just learned that from scott greer, while it did fuck over the tech industry in the last 35 years, there's a reason no one was whining about indians until very recently. in general the illegals by the numbers are a bigger problem and none of the high profile ones were effected by that nonsense.
Prior to 1965, Chinese were completely excluded from immigrating to the US due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1889. Prior to that, a bunch of bug people were able to come in to work on the Transcontinental Railroad, and a few of them managed to get citizenship prior to 1889, and that's how various Chinatowns around the country, particularly in San Francisco, were established. Many of them went back to China after 1889 because their families were there, and unable to immigrate due to exclusion. Still, there were some who had already established businesses and had families here, so they stayed and assimilated out of necessity.
In 1965, the new Immigration Act allowed the Chinese to resume immigration, but only 2% of the existing US population of any country could come, and immigration was capped at 170,000 per year. In addition, no more than 20,000 could come from any one country per year, regardless of skills or asylum status. Looser, but still not bad.
That all changed in 1990 with George H. W. Bush (Bush Sr.). The immigration process was changed to a cap of 675,000 - 700,000 a year and "It provided a family-based immigration visa, created five distinct employment based visas, categorized by occupation, and a diversity visa program that created a lottery to admit immigrants from "low admittance" countries
or countries whose citizenry was underrepresented in the U.S." and thus, the H1B visa was born.
The Immigration Act was further amended in 2006 and 2013, eroding the previous restrictions further, until the Biden Adminstration threw the whole thing in the trash, let everyone come, and didn't even dignify this action with a bill, a law, or even an executive order. The important thing to note is that the "Family Unity" parts of the law are relatively modern, having not come into existence until the 1990 Act during the Bush Sr. administration. Prior to that, immigration was based on quotas, merit, and whether or not you were Chinese. 35 years is not a long time, although a lot of people have been convinced that "Family Unity" and "Diversity" were always a part of US Immigration law. They were not.
This shouldn't be too hard to fix, but it can't be by judicial decision or executive order alone; it must be legislated. Otherwise it will leave another Roe vs. Wade for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to fight about. Never again can we count on a Supreme Court judgment or Executive decision to be the only brick holding up the wall. They'll need to follow up on those decisions with a strong, irrefutable law. That is what the last few administrations have left us.
edit: totally fucked up font wtf