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