history

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an upside if you think it’s important for immigrants to become American — and a downside

if you think the US should be much pickier about who gets to move here for good than it is

about who gets to work here.

One upshot of chain migration: Any policies that made it easier for immigrants to bring their

relatives would allow migration chains to form, thus expanding immigration into the

country. “Family reunification systems,” Massey wrote, “work at crosspurposes with the

limitation of immigration.”

Massey and the other demographers of “chain migration” weren’t presenting it as a

negative. But their words were easily adopted by people who did. The Massey essay

quoted above ended up being reprinted in an issue of The Social Contract — the journal

founded by immigration restrictionist mogul John Tanton, who also founded two of three

most visible restrictionist organizations in American politics (the think tank the Center for

Immigration Studies and the advocacy group FAIR). The third group, NumbersUSA, was

founded by a former Washington editor for the journal.

The Social Contract was a forum for concerns about the threat of mass immigration

(particularly mass nonwhite immigration) to the United States. (The Southern Poverty Law

Center has a rundown of some of the journal’s more incendiary content.) Massey, on

the other hand is a longtime supporter of reforms that would make it easier for immigrants

to come to America.

An article by a supporter of expansive immigration policy could be reprinted, with few

apparent edits, in a journal for his intellectual opponents only because the debate over

chain migration is fundamentally not about whether it happens, but whether it’s okay.

Defenders of chain migration tend to argue that it’s important for immigrants to put down

roots in the US, and that having a family here is part of what that means.

Opponents, on the other hand, see family-based immigration as the government ceding

some control for who gets to come here, so that it’s not selecting individuals in a vacuum —

which leads rapidly to fears of the US government losing control of the immigration system

entirely.

The actual policy behind “chain migration”

It’s not clear whether President Trump understands how family-based immigration actually

works — and when it can lead to “chains” of relatives. Trump has claimed that the man who

ran over several pedestrians in New York in November brought 23 (sometimes he says

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24) relatives to the US in the seven years he’d lived here — a claim that chain migration

opponent Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration studies said was impossible. And

the White House’s “chain migration” diagram makes it looks like each generation of adults

brings in children, which brings their children — which isn’t how chain migration works.

To better understand what policies, exactly, opponents of “chain migration” are worried

about, check out this chart from the restrictionist advocacy group NumbersUSA — which is

a more detailed representation of the same fear of overwhelming, uncontrollable waves of

migration.

It’s a little overwhelming!

Let’s walk through the scenario in that chart. It depicts an immigrant who’s come to the US

on an employment-based green card (in black) and is able to bring over his spouse and

children immediately. He can also — after he becomes a citizen (something the

| NumbersUSA

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NumbersUSA chart doesn’t clarify) — petition for his parents and siblings to come to the

US on green cards (all in gray).

The siblings all bring over their spouses and children immediately, and the spouses (in

orange, maroon, navy, and teal) can (upon naturalization) petition to bring over their own

parents and siblings. The original immigrant’s parents (eventually) petition for their own

siblings to come to the US, and the siblings then petition to bring over their married adult

children — whose spouses can then (eventually)petition for their own parents and siblings,

etc., etc.

Meanwhile, the original immigrant’s spouse, once she becomes a citizen, can petition for

her parents (in pink) and her siblings (in blue, purple, red, and green). Those siblings bring

over their spouses, who subsequently petition for their own parents and siblings, etc., etc.

There are a ton of assumptions in this model about the way immigrants behave — why is

everyone in families of four or five? Does no one really want to stay in her home country? Is

there no such thing as a bachelor in any of these families? — but the visa categories under

US law make it a hypothetical possibility. But the thing is, US policymakers know that it’s a

hypothetical possibility. And there are safeguards built into the system that restrict family-

based immigration far more than the diagram would have you believe.

In practice, bringing over a family member takes years — which makes it very hard to build a chain

No one is automatically allowed to immigrate to the US. Anyone applying for residency in

the country has to go through a standard vetting process — including a criminal and

terrorism background check, and an evaluation of whether they’re likely to become a

“public charge” in the US (i.e., be unable to support themselves for income and rely on

social programs).

Trump’s National Security Strategy claims that “chain migration” is a problem for national

security, but there’s nothing inherent to the way someone is allowed to immigrate to the

US that makes it harder for the US to catch would-be terrorists — that is, if anything, a

failure of the screening process.

The bigger obstacle, though, isn’t qualifying to immigrate — it’s that the number of

hypothetically qualified family-based immigrants greatly exceeds the number of slots

available for immigrants each year. The US doesn’t set caps on the number of spouses,

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minor children, or parents of US citizens who can come to the US each year — but, again,

those categories in themselves don’t create chains.

The categories that do create chains are strictly capped: 23,400 married children of US

citizens (plus their own spouses and minor children) are allowed to immigrate each year,

and 67,500 adult siblings of US citizens (plus spouses and minor children). Furthermore,

because the total number of immigrants coming from a particular country each year is

capped, would-be immigrants from Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines end up facing

even longer wait times.

When people talk about the “visa backlog,” this is what they mean: In January 2018, for

example, the US government will start processing applications for F4 visas (the siblings of

US citizens) who first petitioned to let them immigrate on June 22, 2004, or earlier. That is,

unless the sibling lives in India (in which case the petition had to be filed by December

2003 to get processed in January 2018), Mexico (November 1997), or the Philippines

(September 1994).

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Sudarshana Sengupta, pictured here with family in Massachusetts, had been waiting for a green card for seven years when this picture was taken.

Understanding that an F4 visa is a 13- to 23-year process throws that NumbersUSA

diagram into a different light. How implausible it is depends on your assumptions about

how close together generations are, and how young the immigrants are when they come to

the United States. But if you start by understanding that the first members of the orange,

maroon, navy, teal, blue, purple, red, and green chains don’t enter the US until 18 years

after the original immigrant (signified by black) does — and that the first immigrants in the

yellow section of the chart don’t enter the country until 23 years later — it should give you a

sense of how long it will take in to fill in the rest of the chain.

In practice, this ultimately looks like a lot of people coming to the US in late middle age.

That’s backed up by the data: A study from Jessica Vaughan of the Center for

Immigration Studies — which is critical of “chain migration” — found that the average age

of immigrants to the US has risen over the past few decades, and that family-based

immigration was a substantial cause.

But even then, the NumbersUSA scenario assumes that all the immigrants can afford to

sponsor a family member to immigrate to the US. A US citizen (or green card holder

seeking to bring an unmarried child or parent) has to prove to the government that they

can provide financial support if their relative needs it, rather than relying on the

government for aid.

In practice, this means that every immigrant needs to have someone vouching for them

whose household income is 125 percent of the poverty line — and the “household” includes

the relative who’s trying to come to the US. In other words, a single adult could sponsor his

parent to immigrate if he made at least $20,300 — 125 percent of the federal poverty line

for a two-person household — but if he had a spouse and two children, he’d have to be

making 125 percent of the poverty line for a five-person household. And that includes any

other immigrants who the household is sponsoring at the same time.

So an immigrant with a wife and two children who wanted to sponsor his parents and four

siblings to immigrate as soon as he became a citizen would have to be making $56,875 —

around the median income in the US. And if his spouse were trying to do the same thing

with her parents and four siblings, as in the NumbersUSA chart, they’d have to be making

$83,000 — which would place them in the 66th percentile of US household income.

| Washington Post/Getty Images

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That’s not impossible. But it certainly calls into question the stereotype of family-based

migration as a way for “low-skilled,” low-earning immigrants to bring their low-skilled, low-

earning relatives into the US.

There are ways for citizens to get other people to agree to help support a potential

immigrant relative. But at the same time, the US government has discretion to reject an

application, even if the citizen meets the income threshold, if they suspect that in practice

the immigrant won’t be supported in the US. (Another factor in determining “public

charge” is age — which is interesting, given the data about family-based immigrants being

older.)

Add all of these factors together, and it becomes clear that an immigrant won’t be able to

bring that many relatives to the US over the course of his or her lifetime. Vaughan’s study

found that as of 2015, immigrants who came to the US from 1981 to 2000 had sponsored

an average of 1.77 relatives to come join them. The most recent immigrants in the study —

those who came to the US in the late 1990s — had sponsored the most relatives: 3.46. But

both of those numbers include the minor children they brought with them at the time: In

other words, they were hardly starting 3.46 new “chains.”

If anything, in fact, the family-based system is so overloaded that it ends up creating

unrealistic hopes in people that they’ll be able to immigrate to the US. If your sibling moves

to the US on a work visa, for example, you might start to hope that he’ll eventually be able

to bring you along — but if you try to plan your life around that, you’ll end up waiting for two

decades.

There are hints all this panic over “chain migration” is really about fear of cultural change

All of this is relevant to a conversation about whether to further restrict, or eliminate, the

F3 and F4 visas for married children and adult siblings of US citizens. And indeed, that’s the

most common policy demand being made by Republicans who are seeking to end or

reduce “chain migration.”

But the most stalwart opponents of “chain migration,” the ones who use it to refer to all

family-based immigration, period, are talking not just about the mechanics of the chain but

about a bigger normative question: whether allowing immigrants to come as family units, or

allowing people to immigrate based on family relationships, gives the US too little control

over who gets to come.

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The ultimate impression of both the White House and NumbersUSA “chain migration”

diagrams is to make it seem that admitting a single immigrant unleashes an uncontrollable

tide of infinite future family-based immigration — that each immigrant is a one-person

Trojan horse for hundreds more.

This is an image from the pro-Brexit campaign, but the theme’s the same: a lack of control.

“As more and more immigrants are admitted to the United States, the population eligible to

sponsor their relatives for green cards increases exponentially,” the restrictionist group

FAIR says on its website. “This means that every time one immigrant is admitted, the door

is opened to many more.”

This potent visual is why “chain migration” has been a longtime target of immigration

restrictionists, even when the Republican Party as a whole was attempting to welcome

legal immigrants. For people whose biggest fear regarding immigration is that immigrants

will change the face of America — that they’ll trample the country’s “traditionally” white,

Christian majority — there’s little more potent than the idea of immigrants bringing over

huge families, replanting their communities whole in American soil.

This fear goes hand in hand with a fear that immigrants won’t assimilate. When immigration

restrictionists cite the second quarter of the 20th century as a great time for the United

States, they’re not (at least explicitly) praising the racist country quotas that governed

immigration at the time. They’re (explicitly) praising the fact that, with overall immigration

levels low, immigrants were forced to interact with and eventually integrate among US

citizens. The more immigrants that come over — and especially the more that immigrants

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bring their families over — the less, in theory, that they and their descendants will have to

interact with people from outside of their community. In turn, this gets into fears that parts

of America could become alien to Americans — cultural, or literal, “no-go zones.”

The use of “chain migration” in the current debate over DACA, to refer to DACA recipients

allowing their parents to become legal immigrants, complicates the matter even further.

Because the parents of DACA recipients have, by definition, lived in the US as unauthorized

immigrants, this isn’t really about bringing new people into the US — it’s about legalizing

people who are already here (or bringing people back who have been deported, something

US policy already makes pretty hard).

The insistence among some Republicans that “Dreamers” not be allowed to sponsor their

parents, even after they become US citizens, is really about not wanting to “reward”

unauthorized immigrants for living in the US without papers. They’re worried about losing

“control” in a slightly different sense — worried that any “reward” for illegal behavior will

incentivize a new wave of unauthorized migration to take advantage of potential rewards.

This is pretty far afield from the way that “chain migration” is commonly understood — but

that’s the word being used in the DACA debate anyway, not least because the president

has helped turn it into a buzzword.

Because these memes, and the fears that they provoke, are all so tightly connected, “chain

migration” is both an ideological concern about America selecting immigrants based on

their merit, and a racist smokescreen for fears of demographic change. It can be hard to

separate the two. And it’s certainly not in the interests of the opponents of “chain

migration” to try.

There’s a reason that family-based immigration has lasted as long as it has

It’s a lot easier to get people to agree, in theory, that the US should be accepting

immigrants on the basis of “merit” — i.e., without concern for whether they have relatives

living here — than it is to get them to agree on exactly what should be done to reduce the

importance of family-based immigration to the current system.

For one thing, many policymakers, including many Republicans, see allowing some family

members to immigrate as an important factor in encouraging integration. Allowing

immigrants to bring along their spouses and minor children, for example, makes it less

likely that they’ll decide to return to their home countries — and it means their children will

grow up American, in more ways than one.

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There are also policymakers who see family unity as a value worth protecting for its own

sake (an argument you’ll often hear among religious advocates). And there’s, of course, an

ethnic component. Asian Americans, in particular, feel that they are still trying to make up

ground after decades of racist exclusion from the immigration system — and family-based

immigration has been the best way for them to make that ground up. Mexican Americans,

too, feel that the current system has unfairly forced Mexican immigrant families to be

separated while other families get to reunite with ease.

All of these objections have combined, so far, to make Democrats firmly opposed to any

proposal that would restrict future family-based immigration. But as “chain migration”

begins to eclipse other issues (like immigration enforcement in the interior of the US) as a

top Republican priority, it’s not clear whether Democrats’ commitment to hypothetical

legal immigrants of the future is going to win out over their commitment to legalizing

unauthorized immigrants who are currently here.

CORRECTION: This article originally said that permanent residents (green-card holders)

could petition for their parents to enter the US; only US citizens can sponsor their parents.

This article also originally misstated the relationship between John Tanton and

NumbersUSA, whose founder, Roy Beck, has attempted to distance himself from Tanton in

recent years.