This is what is broken. The current system is archaic and circuitous. It also performs a legal fiction around non-immigrant visas functionally being a path to permanent immigration.
We should increase the number of immigrant visas and make it straightforward what the process is to get a green card like what one would see in other countries like Canada and Australia.
Meanwhile, non immigrant visas should remain non immigrant and very restricted criteria for changing status (eg. marriage) without reapplying abroad.
That’s a strawman. There’s wide gulfs between “I want very permissive immigration à la Canada” to “I want the US immigration system as it was under previous administrations” to “I want no immigrants”. For example, I personally want the standards for H1-Bs to be a lot higher, but would willingly grant substantially more immigrant visas to top academics and workers under EB1, EB2 and EB3 visas.
These are all non-immigrant visa classes. The understanding is that you are temporarily immigrating to the United States. Why should it be surprising then that it is hard to become a permanent resident/immigrant if you explicitly came on a non-immigrant visa?
As a US citizen I am confused. H1-B and similar are supposed to be non-immigrant visas for temporary workers. Why was it allowed to permanently immigrate under those visas to begin with? We have immigrant visas like the E-1 for routes to permanent immigration.
Freedom of association is extremely limited once you factor in public accommodations. For example, even if I own a hotel, I can’t choose who can stay in the hotel if they are willing to pay in a lot of cases.
I do see the benefit of parents having time to raise their kids in society. But I have also seen explicit comments on HN that people don’t have kids because we don’t have enough benefits. If the goal is simply “give people a year off so they can have their one kid and then be done with it”, so be it. But then we shouldn’t be advocating for these policies as a solution to anything besides giving parents a long paid vacation.
Have we been able to find any correlation between better parental leave and people being more likely to have kids/more kids? What is the goal of this improved parental leave?
We should increase the number of immigrant visas and make it straightforward what the process is to get a green card like what one would see in other countries like Canada and Australia.
Meanwhile, non immigrant visas should remain non immigrant and very restricted criteria for changing status (eg. marriage) without reapplying abroad.