U.S. Legal Immigration System Continues to Favor China

The United States’ legal immigration system, admitting about 1.2 million permanent foreign residents a year, continues to heavily favor China despite national security concerns.

No country in the world delivers more legal immigrants to the U.S., with the exception of Mexico, as China has annually for the last three years that federal immigration records are available.

From 2008 to 2018, more than 825,000 Chinese nationals arrived in the U.S. on green cards — an immigration status that provides them with permanent residency, a pathway to American citizenship, and eventually the ability to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country through the process known as “chain migration.”

Between 1990 and 1999, hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals arrived in the U.S., but since 2000, the flow of legal immigration from China has been steady at about 65,000 t0 88,000 admissions a year. In the last three years, from 2016 to 2018, nearly 220,000 Chinese nationals secured green cards, with the plurality arriving as the immediate family members of their foreign relatives already naturalized and living in the U.S.