Kudos to all those friends of mine who are working on immigration reform. Enough hypocrisy. Equality and equal opportunity for all...
Some key facts from the article:
Your rate of progress in a given line depends on many factors. Some applicants have higher priority than others, even in the family line: The unmarried children of citizens tend to have the shortest waits, while the adult siblings of citizens come last. Diversity also helps, since immigrants from no one country can take more than 7 percent of the available visas. That means that people from China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines have an extra long wait, because so many of their countrymen have already gone through the system. In general, Filipinos endure the longest lines; the USCIS is now processing cases for married Filipino children of U.S. citizens who applied back in January 1985.
Starting in 1994, there was another way to skip the line: The Diversity Lottery, a program designed to favor regions like Africa and Europe, which have fewer green card seekers. Last year 5.5 million people tried their luck for about 50,000 green cards.
