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The United States is speedily making changes to its immigration and visa issuance policies, with President Donald Trump ready to present his plan to overhaul the country’s legal immigration and border security system.
The plan, according to a report by Reuters, will be presented on Thursday.
According to the report, the new system will drastically reduce family-based immigration, a long standing system in which about two-thirds of all people granted green cards each year have family ties to people in the United States.
The new system will favour the following:
- Applicants who are proficient in English
- Applicants who are well educated (have degrees) or highly skilled
- Applicants who have job offers from the U.S
These applicants are also allowed to bring with them their spouses and children.
The plan is expected to keep legal immigration steady at 1.1 million people a year, but would attract high-skilled workers as against uniting extended families.
The proposal which also touches on border security, will do the following:
- Cancel the diverty lottery system which offers applicants from countries with low immigration rates the chance to move to the United States.
- Harden the U.S asylum process by reducing 10 percent of green cards being given to immigration for humanitarian reasons from its current 22 per cent to 10 per cent
- Extend the southern border wall
- Improve inspections of goods and people at ports of entry to fight drug smuggling
- Increase fees collected at the border to pay for border security infrastructure
Trump will present an overview of the plan, with details of the “very large document” to be released in coming weeks, Reuters quoted a senior U.S government official as saying.
The new plan is an indication that the U.S is towing the line of Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
It is understood that drafters of the new U.S plan discovered that while migration to the United States based on employment and skill was just 12 permcent, it is a whopping 68 per cent for Australia, 63 per cent for Canada, 57 per cent for New Zealand and 52 per cent for Japan.
So, in the new plan, immigrants proficient in English and with degrees or training and job offers, will increase from 12 per cent to 57 per cent.