Green cards — the documents that put an immigrant on the path to citizenship — are the central mechanism of lawful permanent immigration to the United States. In the excerpts, guests describe a system in which Congress sets numerical caps, the executive branch interprets and administers the law, and the resulting allocation admits far fewer immigrants than Congress intended. The discussion spans the categories through which a green card can be obtained, the per-country caps that produce extraordinary waits, and the constitutional division of authority over immigration.
The categories of lawful permanent immigration
Daniel Di Martino, a PhD student studying the economics of immigration, laid out the routes to a green card. A person can have a direct family member in the United States — as a spouse, minor child, or parent of an American — and two-thirds of all people who come permanently come through that system. A person can request asylum or be brought in as a refugee through the UN refugee system, which Di Martino described as very few people. A person can win the Diversity Visa Lottery, open only to people from countries from which there are few immigrants in America; Di Martino noted that Venezuela was disqualified from the lottery that year because, according to the government, there were too many Venezuelans already. The remaining route, for someone without family and without winning the lottery, is the employment-based green card system, which Di Martino said has several categories, five of them Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021).
Among those categories, Di Martino described one for a millionaire who invests over a million dollars and creates 10 jobs; one for religious workers, who come as priests; and the EB-3 for agricultural workers, for low-skilled immigrants, with only 40,000 allowed a year. He said 80,000 green cards a year — out of 1 million given out every year — are for people with at least a master’s degree or equivalent, coming as extraordinary ability and exceptional ability professors, people with national interest waivers, Nobel Prize winners, Olympic medalists, in sports and in fashion. He called the 80,000 figure, for a country of 331 million people, truly a mess Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021).
Alex Nowrasteh, in a later episode, gave a related figure: the government sets aside about 140,000 green cards a year for highly skilled workers and their family members. He described the general starting principle of American immigration law as the opposite of every other area of law: everything is illegal except the few things the government says are legal, and the few areas that are legal include having an immediate relative or close family member in the United States American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).
Caps, waits and the per-country limit
Di Martino said the U.S. legal immigration system has not only an overall cap on green cards but also a cap on the number that people from certain countries can receive, so that a highly populated country has the same number allowed as a smaller country. He said that if a person with a master’s degree applies today through the EB-2 category and was born in India, that person could face a wait time of 100 years and will never get a green card Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021).
Bob Zadek asked how a country gets on a favored or disfavored list, saying it sounded pure, dare he say, racist. Di Martino answered that there is no list of favored and disfavored countries, just a cap per country: no country can receive more than approximately 7% of all green cards in the employment-based category. He said that for large countries like China or India — and sometimes the Philippines and Vietnam, and Mexico in the family category — people are in a separate waitlist, and that the people on the waitlist for years and years are from India and China right now. He described an underclass of hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, people from India and China living and working in the United States under work visas — H-1B, O visa, TN for people who are also Canadian but happen to be born in India — who are approved for a green card but must stay on a visa because of the arbitrary numerical limit, and who lose their green card and visa if they get fired Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021).
Di Martino said the children of these people, brought when they were one or five years old and included in the green card application, will also never get the green card, and will never become Americans. He said Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Young Kim, and others in Congress on the Republican side, together with Democrats, introduced an act to fix that for the children, called the America’s CHILDREN Act, but that it is just a symptom of the problem of limiting the number of very smart people to 80,000 a year rather than a market-based number, which he said should probably be like 200,000 Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021).
Zadek called the 80,000 figure arbitrary, the result of a negotiation between staffers on House and Senate committees, and asked where opposition to raising it comes from. Di Martino said the limit was set in 1990 and had not changed in 31 years, and that it had not grown with the population or the economy. He attributed the bureaucracy and two-year processing times to inefficiency rather than security, since a background check is fast and most of these people are already vetted because they already live in America and got another visa. He said some people want to make it hard for high-skilled immigrants to come because of the long idea that all immigrants take jobs away from Americans, which he called a total lie debunked in the economic sciences Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021).
Green cards in the Trump-era policy debate
In a December 2016 episode, Nowrasteh described Donald Trump’s published position paper on immigration. He said Trump wanted a huge increase in border enforcement, including a wall out to about 1,000 miles along the border with Mexico, and wanted to triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who run the deportation programs. He said Trump wanted to institute E-Verify nationally, so that every time a private employer hires somebody, the employer must run the person’s name and information through a government database to make sure the person is legally eligible to work. He said Trump wanted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Obama put in place through executive action in 2012, deferring the deportation of some illegal immigrants brought here as children who met certain categories and were not violent criminals, and giving them a temporary work permit. He said Trump wanted mandatory detention for all illegal immigrants apprehended in the United States Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016).
Most worrying to Nowrasteh, he said, were two things: Trump wanted to decrease the amount of legal immigration, cutting the number of green cards for workers down to about zero until the economy fully recovers and the unemployment rate is zero; and Trump wanted to end the entire refugee program, either entirely or just for Muslims entering the US through the refugee program Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016).
Constitutional authority and the structure of the law
Nowrasteh described two big parts of immigration law. The first is naturalization, the process of becoming a citizen, which he said is clearly within the power of Congress. The second is who can come here to live or work without becoming a citizen, on which he said the Constitution is silent. He said that beginning in the later part of the 19th century, Congress started to pass rules and laws restricting the peaceful movement of people to the United States even if they did not want to become citizens, and that this body of laws has grown through successive Congresses and executive actions to be the second most complicated portion of American law, with only the income tax more complicated according to many law professors who study the topic American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).
Nowrasteh said the overall effect is a highly restrictive system under an enormous amount of government control and oversight, with a bloated bureaucracy that costs Americans and immigrants enormous time and money and blocks out the vast majority of people who want to come lawfully. He contrasted this with the days of Ellis Island, when 2% of people were sent back and it was called the “Isle of Tears,” saying that nowadays only maybe 5% of people who want to come here are able to apply and do so in the first place, far worse than anything experienced in American history American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).
Di Martino made a parallel structural point: most things in immigration right now are simply different forms of interpretation of the law by the executive branch, and a lot of the problems are implemented in ways that shouldn’t be, causing a waste of green cards, so that not as many immigrants as Congress intended are admitted, or the type admitted is not the type Congress intended Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021).
Across episodes: the same critique, five years apart
The topic of green cards is argued in the 2016 Nowrasteh episode, the 2021 Di Martino episode, and the 2023 Nowrasteh episode. The 2016 treatment is prospective, describing Trump’s position paper and its proposal to cut worker green cards to about zero; the 2021 and 2023 treatments are structural, with Di Martino describing the categories, caps and waits in operation and Nowrasteh describing the constitutional division of authority and the complexity of the body of law. The excerpts show no development in the underlying argument — that the system admits fewer people than Congress intended and imposes arbitrary limits — but they do show a shift in what is being discussed: a proposed policy in 2016, and the machinery of the system itself in 2021 and 2023.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the full text of the constitutional clause Zadek paraphrases, the name or terms of the 1990 legislation that set the 80,000 limit, or the provisions of the America’s CHILDREN Act beyond its stated purpose. They do not give the outcome of any legislative effort, the current status of the per-country caps, or the specific mechanics by which a green card is issued or denied. The excerpts also do not state the state in which any city mentioned is located, the title or field of any person beyond what the speakers say, or the ending of any sentence that breaks off.