Umm, no. You are mistaken. Racial criteria also applied to naturalized citizenship aspirants. Today, once you have a green card, irrespective of where you were born, it takes you 5 or so years to get your citizenship. So, person of white ethnicity born in Switzerland and a non-white person born in India would have the same wait and the same criteria for citizenship. This was not possible before the INA act of 1965 (and other civil rights acts).

Because no one could possibly be opposed to per country caps unless he were a disgruntled Indian.

I was born in New York. My parents were born in New York. Three of four of my grandparents were born in New York. The fourth grandparent was born in Germany. His parents died in a concentration camp because they couldn't come to the US with their teen children. You see they had be been born in Eastern Europe and the racist national origin system was designed to prevent too many people born in Eastern Europe from coming to the US. Kind of like how you don't want too many people born in India or China to come to the US.

> The green card diversity lottery is based on exactly the premise I mention.

With your encyclopedic knowledge of American history I'm sure you are aware of the political origins of that program.

When phrased that way, sure it feels that way.

But it's not because you are born in a specific country, it's because your country of origin has a lot of people who are attempting to immigrate to the US, and each country is capped.

Imagine if they lifted that policy, then countries like Mexico, India, China would lock out pretty much any other country from immigrating to the US. Add in the Amnesty program for undocumented workers, and you could imagine that nearest neighbors to the US would lock everyone else out.

So instead of penalizing Indians (in this case), you've now penalized everyone else.

What system, given a fixed number of applicants, would not apply some sort of penalty by proxy?

Contrast that to pre-1960's where laws SPECIFICALLY targeted blacks american citizens.

The US has no moral requirement to treat non-us citizens 100% the same as it does it's citizens. Yes they have perhaps lived in the US for 6 years, and paid US Taxes. They have also enjoyed a certain level of comfort afforded them, that they presumably would not have had in their native country.

This is true in nearly every developed country. It would be puzzling if it weren’t. In the eyes of the law a citizen is a citizen, regardless of birth, in most of the developed world. The US is not unique in this way.

> Would your country allow an American to become a full citizen as easily as America does?

Yes, actually, although I will concede that the path to citizenship varies VERY substantially from place to place. I don’t think it’s true to say that the US is especially outstanding in how easy it is to gain citizenship.

Yeah, those things aren't correlated at all. Come on.

> then it would be the exact same process for green cards except you only have a limited number of chances before you cap out the time on your visa and get sent back.

No it wouldn't. There's a different system in place for permanent visas than for temporary ones. Viz. a waiting list. The grandparent post linked the visa bulletin which explains how it works. You have the tools at hand to educate yourself, there's no excuse for ignorance.

> How is that a better, less capricious system than the current one for anyone who isn't Indian or Chinese?

Because human being are human beings, not 1 billionth of India or China. It is a bedrock principle of contemporary liberalism (small l) that people ought be to treated as individuals. The remnant of the pre-1965 racist national origin system is a disgusting anomaly of a worse time.

> The US political system gives disproportionate power to states with smaller population. The US immigration system is disproportionately more difficult for countries with lots of applicants. That's what the US looks at as fair - giving each state or country a fair shot, not each individual.

One terribly unjust system originally put in place to protect slavery doesn't define the United States' entire notion of fairness.

In any event it is nonsensical to talk about giving a country a shot. Countries aren't going to immigrate to the US, people are.

In addition to being cheap and uncivil, it's absolutely unbelievable (but not surprising) that a foreign national here in this country as a guest of the American people thinks that it is in any way acceptable to say things like this.

You would do very well to advise yourself on the laws of the United States, which do not require ancestry from any particular place in order to qualify for citizenship. That includes people like you who also don't have any native American ancestry.

America is a sovereign country, and we the people have every right to make whatever laws we like about what qualifies someone for citizenship or entry into our country. You're not an American citizen, and you have no such rights. For example: that's why you can't vote.

One more thing: in America we have a word for people who believe someone's race disqualifies them speaking.

It starts with R.

The overwhelming majority of people in Japan, China, etc. hasve ancestral roots in their respective countries going back thousands of years before written history. They live in “their land”, their ancestors’ land.

On the other hand, America as we know it is a country of immigrants, practically every “native” American is an N-th generation immigrant, 2 <= N <= 25.

It’s silly to compare immigration policy without regard to historical origins of countries.

That is quite common everywhere except the americas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

Actually, the quote is:

> I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth. Other than Native Americans, all of our families are fairly recent immigrants.

...and the factor not considered here is legacy. Including Native Americans, many Americans have fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and even some female relations who fought and possibly died in U.S. uniforms, partly for their families. And it's a general point. Your grandmother might have founded the local library. Your great uncle might have built the local rec center as part of the Lions Club.

So you don't deserve special rights for being born in the U.S. Your predecessors left you with special privileges through various forms of sacrifice over the years.

To be clear, I'm very pro immigration, especially when it comes to bureaucratic nonsense (H1B), but I think a lot of people are (ironically) missing an entire cultural perspective on this issue.

Your tone seems to imply you do not believe he should be granted citizenship.

What requirements do you have for granting citizenship that this guy doesn't meet?

He's spent nearly two decades in this country being a productive member of society - at a level most citizens don't ever achieve in their lifetime.

Why do you feel he shouldn't be allowed to permanently belong here?

IMO, being able to vote in the country you live and pay taxes in is basically a fundamental human right.

The idea that you should deprive immigrants who are living somewhere permanently of the right of self determination based on some sort of nationalistic idea of how countries should function just seems extremely misguided to me.

If you don't want to let them in that's one thing but once they're living there and paying taxes beyond maybe a few years they're entitled to vote.

Do tell, how does one go about naturalizing elsewhere?

In the country I live in, it typically takes over ten years and requires establishing a support system in said country first (employment, social connection, etc).

If you ban everyone from a country from immigrating (which is exactly what you're proposing for all birthright citizenship countries), you prevent naturalization from even being a possibility.

You claiming I'm arguing in bad faith while ignoring the Titanic sinking your argument did give me a chuckle though, I grant you that.

Wait, what? I thought you were going to suggest that people should be free to live/work wherever, which I agree with in principle, but also think it's not a change that can be made overnight. You seem to be suggesting that everybody has to earn the right to live in a particular country, even if they were born there. If that was universal, where would the people who fail the test go?

Maybe not, if the selection process were primarily concerned with individual merit. But it isn't. We decide which races to allow as residents or citizens, then throw the individuals into a lottery, with good odds for white countries and bad odds for brown ones. Discriminating on ancestry or proxies for ancestry (like nationality) to keep underprivileged groups down and privileged groups comfortable is immoral. So is denying others the same opportunities benefitted from merely because they came later.

Would your own family tree's entrypoints to the US pass your test?

As someone who doesn't know a lot about american immigration laws, that sounds surprisingly insane. Probably a stupid idea, but might it be preferable to become a citizen of another country - let's say Estonia, which seems to embrace immigration - just to use that citizenship to apply for a US green card?

However, you've then penalized someone born in in Mongolia, simply because they come from a less populous country, vs the opposite that is happening now.

I'm not claiming there is a moral argument to be made: the way the US residency program is implemented is neither moral or immoral.

> I'd rather have US as the home of the best and the brightest, not based on whether your parents were born in Mongolia or 100 miles away in Inner Mongolia that happens to be in China.

How do you qualify "best" & "brightest?" I'm a 1st generation US Citizen (of Indian decent). Both my parents immigrated here. My dad was drafted for Vietnam and then continued to serve in the US Army for 20 years, and my mom was a lunch lady. My parents don't have CS degrees, and instead worked blue collar jobs to make sure we could have a better life than they did.

One is denying the right of people born in the U.S. with parents that are citizens.

The other, is limiting the number of people not born in the U.S. and without parents that are citizens. In other words, its a choice to come here.

Not saying it is morally right or wrong, but you may consider distinguishing between the two.

How can anyone in their right mind justify per country caps that signify the racialist compromises of the Civil Rights Act.

I came to this country at 17 as an undergrad and have a US tax payer funded Masters degree from a top 5 university (not that I believe US news ranking is all that important. I've been here 9 years and can fairly say that I'm as an integrated immigrant as any, but i wont be getting a greencard anytime before 2025 because I'm an Indian. From my perch i could also find it maddening that a UX designer who happened to be born say in the EU gets their residency in a matter of months with far less investment or attachment to this country.

People don't come to this country as representatives of their government.

So...because Europeans colonized North America and for all practical purposes genocided the natives, current citizens of the USA aren't allowed to have / enforce immigration laws? I don't understand what point you're trying to make.