Is there any reason why you would want diversity? On its face Indians wouldn't be less valuable per capita than inhabitants of some small Pacific island just because there are more Indians alive. In fact if you believe in normal distributions then the best Indians would be better than almost any other country because there are more Indians to draw from.

Yes,

If you only receive immigration from only one country, it is easier for these newcomers to associate and become a political force that can change your status quo. Whereas if immigration is diverse, this situation is more complicated.

I don't think this comment deserves to be dismissed so readily. Although I shudder to think about the xenophobia that could potentially motivate thinking along these lines, it is very much a fact that plenty of people have such concerns, and as such it is an important reason to enact barriers and one that I hadn't thought of before.

Are there any historical examples of large numbers of immigrants politically changing the country they immigrated to?

Every country in the Western hemisphere? India/Pakistan until the mid-20th century and under earlier Muslim rule? The entire Mediterranean under Rome? China after Khan?

This reminds me of an episode during my senior year of high school Model UN where a hapless delegate for Germany in the security council stood up and started on with a straight face "Germany has never invaded another country..." before being drowned out by peals of laughter and sitting down red-faced.

Umvi wasn't claiming that there were no examples, they were asking for examples.

Hawaii. Texas.

Texas Revolution?

Israël?

The USA?

All of South America?

>Hawaii

>Texas

>USA

>All of South America?

All of the Americas?

That sort of thing could honestly be in the minds of the Powers that Be.

The positive spin for diversity in where your immigrants come from is that it is better for the culture if the participants have diverse backgrounds.

Even if you're right, I don't think people want a system that benefits a group of people just because they have a bigger population than others. It's the same reason why diversity quotas are pushed for, because we can't have companies only hiring or promoting into leadership positions people who happen to look like them. It is in line with those principles that we would not want to have a system where Indians are being severely advantaged compared to other minorities just because they have a huge population.

>Even if you're right, I don't think people want a system that benefits a group of people just because they have a bigger population than others.

This does not make much sense. People get green cards, not countries. Imagine if you were at the DMV and each region of your city had its own queue. People coming from the smaller parts leave in 5 minutes, and people hailing from the larger parts have to wait 8 hours for their turn. It's their fault for living in a more populous place?

What did the people in the smaller areas do to deserve their faster queue compared to others, except being born at a certain place?

Work visas should be about the person who passes the interview, is selected and is able to hold said job.

That sounds nice and all but the DMV analogy does not hold up. Think about if there were no limits by country population, India has more people and therefore the most applicants, so we would be mainly giving limited numbers of work visas to Indians while others would have no chance.

Imagine if there was a company with a white CEO who was only hiring/putting other whites into high level positions because they happen to be in a majority white area. If that makes you cringe, you should have the same reaction regarding this.

Diversity = various countries/peoples around the world getting a fair chance

Not diversity = Only Indians get work visas

>a white CEO who was only hiring/putting other whites into high level positions because they happen to be in a majority white area

If 90% of a town is white and 10% is black, 9:1 is a fair ratio for executive boards on average. Anything else would mean that the probability of a person holding a board position given their race would be different for different races. Imagine if every company in Mombasa was required to have an even split between white and black: being born white would guarantee you any job you wanted because you would be competing with less than 1% of the population, while in contrast every other ethnicity would be crowded in to half the number of jobs. In fact if racial quotas were instituted in Kenya and every race was given the same percent quota, 98% of Kenyans would be forced to be unemployed.

By all means you're right and I would agree. It's just that, if we are going to go with the diversity thing, we should uphold it equally and fairly. There is no avoiding natural majorities where we can't help it. But in the realm of green cards and work visas where they are limited and we CAN help it, I think avoiding incentivizing or allowing for majorities to form that will become problematic(and then too big to be helped later on) is a good thing.

> Is there any reason why you would want diversity?

Diversity is generally considered a positive thing for companies and countries. Also there have been complaints that US is poaching the best people from other countries so diversity helps moderate that.

>Also there have been complaints that US is poaching the best people from other countries so diversity helps moderate that.

The US sets US law to serve US interests, so I don't see how that would be a motivation.

Diversity in the green card pool is not the same as diversity of who lives in the country or works at a company.

This underlies an assumption that the people from one country are generally homogeneous.

India is easily the most internally diverse country in the world. There is also the fact, that literally 15% of the world's population resides here.

The current "diversity" heuristic is too naive to promote any real diversity.

Maybe, maybe not, but thats a different battle altogether, and right now a huge portion of American politics revolve around this definition of diversity, and if it didn't, it's likely immigration would get stricter, not looser.

I'm Indian and I find that claim hard to believe. Countries like the United States and Canada are far more heterogenous, unless you want to say everyone who speaks a different language is different in any way other than the language (mostly not;).

It is not just language. It is skin color (some are fair skinned like Europeans, some are dark skinned like Africans), food (North and South Indian food are very different), clothes, religion (which is very important in India), income levels (extreme poverty as well as extreme wealth), education (most of the country is illiterate, but there also world-class institutions such as IITs, culture (India has higher female participation in the workforce, in IT at least, that the US, yet, in certain villages there is "honor killings" and so on.) Yes, India is absolutely the most diverse country in the world, and it is many times more diverse than the US.

Double bell curves != diversity

Country caps are based on country of birth (with some exceptions that don't apply to most people). From that standpoint, US-born people are actually very heterogenous relative to other large countries, and the same applies to Canada-born people.

Why do you think India is called a subcontinent?

>Countries like the United States and Canada are far more heterogenous

That's only in the media and big cities.

> The “no country can get more than 5% of immigrant visa in any given year”, was done so that large countries don’t dominate the immigrant mix.

It was done so that countries with large numbers of eligible immigrants don't dominate the immigrant mix in any category (it's per category, not global), which is a really stupid idea (it systematically prevents legal supply and demand from aligning, even as far as they could within the aggregate limit, by artificial restriction, which as anyone whose studied price controls know, creates illegality.)

Supply and demand? I don’t think are many people that think who should immigrate to the US should happen the same way people buy cars or other consumer goods.

It was a more subtle way of restricting immigration from "undesirable" countries.

https://scholars.org/brief/how-legacies-racism-persist-us-im...

US immigration law has always been racist.