- The piece discusses the flaws in the US legal immigration system
- It highlights the misconception that there is a simple "line" for people to get in legally
- The family sponsorship system is explained, with limitations on who can be sponsored and long processing times
- The employment-based path is discussed, with difficulties in obtaining work visas and converting them to green cards
- The flaws in the system are shown through examples of individuals being turned away or forced to leave the US

- Getting a work visa does not guarantee staying in the US, as converting it to a green card is difficult.
- The green card process requires employer sponsorship and there are limited green cards available.
- The diversity visa lottery is a long shot, with very low chances of winning.
- The US has been reducing refugee admissions, with reports suggesting the number may be cut to zero.
- The Trump administration has made procedural changes and issued the Public Charge Rule to make legal immigration more difficult.
- The immigration system needs serious evaluation and improvement.

John Oliver explains how our legal immigration system works, and how it often doesn’t.

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It's the system that brought you Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma, and me.

And yes, obviously, fuck, marry, kill, respectively.

-♪♪ Immigration is the subject that Trump campaigned on the hardest.

And as president, his tone hasn't exactly softened.

I told my people yesterday, our country's full.

I mean, maybe if 1 of these guys dies or something, but until then, there's just nothing we can do.

But look, it is obviously not that simple.

And in Trump's more reflective moments, seen here, he actually claims that there is 1 kind of immigration that he wants, legal immigration.

It's the thing that he and his political allies will tell you they love.

I believe legal immigration is good for our country.

My views on immigration are simple, and I've summed them up many times in just 4 words.

-♪ ♪ -♪ I do not like that man, Ted Cruz.

If you take all of them at their word, we actually agree on this.

That is a popular opinion, both among those who see immigration as foundational to America, and among economists who largely agree that it increases economic growth.

About 13% of the people in this country are immigrants, three-quarters of whom are here legally.

And with all the talk about illegal immigration, the flaws in the legal pathway, which arguably help fuel illegal immigration, often get ignored.

So tonight, let's talk about our legal immigration system, because there are a lot of misconceptions about a process that, to be fair, most Americans have never experienced.

And a key misconception is captured in a phrase that you hear all the time, both from politicians and from ordinary voters.

Get in line, and we want to let people in legally.

They have to get in line, come legally, and wait in line like all of them.

There are a lot of people from all around the world that are in line and waiting to come in here.

And I don't think that they should be able to come in ahead of all these people that have been really struggling to get here.

And look, I know that is an appealing phrase, but it's significantly more complicated than that, as you can probably tell from that woman's reaction.

I'm guessing the closed captioning for which is probably, woman thinking, the fuck?

Because the truth is, for those who want to come here, there is no 1 line to get in.

The lines that do exist can be prohibitively long or have sudden dead ends.

And for many people, and this is really important, there simply isn't a line at all.

And if you think, well, hold on, my ancestors waited online, not necessarily.

For America's first hundred years, there were no federal immigration laws.

So coming here the right way, basically just meant not slipping as you walked down the gangway.

Now, since then, our immigration system has evolved into 1 with complicated and convoluted restrictions.

When it comes to most types of green card, which allow you to be a lawful, permanent resident, No more than 7 percent of immigrants accepted each year can come from any 1 country.

What that means in practice is that big countries with a lot of would-be immigrants like China, India, and Mexico are subject to the same numerical caps as tiny ones like Malta, which is so tiny, that's actual size.

We borrowed it and put it in this box to show you how small Malta is.

The whole system has a lot of restrictions on who exactly can come here.

In fact, the best way to understand it is that there are just 4 paths to permanent residency or citizenship.

Family, you're related to someone who's already here.

Employment, meaning you were offered a job here.

Good luck, you won the Visa lottery, which I'll explain later.

Or bad luck, you're a refugee or seeking asylum.

And the number of people going through each path is by no means equal.

Proportionally, they should probably look a lot more like this.

So, let's start with the way that most immigrants come here.

About two-thirds of green card holders come through the family-based system, which makes sense.

Families provide support, and some, I'm told, like each other.

But to Donald Trump, family-based migration is a scourge, as you can tell from how he refers to it.

A guy comes in, stone-cold killer in many cases.

A guy comes in, and then you have to bring his aunt, his uncle, his father, his grandfather, his grandparents.

Okay, That is so wrong in so many ways, it would honestly be hard for a fact checker to assess it.

That couldn't even be described by the Washington Post's bottomless Pinocchio, which is an actual thing they do now, and which, For the record, sounds like an all-nude strip club for wooden puppets.

Because bringing family members over is not nearly as easy as Trump makes it sound.

For a start, you can only sponsor close relatives.

At most, that is a spouse, child, sibling, or parent.

No aunt, no uncle, no grandparents, no third niece by a different marriage.

And anyone who comes in has to pass rigorous background checks, which tends to weed out any stone-cold killers.

And that chain, as you definitely should not put it, can move very slowly, because those country caps that I mentioned earlier apply to many categories of family-based immigration.

So, if you're trying to bring your sibling over from China, the government is currently processing applications from 2006.

And who knows what they'll be doing 22 years in advance?

Aside, of course, from Pat Sajak, because I guarantee he'll still be standing by a wheel, selling vows he doesn't own until the fucking son dies.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ And yet, the family sponsorship system is still seemingly too permissive for Trump, who wants to limit it to just spouses and children.

Meaning you could no longer sponsor, for instance, your parents to immigrate here.

Although, interestingly, he seemed fine with 1 high-profile exception.

President Trump's in-laws slipping in and out of a Manhattan federal building where they took the oath of U.S.

Sources tell ABC News that First Lady Melania Trump sponsored her Slovenian-born parents, Viktor and Amalia Novs.

Look, look, look, that is obviously hypocritical.

I know it's not the important part here, but I should point out Melania's mom is 74, making Trump exactly 1 year younger than his mother-in-law.

And While there are plenty of spouses out there who probably should be closer to their in-laws, that is simply not the way to do it!

So that is the family-based path, which of course only works if you have a close relative in America, and it frankly doesn't hurt if she happens to be in a loveless marriage with the president.

Now, if that is not an option for you, you might try the employment-based path.

The way that pathway usually begins is an employer in America sponsors you, and you come here on a temporary work visa.

You might be able to renew it if your employer likes you, but there can be limits on how many times you can do that.

And even getting a work visa in the first place can be very difficult.

You have to fit within narrow categories.

There is R1, that's for religious workers.

I, myself, came over on an O1 visa, which is for persons with extraordinary ability in the arts.

I know what you're really thinking deep down, and fuck you!

♪ Certain work pieces are so hard to get, highly skilled people get turned away.

He's the founder of a very successful Indian company called Snapdeal.

And just watch as he's interviewed on stage at a conference in India about why he ended up creating a company there rather than staying here.

You know, the Indian tech guy wanting to work at Microsoft.

And they applied for my visa, which got rejected.

Now you're stuck and you're getting deported back to your country.

So he decided to come back and start a company here.

Okay, well, I'm glad that that story worked out well for India, but it's frankly not a great result for America, is it?

Who helped educate him, and then for some reason, forced him to go innovate somewhere else instead.

Honestly, I respect Kunal Bha for not going full pretty woman on a U.S.

And it is worth noting, just getting a work visa does not mean you're going to end up staying here, because converting it into a green card can be difficult to practically impossible, depending on your skill level and where you're from.

You need your employer to choose to sponsor you again, and there aren't many green cards to go around.

Only around 140,000 of them are granted every year.

Basically, think of getting a work visa as getting a backstage pass to see BTS.

Sure, it'll allow you to hang around for a bit, but you're probably not gonna end up becoming part of the band.

And look, I can tell you from experience here, living on a visa can be very stressful and involves having to jump through endless costly hoops.

I used to have to file for extensions to my visa every year, hoping they'd be granted, and had to leave the country every 11 months to go to the American Embassy in London to get a physical stamp in my passport, allowing me to travel.

And I was constantly, constantly worried that I would not be allowed to come back.

And here's the thing, even when you are approved for a green card, there might not be 1 available for you, because those country caps that I mentioned also apply to employment-based immigration.

So if you come in from, say, India, your estimated wait time can be ridiculously high.

Watch as 1 boy living in America finds out how long his dad might have to wait.

So, your dad has applied for a green card for himself and your family, and the U.S.

Government looked at this application and approved it.

The problem is that there's a waiting line for green card, and that line is really long for India.

It'll very well be about 60 years by the time your dad gets a green card.

Well, well, nearly, your dad will be dead, but yeah, you will be...

Or dead, or dead, you could be as dead as your very dead dad.

But overall, your point is a good 1 there, kid.

So together, the family and employment paths make up around 80% of legal immigration.

But what about if you are not related to somebody here and you aren't already highly skilled?

Well, that brings us to the luck categories.

If you are lucky, you could come to America through something called the Diversity Visa Lottery, which I'll let the president explain so that you know exactly what it isn't.

Common sense means they're not giving you their best names.

They're giving you people that they don't want.

And then we take them out of the lottery.

And where they do it by hand, where they put the hand in a bowl, I probably, what's in their hand are the worst of the worst.

There's just not time to break down how wrong everything he just said was, but suffice to say, Trump can expect a visit from bottomless Pinocchio any day now, Because everything about what he just said is wrong.

The country the person comes from is not involved.

The people who win are vetted, and obviously, it's not done by hand.

Does he honestly think we made 1 of those spinning bingo hoppers for 22 million ping pong balls?

What actually happens is, anybody who lives in a country with low immigration rates to the United States can enter themselves into a computer-run, non-bowl-based lottery...

For the chance to win something called a diversity visa.

And out of the millions of people who enter, only 50,000 win.

So, your odds of winning that lottery to come into the country are about the same as your odds of getting shot once you get here.

So, so the Visa Lottery is the longest of long shots.

It's honestly barely even worth talking about, which brings us to our final category here, bad luck.

That is basically refugees and asylum seekers fleeing terrible situations.

And America has long prided itself, with some reason, on the fact that it's led the world in terms of refugee resettlement, accepting more refugees annually than any other country.

But, as you probably know, Trump does not care for that.

He has attacked the asylum system repeatedly, and while Obama set the annual cap on refugees at 110,000 in his last year in office, Trump slashed it to 45,000 the next year, and 30,000 the year after that.

At this rate, next year's cap will be reduced to just Zayed, at which point Trump will probably make his campaign slogan, Get Rid of Zayed.

-♪ LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE ♪ And if you're thinking...

If you're thinking Trump might have a change of heart, if you just heard what some of these refugees are fleeing, you're wrong about that.

Take Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was abducted by ISIS in Iraq.

She fled to Germany after they killed her family, won a Nobel Prize for her advocacy, and actually got to tell her story to Trump's face in the Oval Office recently.

And what you're about to see is the second time she specifically mentioned to him that her family was killed.

And watch just how little he has been listening.

They killed my mom, my 6 brother, they left behind them.

President displaying a level of indifference to human suffering rivaled only by robots and house cats.

There are now reports that Trump's White House is weighing whether to cut the number of refugees we admit to 0 next year.

And if they do that, then please tell me, what is the right way for refugees to come in then?

For all of their talk about how fine they are with legal immigration, This administration has worked hard to reduce it as much as possible across the board.

In his first year, Trump supported a bill that would have cut legal immigration into this country by half.

And while that bill went nowhere, he's made countless procedural tweaks gumming up the process for coming here legally, which helps explain why the time it takes to process an application has jumped 46 percent since 2016.

Some immigration attorneys are now calling those changes the Invisible Wall.

And Just last month, Trump put another brick in that wall when the administration issued what's called the Public Charge Rule, making the path to permanent residency much more difficult for any would-be immigrant who fails to meet income standards or is deemed likely to use public assistance like food stamps, public housing, or Medicaid.

That could profoundly change who gets to call this country home, advantaging the well-off and disadvantaging anyone they ever think might have greater needs.

And when Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, was asked how this could possibly square with America's ideals.

Would you also agree that Emma Lazarus's words etched on the Statue of

Liberty, give me your tired, your poor, are also part of the American ethos?

They certainly are, given you're tired and you're poor, who can stand on their own 2 feet, and who will not become a public charge.

You can't just add lines to a poem that totally invalidates its premise.

You can't say, in the words of Emily Dickinson, because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.

You're fundamentally changing the intended meaning.

Also, it's not just that his addition to the poem is terrible, it's that what he took out is really important there.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Because as corny as it might sound, America at its best isn't about who you are when you arrive.

And that doesn't have to mean that everyone who wants to come gets to come.

But if you are going to say, get in line to people, you should at least make sure they actually have a line to stand in.

And right now, these are the only pathways that exist.

And we should be having a serious conversation about whether they work smoothly enough, which they do not, whether this is the right balance between the categories, and whether we've defined the categories correctly.

I think Trump, for his part, has made it pretty clear that his ideal system would be in 2 tiers, split evenly between rich Norwegians and future wives.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Personally, personally, I think a lot more people should be let in in general, but I will admit, this is subjective, and I am biased here.

I have been through this system and I can tell you, it's rough.

When I finally got my green card years ago, it was sent to The Daily Show and they surprised me with it at work, presenting it to me with a slice of apple pie and a Budweiser as a joke.

Thing is, I was so relieved, I nearly burst into tears.

And that is when I realized I had been worried about my immigration status every single day.

I had a lot of help, and more importantly, I had a path to come here.

It's the path that has led us all to Sad Zazu's mildly interesting explain train.

But for many people, there is literally no way to come in the right way.

And if I was 1 of them, and Donald Trump told me to just get in line and come in the right way, I think I would have been well within my rights to quote the other immortal words of Emily Dickinson, hope is the thing with feathers.

Also, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, you fucking idiot.

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Legal Immigration: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)