I don't understand how one can be pro living wage and pro widespread immigration.

[metalbot]

129. Just so we're clear

The dominant form of legal immigration to the US is family based immigration. There is no limit on visas for immediate family members (spouse, minor child). There is a limit of 480,000 family based visas for non-immediate family (brothers, sisters, parents, adult children). The entire allotment of visas is issued every year, because there is a huge backlog (which varies by country). If you are a Filipino who has married an American woman and come to the US, current wait times are 22 years from the time that you get citizenship until you can sponsor a family member to join you in the US. Work skills are irrelevant to this type of visa.

We allocate less than 5% of that number of people for low-skilled visas, and cap H1B's (which aren't even immigrant visas) at 65,000.

If you are suggesting that we "need to do something" about low-skilled workers entering the country, the only place where you can make a meaningful cut is to slow down the rate for people to legally bring family into the country. If you're going to slow that down, you might as well cancel it, and tell people "sorry, your family will never be able to come here", because making the waits longer will by definition bring in lower skilled and older immigrants.

Or are you really just talking about illegal immigration, something that we actively try to deter (though not with sufficient vigor at the employer level)?

When people on this board talk about support for illegal immigration, it isn't that we're encouraging a bunch of people to come here, but that the correct approach is probably not to throw millions of people on buses and forcibly throw them over a border.