Indians might benefit from Trump’s move to favour ‘meritorious’ immigrants

• Trump said that he favours foreign immigrants coming in through a merit-based system as they will help meet labour demands of American companies.
  
• Trump also recently acknowledged that their immigration policy is unfair to those who come in legally, a lot of which are Indian immigrants.
  
• Experts believe that this might favour thousands of Indians waiting in line for their green card, an overwhelming majority of whom are meritorious.

On Wednesday, during a luncheon with members of the Congress at the White House, Trump told reporters, that he favours foreign immigrants coming into the US through a merit-based system as they help the country meet labour demands. According to Trump, these ‘meritorious’ immigrants will prove beneficial for companies that are moving into America “at numbers that nobody has seen in a long time”.

As an example, he announced that Foxconn, the company that makes Apple’s laptops and iPhones, is setting up a big plant in Wisconsin and would need labour. In that case, Trump said, he will have to let people in but it must do so through the merit-based system to ‘Make America Great Again’.

Experts believe that Trump’s new decision might favour Indians.

The current immigration system imposes a quota of 7% per country on the allotment of green cards or permanent legal residency and Indian-Americans have been its worst sufferers. Thousands of Indians are waiting in line for their green card, an overwhelming majority of whom are meritorious. However, because of the country-limit, they have to wait for more than a decade to get legal permanent residency. Trump also recently acknowledged that the country’s immigration policy is unfair to those who come in legally, a lot of whom are Indian immigrants.

Trump further added that the current US immigration policy is a mixed bag of laws put together through several years and it needs to be straightened out. For that, Trump recommended a system with tighter border security that does not need “thousands of judges sitting at a border” to handle the cases of illegal immigrants who are often “criminals”.

Trump’s comments and policies concerning immigrants have recently faced much backlash and staunch criticism from all across the world. And recently, 17 American states and the District of Columbia have moved the US District Court in Seattle against Trump for his policy that separated immigrant families. The policy had also faced public disapproval from the First Lady before he finally had to scrap it.