White House Releases ‘Explosive’ Tally of Green Cards Issued in ‘Chain Migration’

For the first time, the White House said, the federal government has counted the green cards issued between 2005 and 2015 to migrants admitted through family preference, or as immediate relatives of migrants already admitted into the country in perhaps the fullest portrait of “chain migration” ever developed.

“For years, we’ve known that large numbers of immigrants have been coming based on petitions from previous immigrants,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Lee Cissna told Fox News. “But this is the first time we really kind of see the whole scope of the problem. And legislators or policymakers at DHS can do what they need to do address the problem.”

During the ten-year time frame, officials said, the U.S. permanently resettled roughly 9.3 million new immigrants on the basis of family ties.

That’s more than 70 percent of all new immigration in that period, the White house said, adding it is also the primary driver of low-skilled workers’ entry into the U.S. A phenomenon analyst say most directly hurts American minority groups with comparable skills.

“These numbers are explosive. They show that American immigration skews almost entirely towards family-based admissions,” said a White House official who briefed Fox News on the data.

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