alt Hacker NewsHe's speaking specifically about the green card process, at which point you've already been in the country for a long time and paid into U.S. taxes. Not people who might want to pay money to immigrate here (although for them, the EB-5 visa program exists).
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
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Any changes to immigration require the legislature. Congress hasn't changed anything in over 30 years, so all this is moot. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It's a bit silly to reason backwards about what the anti-immigrant types want. There is no grounding principle there.
Cato did a study in 2017 that asked people if they supported immigration. Most people did. Then they asked people what they thought the level of immigration should be. The median answer was around 500,000 a year. The real level is 2-5 times higher than that. That’s why nobody will push for a real skilled immigration system. Once you open up the issue to public debate, a likely outcome will be a demand to drastically cut the level of legal immigration.
For example, right now, nobody is thinking of how many immigrants come to the U.S. through family unification for each H1B worker that eventually gets permanent residency. If you open up the issue now it’s going to become a firestorm when people realize that “65,000 skilled workers a year” actually results in millions of people every year, most of whom aren’t skilled workers.