09/20/2019 Tungol Law Headline News "John Oliver Talks Legal Immigration On Last Week Tonight"

John Oliver examined America’s legal immigration system on a recent episode of On Last Week Tonight. “Immigration is the system that brought you Albert Einstein, Yo Yo Ma and me,” said John Oliver on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight. Immigration is one of the issues that President Donald Trump campaigned on, claiming that “the country is full” and arguing for a border wall.

Oliver said, focusing on one of the most-repeated and predominant ones, which can be boiled down to: “Get in line.”“That is an appealing phrase, but it is significantly more complicated than that,” Oliver said. For starters, there’s not one line to stand in, and “the lines that do exist can be prohibitively long or have sudden dead ends,” Oliver argued. “And for many people, and this is very important, there simply isn’t a line at all.” That, or the line dead-ends in a country cap, which mandates that no one country can account for more than 7% of all green cards in a single year – no matter if it has a massive number of potential immigrants (China, Mexico, India) or a tiny one (Malta).

To illustrate the system at work, Oliver introduced his four categories for obtaining legal residency in the United States: family (you’re related to someone already here), employment (someone offered you a job in the US), good luck (you won the visa lottery), or bad luck (you’re a refugee or seeking asylum). The number of people going through each pathway differed greatly, he said, prompting a font change to reflect the disparity – the word “family” towering over a tiny “good luck.”

Horton, Adrian. ” John Oliver on immigration: for many there is no way to come in the right way.” The Guardian, September 16, 2019, available on the web https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/sep/16/john-oliver-legal-immigration-for-many-there-is-no-way-to-come-in-the-right-way

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