It is a problem with H1B because it undermines the whole idea of selective immigration. H1B is pitched to the public as a way to get "the best and brightest" from foreign countries. But because of family reunification, the decision to admit one skilled worker actually means one skilled worker plus potentially dozens of other people with no qualifications whatsoever.
Bangladesh gets around 50-60 skilled immigrant visas a year, but the Bangladeshi population in the U.S. has someone grown from under 10,000 in 1990 to over 270,000 today. That's the product of family reunification. Voters who supported H1B thought they were voting for a handful of Bangladeshi doctors and engineers, and instead they got Little Bangladeshes popping up all over the country.
I don’t mind more Bangladeshes. Seems like your whole issue is that they’re a different ethnicity. Kids born in the US are citizens and you have no good reason to think they’re worse somehow.
You think you don't because you don't know anything about the culture and any contact you have with the community is superficial and arm's length. I'm Bangladeshi--my family has no knowledge of even a single ancestor from anywhere else. Bangladeshis aren't just Iowans with darker skin. Our mothers socialize us very differently from birth.
That’s a great example, but with one key difference. Mormons went out and built their own society in the middle of nowhere on land nobody else wanted. But how would you like it if tens of thousands of mormons moved into your town and reshaped it according to their culture?
There you go. You identified the actual cause yourself.
> the decision to admit one skilled worker actually means one skilled worker plus potentially dozens of other people with no qualifications whatsoever.
"Potentially no qualifications" is doing a lot of work there (strangely). What are the odds that only one person in the family is well-educated? And isn't IQ supposedly heritable? I'm personally neutral on family reunification. It undermines fairness but helps family cohesion. I understand arguments in favor of and against it, and there probably isn't a single right answer.
I'm not convinced family members without any qualifications or a means of supporting themselves in the US would even leave their country. What's the point? And if they're truly useless, their relative who would otherwise sponsor their immigration visa might prefer just sending them some money. It would be cheaper than financially supporting them here.
> instead they got Little Bangladeshes popping up all over the country
From the little research I did, Bangladeshi-Americans have higher educational attainment and household incomes than the median. America has always had ethnic neighborhoods - German/China/Korea/Japantowns, little Italys. What's the issue?
>From the little research I did, Bangladeshi-Americans have higher educational attainment and household incomes than the median. America has always had ethnic neighborhoods - German/China/Korea/Japantowns, little Italys. What's the issue?
Some people have problems with other people's skin color.
The key difference between Scandinavian enclaves in Minnesota and Little Bangladesh isn't "skin color." It's order versus disorder. First world versus third world. Humans aren't just differently colored blank slates.
Scandinavia is peaceful and prosperous today. Was it like that when those enclaves formed? I haven't been to any Little Bangladeshes personally. What kinds of disorder exist there?
You’re spot on, people are confusing economics and cultural assimilation concerns with racism. I don’t believe you’re racist (based on your comments), you’re just pointing out a loophole that allows mass migration via a skilled worker visa program (whether intentional or not) of a cohort of immigrant who might experience challenges assimilating into their target country culture.
Culture isn’t magic land, it’s people, and their social values and norms. Are mass migrants via family reunification assimilating and adopting the culture of their new home? That’s an important question for those offering residency and potentially a path to citizenship.
Very similar to why many European countries are offering economic migrants a return path to their country of origin when social and economic integration has failed.
Is your first sentence true? If you think so--how do you explain the cultural differences between different parts of the U.S. with different immigration histories? I can't help but notice that Minnesota (heavy Scandinavian influence) and Massachusetts (heavy Puritan Anglo influence) are clean, low in corruption, and orderly, while New Jersey and New York (heavy southern Italian influence) are significantly less so--a characteristic that they share with contemporary southern Italy (e.g, Sicily).
It's also worth pointing out that the social infrastructure for assimilation that existed in the early 20th century has since been destroyed. Italians immigrated to a country where there was strong pressure to abandon their foreign culture and assimilate into Anglo norms, attitudes, and customs. Assimilation was also facilitated by restrictive immigration laws adopted in 1921, which dropped the foreign-born population from 15% to under 5% by 1970.
Even then, the evidence we have is that assimilation only worked about halfway: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran.... To this day, differences in social attitudes between European countries show up in U.S. descendants of immigrants from those countries: https://cis.org/Richwine/Still-More-Evidence-Cultural-Persis... ("For example, in Europe, Norwegians are more trusting than Germans, who are themselves more trusting than Italians. Despite over a century passing since their peak period of immigration, those three ancestral groups order themselves the same way in the United States: Norwegian-Americans are more trusting than German-Americans, who in turn are more trusting than Italian-Americans.").
"Past performance is not a guarantee of future results." And who is going to guarantee favorable outcomes and results? "America has traditionally been excellent at..." is load bearing considering current state and forward looking projections.
I have doubts because the country and its governance is stumbling towards failure.
Here’s a secret: Not only am I ethnically Bangladeshi, I enjoy Bangladeshis! I enjoy weddings where the aunties harass the couple about immediately having kids. I live 10 minutes from my parents and subject my Anglo wife to elaborate and overbearing family obligations and face saving rituals. Seeing Anglos with adult children waiting for grandkids that will never come genuinely fills me with existential dread.
That is an entirely different consideration, however, than the economic and social effects of immigration of people like me in sufficient numbers to culturally reshape parts of America.
The point is that H1B is marketed as selective immigration of highly skilled immigrants, but in practice it enables mass migration. Whether you think mass migration is a good thing is a different, and irrelevant, point. If you put "our immigration policy should enable the formation of places like Little Bangladesh" it would lose handily at the ballot box.
(By the way, Bangladeshi Americans are poorer than the average American: "In a 2013, NPR discussion with a member of the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the book The Myth of the Model Minority Rosalind Chou who is also a professor of sociology. One of them stated that 'When you break it down by specific ethnic groups, the Hmong, the Bangladeshi, they have poverty rates that rival the African-American poverty rate.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladeshi_Americans)
> By the way, Bangladeshi Americans are poorer than the average American
The Wikipedia article is inaccurate. It claims that Bangladesh-Americans have a median household income of ~$59k. The actual sources cited by the article both say it's $78k:
Bangladesh gets around 50-60 skilled immigrant visas a year, but the Bangladeshi population in the U.S. has someone grown from under 10,000 in 1990 to over 270,000 today. That's the product of family reunification. Voters who supported H1B thought they were voting for a handful of Bangladeshi doctors and engineers, and instead they got Little Bangladeshes popping up all over the country.