Transcript of the above video:

In this video today we are going to be discussing some recent developments with respect to immigration reform or proposed immigration reform by the Trump Administration and by Congressional Leaders back in the United States.

A recent Reuter’s article caught my eye. The title is," Trump promises to "take the heat" for broad immigration deal", published January 9^th, 2018. Again it's Reuters. I found this on reuters.com. Washington. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was ready to except an onslaught of criticism if lawmakers tackled broad immigration reforms after an initial deal to help the young illegal immigrants known as dreamers and build a wall with the US border with Mexico. Continuing quite a ways further down in this article, quoting further, "but after the meeting, lawmakers from both parties said that they would meet as early as Wednesday to continue negotiations on a deal covering DACA and border security as well as a visa lottery program and chain migration which could address the status of relatives of dreamers who are still in the United States illegally."  Quoting further from Sarah Sanders the White House Press Secretary, "we're certainly open to talking about a number of other issues when it comes to immigration but right now this Administration is focused on those four things and that negotiation, and not a lot else at this front”. Okay so I have skipped a lot with respect to this article and I strongly recommend any viewer go ahead check out this article on Reuters because it's fairly detailed but I want to kind of do a synopsis for purposes of sort of getting to the crux of possible immigration reform especially possible reforms that could have significant impacts on folks who are out here in Southeast Asia and the kind of visas we generally tend to see out here in Southeast Asia.

So first of all DACA, or the D.A.C.A.  That has to do with children who immigrated to the United States, not really at their own behest. They were brought in by parents or other relatives into the US when they were underage and not able to form intent on their own. These folks have been, I would say championed by certain factions and it's kind of hard I think on a political level to really say "yeah, just kick those folks out". If someone's been in the United States since they were four years old and now they're 21 and they've never known any place else, yeah it seems a little inequitable to just kick those folks out. So it seems that this issue of the DACA is going to be a sort of a preface to a later and more detailed negotiation with respect to immigration on a whole Trump appears to be amenable to making concessions with respect to the so-called dreamers but those concessions seem to be connected to a later phase in this process so there's the dreamer’s issue, then there's these other four issues, and then there’s further issues in even deeper level with respect to comprehensive immigration reform. I'm not going to get to that third phase. That seems to be dealing with some almost systemic aspects of US Immigration but a particular note, and these seem to be priorities of the administration. You've got DACA. They understand there are people who are pretty adamant about DACA so they've got to deal with this from a negotiation standpoint and then they go on to mention border security. We all remember Trump made campaign promises with respect to walls and border security along the Southern US border so obviously that seems to be a priority as well as a Visa Lottery program. This has been an interesting one. The Visa Lottery is an interesting mechanism and basically is a lottery that allows a certain number of people each year to just be  granted immigrant status or be granted an immigrant visa number and allowed to apply for an immigrant visa simply based on their nationality and the thinking goes, they're trying to, It's a diversity visa lottery, they're trying to improve diversity in the United States and it was invented basically to sort of single out countries that didn't have a heavy presence of their nationals in the United States to allow them access to the United States for no other reason than diversity. That's actually what the visa program is called, the “Diversity Visa Lottery” and I have heard varying complaints and various proponents of the diversity Visa Lottery. I don't really have an opinion one way or the other on it quite frankly; I can see the benefits to it, I can also see the arguments of the opponents of it. That being said, I have to think that if any type of comprehensive immigration reform comes down the pike, I've got to think that this Visa Lottery is probably one of the first things to go. How it got in is kind of an interesting story and I'm not going to go into that how it got enacted and then the fact that it's sort of hung on through all the trials and tribulations of sort of American law making is kind of fascinating. It's something of a tribute to the American legislative process and the American mindset. But that being said I just don't see that that's going to survive a real serious look at immigration reform.

That being said, this is of more interest to me because this is an interesting one. They keep mentioning so called  "chain migration" and what we are talking about here,  it is rather curious because the immigration nationality act which was enacted the middle of the last century was designed at a very different time in American history. It just simply, I won't call it an anachronism, although there are aspects of it which I would say are somewhat throwbacks, but it just doesn't accurately reflect the current time I would say. Basically what it was set up for, it was very, how do I put it, it was very positive toward family migration in the United States.  There remains a category for brothers and sisters of US citizens, so children of US citizens, parents of US citizens, brothers and sisters of US citizens, unmarried children, married children, and of varying ages, there’s many different categories within the family visa context that create this so-called chain migration, which many people that are watching this video may have us of so-called anchor babies. So a child who’s born in the United States that can create the possibility of a later immigration benefits for that child's parents, a later immigration benefit for that child's currently as the law sits, for that child siblings, and later for that child's children unmarried or married, that child spouses and fiancée’s of that child or that person at that point I guess I should say. It seems that the Trump Administration is pretty serious about truncating these options as far as the visa benefits that sort of flow from citizenship in the United States or permanent residence in the United States. That's another thing to keep in mind. So called chain migrants can be attached to a permanent residents in the US, children of permanent residents, spouses of permanent residents. They are able to petition for certain benefits under the current regime. So the thing to take away from this video that I would want the viewers to sort of understand where I'm coming from,  and the folks that are out here in Southeast Asia. When they're talking about chain migration that is going to significantly change, substantially change for that matter, the sort of environment with respect to immigration moving forward. If so called chain migration is significantly truncated we could be looking at a massively different system comparing today to that system in the future. Again it remains to be seen what that system is going to look like but it seems like this Administration is pretty serious about at least altering the so-called environment, for so-called chain migration.