I am sorry you had the experience you did and I make no argument about your experience. I think it’s hard to push for change in immigration law when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US.
Where did you get this idea from? Ask anybody hiring managers in tech (who are willing to pay well), and they’ll say there’s nothing but a shortage. And I’m sure there’s multiple other fields besides tech with a serious shortage.
Employers requested 758,944 visas for skilled workers (H1B), and the U.S. government due to congressional limits, can only issue 85,000 and will have to reject 673,994 applications.
Source: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Your general thesis has been that immigrants are treated as unequals without rights by the US government. I am not arguing if that is true or not. I am simply stating that those processes are hard to change when there is no shortage of people wanting to come to America. There is not a supply shortage of people wanting to come, so there is no incentive to make the process easier/better. Adding proof with your statement that we annually reject more applications than accept.
Just because there is demand, doesn't mean it's morally right to treat people badly, and to restrict their rights and freedoms.
Canada is an excellent counter-example to this.
Canada gives most people moving to Canada their full rights and freedom, unlike the US. From a purely moral point of view, that's highly commendable.
There is huge demand (and millions of people willing) to move to wealthy countries the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait UAE, Qatar, etc. That demand and desire exists mostly due to higher salaries there.
There's no reason the US should treat immigrants worse than Qatar or Saudi Arabia (I would say the conditions of the H-2 work visa and especially the undocumented are probably worse than in some countries in the middle east), but the US (or at least Republicans[1] in the US) chooses to do so out of general disdain and hatred towards the concept of granting permanent residence, and integrating new people.
[1] I'm clarifying with Republicans here, since many blue (Democratic) states have indicated they'd like the welcome immigrants, Democratic politicians have introduced legislation that is immigrant-friendly; and all of these efforts have only been opposed to and blocked by Republicans.
I used strong language in my comment earlier, since I've lived in the past for over a decade without basic rights in the US, and since moved to Canada. So this is real and personal to me. Whenever I talked about not having rights in the US on HN, people on HN responded with intense hatred saying things that effectively amounted to "get the fuck out of this country you brown piece of shit", "we hate you", "you deserve to have no rights", "you have no right to expect to have any rights" etc (no, they didn't use those exact words--I am paraphrasing their sentiment--but they expressed an equivalent level of hatred using politer words). You can dig through my comment history to find those comments. To me, it was oddly reminiscent of the hatred white Americans must have shown black people during the Jim Crow era, or Germans towards Jews after the Nuremberg laws had been passed. I just didn't expect so much extreme loathing and hatred toward immigrants to be so incredibly prevalent on HN.