In discourse about HR1044/S386, there is a myth that Chinese people don’t support removing the per-country caps. I can tell you that this is false. I’m Chinese and I support it.
Not only is it the right thing to do, but even for purely selfish reasons, I should still support it. Imagine if the per-country caps had never existed in the first place. There are two possible scenarios. One is that the waiting time for Chinese would be shorter than it is now, and I would already have a green card. That’s obviously a win. What about the other scenario? What if there were more applicants in the alternate universe, so waiting times were 5+ years for everyone, rather than 3–4 years for Chinese?
Well, I would rather live in that world—where everyone waits 5+ years—than in this one, where I’m disadvantaged by longer waiting times. Any factor that puts me at a disadvantage relative to other people threatens my well-being in a competitive globalized economy.
Right now, I have the opportunity to work for many of the top companies in the United States because they can sponsor me for H-1B status. However, there is no guarantee that this will continue to be the case. My bachelor’s degree is not in computer science, and I’ve already received two RFEs (in which USCIS asked my company’s lawyers to provide more evidence that I’m actually eligible for TN and H-1B status). The Trump administration has increased scrutiny on H-1B applications, and determined that junior software engineering positions should not be presumed to be eligible for the H-1B classification. The word on the streets is that scrutiny has increased for H-1B applicants who don’t have CS degrees, so I can expect this situation to persist in the near future. No one can predict the Trump administration’s next moves, and the probability that they will change the regulations so that I’m simply not eligible to be an H-1B software engineer anymore—either because I don’t have a CS degree, or because we just can’t prove that my job is complex enough to merit an H-1B—is non-negligible. Of course, if I already had a green card, then any such future changes wouldn’t affect me.
I live in constant fear that I am going to have to leave the United States while others (including hundreds of thousands of my fellow Canadian citizens) continue to work for top US companies, getting the best possible experience, and I fall behind. As I said: this disadvantage would threaten my well-being in a competitive globalized economy. As long as the opportunities available in tech continue to expand, everything will be fine and dandy; but if a recession were to occur, limiting the availability of decent software engineering jobs, I would be in the unenviable position of having to compete with people with much better résumés for that limited set of openings. Chances are that I’d be forced to accept some demoralizing, low-paid position in a company that treats its software engineers like cogs and has frequent layoffs. (Never forget that Dilbert is a minor exaggeration of the reality of working as a software engineer in a company where software engineers can’t command respect.)
Some people think I’m overly anxious. I would say that we software engineers should remember how lucky we are right now. Do you see how other people our age, who are just as intelligent and hard-working as we are, struggle for economic security? One might say, there but for the grace of God go we
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I have often expressed my desire for a world with open borders, but we all know that’s not happening any time soon. For the time being, people who were born in United States, or otherwise acquired US citizenship at birth or through the naturalization of a parent, have an advantage over me in terms of access to the best software engineering opportunities, which handicaps me in the competition for the sharply limited availability of economic security in a neoliberal globalized economy. The effect of the per-country cap system is to also put me at a disadvantage relative to equally qualified individuals born in Canada or, say, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or South Korea. For this reason, I must support HR1044/S386, and that would remain true even if I had the animosity against Indian software engineers that many anti-HR1044/S386 people seem to have.
B³₂ 
If HR1044/S386 passes, the waiting time for Chinese people will increase because there are thousands of Indians in the backlog. So if they remove the country cap, the green cards don’t belong to the Chinese or any other nationalities other than Indians. As you can see the 80% of the H-1B visas are given to the Indians. The same thing happens for green card if there is no country cap. Therefore, the waiting line will be +10 years for each applicant even for Indians. Since the number of applicants increases each year (especially from India) but the number of green cards is constant.
Whether removing the per-country cap increases or decreases wait times for Chinese depends on the particular numbers of petitions that would be filed by Indians and others in the future, which we cannot predict.
If you read my post, however, you would have seen that I made the point that even if it does mean everyone will end up having long waiting times, the mere fact that such waiting times would be equal between Indians, Chinese, and others would make such a system better than the current system. It would mean that ROW applicants would no longer have an unfair advantage over me in terms of having the freedom to pursue the best opportunities in the US.