> And yes, not basing it on population side means you are screwed if you come from a big country, but at a huge benefit if from a small country

What the actual system does is make it so you are screwed if you come from a country with a large number of qualified immigrant applocants in a similar category (employment or family) subject to numerical limits. Population is loosely associated with this, but the biggest negative impact by far, on a country level, is to qualified immigrants from Mexico, and specifically to those in limited, family-based categories. India and China have bigger populations, sure, but much smaller total backlogs of qualified applicants.

Yeah, but US immigration policy should be constructed for maximum benefit to the US, not to the rest of the world minus China + India.

And I would go one step further and say that it is probably in the best long term interest to the US to have a large population of ethnic Chinese, for the same reason that Israel has benefitted so greatly by the US having a large and influential Jewish population.

I strongly disagree with this. I am a WASP whose family came to the US in 1620 and diversity in America is imperative. I don't think any racial group should particularly have a majority. If I've learned anything recently, a muslim man was lynched in India for killing a cow, it is illegal to eat in public on Ramadan in muslim majority countries or the chinese treatment of Uyghurs. We are strong through diversity and secularism, as much as I want economic prosperity that a pure merit based system can potentially bring. I think we can have a diversity oriented immigration system that works in tandem with being merit based, we must also remember that people of some backgrounds may be more disadvantaged but would similarly work hard given a good opportunity.

I have a very nuanced view on immigration and I tend to be more republican in my views. i.e. Curbing illegal immigration and moving to a merit vs. lottery based system. America is strong through diversity, but it needs to be controlled in an intelligent way.

I'm not sure that we disagree. The person I was responding to was framing things in terms of how US immigration policy benefits people who are not US citizens. I was just pointing out that the US government is morally obligated to attend primarily to the interests of it's own citizens (IMO; I realize this is a controversial opinion in some circles). I tend to take a pretty expansive position on what constitutes the best interests of US citizens and generally think it's good for the US that most countries have significant expat populations in the US.

> And I would go one step further and say that it is probably in the best long term interest to the US to have a large population of ethnic Chinese, for the same reason that Israel has benefitted so greatly by the US having a large and influential Jewish population.

That doesn't seem to follow, unless you left out a “not” before “in the interest of” or meant “China” the first time you used “US”.

(I'm not endorsing the result of either change as a correct statement, just commenting on the internal coherence of the statement, and particularly the disanalogy between the juxtaposed situations as presented.)

The analogy is not that the two sets of countries are related to each other in the exact same way, but that they can enjoy the benefits of a significant shared ethnic population.