50 green cards holders? The total number of green card holders is 12.8 million.
Pay in some professions is still way better than in their home countries.
Almost all my friends in Canada want to move here. 5 times more Canadians move to the US than Americans move to Canada. That's a damning statistic given that Canada's population is 10% of the US population - so on a per capita basis, it's a ratio of 50x.
Yes compared to developed countries the US may look bad, but most of the world is below the US. Stuff like ICE simply doesn't even register. They've killed only a handful of people.
They can't ever articulate the freedoms, I think we just have good propaganda, but the desire is certainly there.
The relative ease of transitioning to a permanent status meant there was a greater incentive to invest in living in the US, both in material and cultural terms. That may now diminish, and immigrants may remit more of their wealth as a hedge. For immigrants of some countries, that has already been something on the mind now since much before even the first Trump administration. Even transitioning to permanent status has become much harder, leave alone obtaining citizenship.
Maybe this administration's stricter (and scarier style of) enforcement may spur that shift now, but it would have been foolish of immigrants from some countries to have not paid attention at all to the changing conditions over the last 10-15 years.
As a citizen, it saddens me that this administration is reducing incentives for new immigrants to invest here - buy properties, start businesses, start relationships etc. Immigrants will still come to make what they can, and then leave with all that experience and some of those assets, when that could have benefited the country. I am of course hardly the only person noticing how the drive to satisfy the nativist vote is leaving us kicking this gift horse in the mouth.
