ABSTRACT
Politicians on the left and right agree that the “system is broken.” Precisely what is broken about it almost never specified, however. In this chapter, I point to a central cause: the U.S. visa system and the per-country cap. By applying a one-size-fits-all model to the distribution of visas, countries that send large numbers of immigrants to the United States (i.e. Mexico, India, the Philippines, and China) face very long waits. These long waits produce a structural pressure to immigrant without authorization. Formulated in the midst of the freedom struggles of the 1960s, the case of the U.S. visa system evidences the way that equality under the law continues to be defined as sameness of treatment. It is the argument of this chapter that, much like the U.S. immigration system, this legal discourse of sameness as equality is broken.
