The new order for those willing to move to America: You should be young, highly qualified, rich, speak English and know your municipality’s laws of the selected area? Well, then the land of the free, the USA, beckons professionals like you as President Donald Trump, on the advice of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, proposed a new immigration policy called the Build America visa to replace the green card visa for permanent residency. The key takeaways: The skills-based visa will prioritize migrants based on education, English-language ability and high-paying job offers as against the existing diversity-visa lottery. Note: The Democratic Party-led Congress is unlikely to approve it.
What it offers: As per the proposed policy, the younger you are, the more points you accrue; more qualified you are, more points; more you earn or are able to support yourself financially, more points. Additionally and very importantly, all such wannabe migrants will have to pass a civics exam before they are granted permanent residency. Under the present system, 66% of the green card visas were given to people who had a relative in the US, while another 21% were selected via a random lottery. The proposed policy will grant 57% of the permanent residency visas to highly skilled workers — who currently get just a 12% share.
Will Indians benefit? That’s the general consensus, given that the new policy will favor techies and entrepreneurs as also other highly skilled workers for whom the current waiting period to obtain a green card could be 10 years or more. For Trump, it helps him win the support of low-wage or blue-collar American workers as they will face less competition from migrants, thus making the proposal a rallying cry as he heads for the re-election in 2020.
Where else? Trump cited the examples of Canada and Australia to back his proposal. Canada, which offers residency to about 200,000 immigrants and refugees a year, assigns the highest share to economic criteria, followed by family reunification and refugees. It has also tightened loopholes such as marriages of convenience by making it mandatory for the sponsor to financially support the spouse for three years even if the marriage fails. Between the years 1989-2018, Canada allowed in only 5 million immigrants, as against the 1.1 million green cards the US issues every year — a figure that will remain unchanged even under the new policy.
World Today by Binay Srivastava 
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