US immigration policy is now somewhat akin to charity rather than intended to maximize the highly skilled talent pool. This isn't intended as a criticism, but by and large most of our immigration pool comes from poor countries and does not have specialized skills. And we're pretty lenient on illegal immigration which is largely low skilled labor as well. There's a movement right now to change it to be more like the Canada system, more closely based on skill. Whether that's better or worse is subjective I suppose.
> US immigration policy is now somewhat akin to charity rather than intended to maximize the highly skilled talent pool.
No, it's not.
It's largely intended to acheive different social values (particularly community cohesion and undivided loyalties, as opposed to optimizing labor pool to serve capital), which is why the major segment is family unification, but it's not a charity, operating on s need basis (the refugee component is charity-like, sure, but that's not a main component of the immigration system, and the US isn't particularly refugee friendly, even before Trump.)
