US immigration should be more selfish.

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...