The 179-Year Background Check

Since emerging from my coma, I have endeavoured to follow my doctors' advice to eschew stress-inducing things like the Internet and spend more time communing with the birds and flowers. However, once in a while, a friendly homing pigeon will insist on dropping something from what passes for reality - like a copy of The San Francisco Chronicle:

Indian workers seeking U.S. green cards could face 179-year wait

That took me back a few years - to when my kids were young and I looked into bringing down to New Hampshire the nice Mary Poppins type who helped with them in Montreal. My US immigration lawyer advised against it: she was certainly qualified, but the current backlog for approval was twenty years. So, if all went smoothly, the nanny would show up just as the moppets were entering early middle-age.

The process has now expanded from my nursery to afflict all those tech bros who take for granted that US innovation is one eternal sunrise on the Ganges. The Times of India has more:

Many Indian professionals working in the US on H-1B visas pursue permanent residence through the employment-based EB-2 or EB-3 categories. EB-2 covers professionals with advanced degrees, as well as individuals with exceptional ability in the sciences, arts or business...

The backlog has become so severe that an Indian national whose employment-based immigration petition or labour certification application was filed in January 2026 or later could face a potential wait of 179 years for permanent residence in the EB-2 category and 38 years in EB-3, according to the NFAP analysis.

The NFAP is the pro-immigration National Federation of American Policy, so they say "179-year application process" as if ir's a bad thing:

NFAP estimates that nearly one million Indians were waiting in the first three employment-based preference categories as of Dec 2025.That compares with a total estimated employment-based backlog of 1,264,495 people across EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3. In other words, Indians alone account for four out of every five people in these three categories.

So Indians make up eighty per cent of all the "exceptional" people in the world? Does that include the one-fifth of US truck-drivers who are Sikhs? As fond as one is of Rajiv in customer service in Bangalore, that "four out of every five" sounds unlikely - until one remembers that almost every aspect of modern life is a racket. Were Trump to order a 179-year immigration background check, the District Court judge of Dead Moose Junction would strike it down in nothing flat. But if it just sort of happens, well, it's government bureaucracy; what can you do?

~Among those exceptionally exceptional Indians is Nithya Raman, born in Kerala and currently assistant president pro tempore of the Los Angeles City Council. Assistant President Raman has lately been congratulating herself because her "incredible" team took just under a year to procure a couple of cans of yellow paint and apply them to a cracked road increasingly similar to those back in Kerala:

The Los Feliz Neighborhood Council alerted our office in late 2025 to the need for a crosswalk at Sunset Dr. and Bates St., which has just been completed!

Thank you to our incredible CD4 Field Team for continuing to problem-solve, push for solutions, and make our streets safer. pic.twitter.com/AmNAyPAhdR

— Councilmember Nithya Raman (@cd4losangeles) August 26, 2026

Is that California's first billion-dollar crosswalk?

Nor is this stunning feat the assistant president pro tem's only accomplishment. Nithya Raman is so exceptional that she is in the run-off against the incendiary Karen Bass to be mayor of the second biggest city in the United States. As residents of Pacific Palisades learned last year, Mayor Bass is incapable of getting water into fire hydrants. But Mayor-to-be Raman's incredible team will at least be able to paint the waterless hydrants an appealing shade of yellow, so it's puzzling that she's twelve points behind in the latest poll.

Oh, no, wait, my mistake. That poll is no longer operative:

Poll showing LA Mayor Karen Bass leading Nithya Raman by a wide margin was fake: Company

By "company" The Hill means the total workforce of "Median Strategies", which in its entirety is a 21-year-old college student from UC Santa Cruz whom The Guardian (which is not a California newspaper) managed to track down. Rahil Prakash is truly exceptional: he invented a fake company to publish fake polls to see if the purportedly non-fake US media would fall for it.

Which, of course, they did.

~Nithya Raman, you won't be surprised to hear, is yet another member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Recently, as you will have noticed, the more cobwebbed members of the American "right" have been attempting to revive golden-oldie scare words such as "socialist" and "Communist" in order to cajole wavering voters into opting for the reassuring likes of Mitch McConnell. I doubt this will work. As I wrote ...ten sodding years ago? twenty-five sod-bollocking years ago? No, just for a change, as I wrote last month:

The striking feature of America's belated embrace of socialism and communism is how foreign it all is:

*Some Ugandan takes US citizenship in 2018, and is elected mayor of America's biggest city seven years later - and you're surprised the US semiquincentennial doesn't mean much to him..?

As I have also noted, Zohran Mamdani believes everything the late Supreme Ayatollah did: both are fanatical Shia Muslims panting for the Twelfth Imam. So we drone the one in Tehran, and make the one in New York the kingmaker of the Democrat Party.

Nevertheless, if Ms Raman crosswalks her way to victory, the two most famous cities in America would be governed by a Muslim and a Hindu.

In the old days, the French and Italians at least created their own socialists and Communists. Now we import them from Uganda. In other words, the Communism is mostly a symptom of the problem; the root cause is, yet again, American public policy. So the Wanker Right suddenly bleating about socialism is not just a fit of Cold War nostalgia from the boomercons. Planning ahead for a post-Trump Republican Party, they're attempting the usual containment operation. Thus the Supreme Leader of New York City is nothing to do with Islam and the increasing foreignness of urban America but just a useful lesson, such as one might have read in National Review circa 1958, in the timeless virtues of "limited government". Which is a laugh-and-a-half in a political culture in which "fiscal conservatives" breezily join the spendthrift left in driving federal debt up over forty trillion bucks.

If you're wondering why the socialist bogeyman doesn't seem to have much salience with white male Americans younger than Mark Levin or Dan Crenshaw, pluck any random US statistic. I see the median age of first-home purchase is now forty years old - or nearly twice what it was in the Fifties. Mass migration plus DEI: it's the demographic dispossession, stupid.

~To conclude with a general observation: I am surprised by how much "news" is statements of the obvious, and indeed of what should have been obvious many years ago. From the BBC report on Washington blowing through yet another debt landmark:

Signs of economic trouble have been building. This week they hit the headlines when US national debt passed the $40tn (£29.4tn) mark, raising concerns both at home and abroad...

Interest payments on government debt are now 15% higher than the same period last year, says El-Erian. They are almost 20% of tax revenue, which is "larger than defence", he adds.

You don't say. Actually, I did say - in the opening pages of my ancient bestseller After America:

Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military. You read that right: more on debt service than on the armed services. According to the CBO's 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the government will be paying between 15 and 20 per cent of its revenues in debt interest. Whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 per cent.

Just to clarify: We're not talking about paying down the federal debt, just keeping up with the annual interest charges on it. Yet within a decade the United States will be paying more in interest payments than it pays for the military – and that's not because the Pentagon is such a great bargain. In 2009, the United States accounted for over 43 per cent of the world's military expenditures. So America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have evolved from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers. The CBO numbers foresee net interest payments rising from nine per cent of revenue to 36 per cent in 2030, then to 58 per cent in 2040 and up to 85 per cent in 2050. If that trajectory holds, we'll be spending more than the planet's entire military budget on debt interest.

But forget mid-century – because, unless something changes, whatever goes by the name of 'America' under those conditions isn't worth talking about.

When I wrote those words, the debt was a tuppenny-ha'penny thirteen trillion.

One morning, American will wake up and the dollar will not be there.

And, on that note, back to my coma.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)