interesting as never before had I ever recognized there was a limit. This also brought up the question of if there can only be that many permanent immigrants then how many are here illegally? I also found it interesting that the United States is looking to have immigrants come to our country that have skills valuable to the United States, or helps to unify families. This brought up more questions as I wondered how the United States makes the decision on skilled labor and being a valuable part of this country. I am sure there is a long process to decipher all of the evidence, but it has to be hard with such a limited number of permanent residents.

            When reading about unifying families, I found it to be very interesting and nice to find that family members can be brought to the United States and given a chance to be whole once again. While I have known that the U.S. has been a place of refuge, learning that we actively allow families to become unified is both heartwarming and good to know as this has never been brought to my attention before today. One possible downfall to all of this though, is the section about sponsors and or the section on meeting requirements. It seemed to be decently confusing as I scanned through the information to dial down what specifically has to be done and how to go about that. The information I found dealt specifically with numbers and who is allowed to immigrate, so the how to eluded my search and left me wondering.

            Another thing I stumbled upon was the Diversity Visa Program. It stated that each year since 1990 55,000 visas are randomly given to nationals from countries that have sent less than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the last 5 years. The information stated that this was originally created to allow immigration from Ireland and in the beginning 40% of the visas were given to Irish immigrants. The plus side to this program is that it is an avenue for certain immigrants that is the only way they secure a green card and are able to get to the United States. Another interesting fact was that immigrants must have a high school education to be accepted into this program. I found this program to be very interesting and wanting to learn more. When it came to the requirement of a high school education though, the restrictions started to get pretty strict and possibly limiting as the restrictions became more than I expected to gain acceptance to this country. Having to have worked or gained experience of two years on a profession seems rather limiting and must be tough for individuals to meet. What I ended up wondering, was that if 50,000 people are allowed to immigrate a year from this, how many get rejected each year? I also wondered that if you are rejected, can you reapply until you get into the United States? I find it interesting that there is a lottery that takes place and I had never heard of it before. What I think would be interesting is to look at all of the immigrants and see how the transitions workout once the immigrants have been here for a couple years.