I was once watching a speech given by Hollywood actor Denzel Washington. In that he says that the most selfish thing one can do is to help others. That the amazing joy, which one feels after helping someone, is what drives this urge to help. Turns out the US immigration can be selfish both in that sense as well as in a very material sense.

When a US citizen files a petition for his siblings to come to America, nowadays the process takes about 17 to 18 years for those siblings to immigrate from Pakistan. That is such a long time that Pakistanis, being the ever believers of conspiracy theories, have started to believe that America does not want for them to ever come to its shores, so, that is why they have come up with this excuse of 17 to 18 years of processing time. Because, they say, such a long wait discourages people from applying in the first place.

The truth, however, is less nuanced than that. The simple reality is that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has only so much manpower to deal with an enormous number of applications filed by various US citizens belonging to various countries of origin. If you apply for your sibling today, the number of applications ahead of you will cause this timeline to be so ridiculously long. I was thinking about this problem and then I realised, well, as they say there is an opportunity in every problem; this certainly qualifies.

If the US government hires a lot more people than are currently working at the USCIS, then that would pace up the processing time because it would clear up the backlog. But then the US government would quickly argue that they do not have the funds to hire so many people and also deal with the processing of the visas in overseas US embassies. Well, here is a solution: many of the people who are desperate to come to America are in those countries where the US government pays the leadership a lot of money every year. That money enriches the strongman or the system in place there. It certainly does not help the people. And Uncle Sam knows this. I mean it is not like the Swedish or the British are desperate to find work in America because back home desperation reigns. But then neither is Uncle Sam paying Stockholm or London.

So, instead of funding and thereby fueling corruption in those countries, why not use that money to hire people to work for the USCIS. It would not only fasten the processing time for those petitions, but also create so many jobs. The US president can claim credit for and advertise the number of jobs created by his administration helping in re-election campaign.

The American people have lived long enough with the immigrants among them to know that the one thing the immigrants do more than any other thing is work. They are working all the time. They are buying and developing businesses. They create jobs. One of the most common observations in America is to see local white and black Americans working for a business owned by some brown skinned immigrant. The immigrants pay taxes. They do not rob people around street corners. They do not practise their second amendment rights on others. They are the proud parents of students who do not shoot their classmates and neither do they sell drugs to honour students. They do not even take any student loan for their children. The children of immigrants go to college and university with their tuition paid in full by their immigrant parents. They do not become a burden on American society. They rather add to the society. They and their children invent brands such as Google, Apple, Whats App, Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal and so forth.

In a nutshell, it would only be selfish on part of America to let more immigrants in.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 18^th, 2023.

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