this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
36 points (100.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

36553 readers
1983 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] AfterNova@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Congress could increase the immigration quota. Maybe they should double or triple the immigration quota.

[โ€“] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, if they wanted to do so, in theory they could. However, even if that were the case, it'd be unlikely to happen until 2029. The President has a veto on legislation, and Congress requires a two-thirds supermajority in both legislative houses to override that veto on a given piece of legislation.

Congress can play hardball with the budget, refuse to fund the Executive, but outside of that, generally, there's a strong bias towards the status quo in the US system of government: lots of ability to block other entities from changing from the status quo.

IIRC, despite wildly-conflicting statements on the matter to different audiences, Trump hasn't been particularly opposed to skilled immigration, so maybe he might not veto an increase there.

If you're thinking about, like, the high-school-diploma-only green card lottery being greatly expanded to crank up unskilled legal immigration, it's theoretically possible, but I would bet against it happening for political and economic reasons. For unskilled labor, illegal immigration is probably more-advantageous to to the US than legal immigration; you can get labor, and thus economic production for the country, without needing to pay out a variety of government benefits that one otherwise would need to pay out. Milton Friedman (Nobel-prize winning economist, was involved with designing the income tax system in the US) has some old video where he's giving a talk at some university and was happily saying something like "immigration is only good because it's illegal". I mean, he's intentionally being provoking there for the effect, but he's got a point.

goes looking for said video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eyJIbSgdSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfU9Fqah-f4

Like, the people who are gonna get citizenship are gonna be the kids of illegal immigrants born in the US, not the illegal immigrants themselves. Those kids are gonna go through the education system and ideally acquire a skillset there.

In practice, would probably be better to do all this legally, have some kind of unskilled work visa that doesn't provide benefits, but I can't imagine that there's any way that a "two-tiered citizenship" would stand muster politically.