Crops rotting in the fields is a common trope used by the Open Borders Lobby to increase unskilled and other immigration all based on the claim that there are millions of unfilled jobs just waiting for a hard-working alien, mostly revolving around the claim that farmers can’t harvest crops because of a supposed shortage of legal workers, or even illegal workers.

It is always a lie—most agricultural enterprises rely on illegal alien labor as a business model for maximizing profits. This is the typical case of socializing costs and privatizing profit that many businesses rely on, and not just field work, but retail, restaurants, and manufacturing as well. Chipotle, for example, has long used this model. And when the jobs are rotting in the fields, the call is for more amnesty and more immigration.

A variance on the jobs rotting in the United States is the latest lie from the Open Borders crowd—lazy bureaucrats are allowing visas and applicants to rot in the waiting rooms of American Embassies and Consulates overseas.

According to the Open Borders crowd visas for hard-working and entrepreneurial aliens are taking too long to be issued and that is the cause of America’s inflation and economic decline. Inflation is caused by not enough cheap labor and purchased green cards.

A quiet crisis has been brewing in U.S. diplomatic posts around the world: months, even years, of visa-processing delays. As an entrepreneur and investor who seeks out the world’s top talent to create prosperity in America, I’m sounding the alarm. When we make it needlessly difficult to visit and work in the U.S., we miss out on talent, cause unnecessary headaches for residents and encourage businesses to move jobs abroad.

In New Delhi, an appointment for a nonimmigrant visitor visa takes more than 800 calendar days, or nearly three years; for a student visa, nearly 450 days. The Cato Institute found that more than half of U.S. embassies and consulates world-wide have a waiting time greater than six months for a visitor or business visa appointment, compared with 1% before the pandemic. More than 1 in 4 have a waiting time of a year or more.

The Other Immigration Crisis: Endless Visa Waits, by Joe Lonsdale, Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2022

The WSJ’s Lonsdale cleverly does not give us the whole numbers—the United States issues about 1.5 million Non-Immigrant Visas (NIV) each year, most of which are issued overseas, and over 1 million Immigrant Visa (IV) are issued as well. The overwhelming number of temporary tourist and business visitors enter using the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), from countries that have low rates of visa fraud. Delays are likely as giving an alien access to the United States is a significant decision.

However, Lonsdale concentrates on Indians, who have a high rate of visa fraud, both for employment, business, and tourist visas. And he complains that China has an even longer delay, but does not mention the corresponding high rate of fraud and the obvious national security threat.

Lonsdale thinks that a visa application is meaningless and should be approved like an online purchase at Amazon. That’s really what he wants, automatic approval of any visa application because more people means more profit for his paymasters, especially in driving down wages and increasing the number of consumers.

He also does not seem to really know much about the immigration system, conflating non-immigrants with immigrants as well as outright lies, such the whopper that once someone has applied for a immigration benefit in the United States they cannot leave until it is adjudicated. Apparently this “immigration expert” has never heard of parole, which was created just for this situation, and is much abused.

But his real concern is for the aliens, and the fraudulent programs they abuse. He is deeply concerned that Chinese citizens are not getting their purchased green cards soon enough.

In March Congress enacted the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 to streamline the immigrant-visa process for foreign investors who commit significant capital to the U.S. But that reform is swamped by slow administration. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services advises applicants that 80% of cases (excluding Chinese nationals, who take even longer to process) are resolved within 52 months, or nearly 4½ years.

And by significant capital he means merely depositing $500,000 in an investment. There is no need to actually manage an ongoing enterprise, which the program was originally sold as, bringing in an entrepreneurial class of investors, but in reality is just purchasing a green card with a cash deposit in an investment scheme of which the purchaser is not involved in the management or direction with no need for the “investor” to create and grow a business with employees in the United States. All the “investor” has to do is make a deposit.

Lonsdale is also solicitous of Indians for some strange reason, Indians are driving down wages in high tech fields and are leading the suppression of free speech in Social Media.

Americans broadly support high-skilled immigration and a reasonable visa regime. It’s become a running joke in Silicon Valley that major Canadian cities such as Toronto and Vancouver are now “waiting rooms’’ for high-skilled foreigners who got unlucky in the crapshoot that is the U.S. immigration system. We shouldn’t laugh, since America and its economy are the butt of the joke…

For many U.S. Indians, one of our largest immigrant populations, the dysfunction is becoming personally untenable. Even permanent U.S. residents with family in India may reconsider working here if relatives have to wait years for a short visit.

Frankly, I wish Indian Lawful Permanent Residents (LPR) would leave, so wages for Americans in high tech industry would increase. This is really the issue. Lonsdale is more concerned for aliens than Americans. He is more concerned about Google’s profit than family income for Americans. That is the story of the American ruling class and their hired guns. They care only for foreigners, not Americans.