Since the War of 1812 ended, we’ve had a friendly rivalry with our northern neighbors. We gave them McDonald’s, Walmart, baseball, football and basketball; they gave us the Ryans (Gosling and Reynolds), Paw Patrol and ice hockey. All in good fun — yet sometimes our frozen friends really hit us where it hurts, and in the past few years that’s meant attracting and absorbing loads of immigrant talent that couldn’t find a place here.
Of course, we have no one to blame but ourselves, as decades of stalling and broken promises have kept the United States with a clunky, badly outdated, counterproductive and nigh-unnavigable legal immigration system.
Despite the repeated pleadings of everyone from national security wonks to big-business lobbies to chambers of commerce, simply trying to immigrate with a sponsored high-skill work visa is an expensive, unpredictable and drawn-out mess that can leave would-be newcomers waiting sometimes as much as decades for permanent residency despite having done everything exactly right, all the while at risk of deportation if anything goes wrong.
