Country of birth does determine the "priority date" waiting list. Specifically for Philippines, Mexico, India and China. Due to demand. Everyone else is in the rest of the world bucket.

For those countries (especially India) the wait can be more than a decade.

Moving to a points based immigration system without country of birth consideration may one day happen.

Depending on what contributes to points it would encourage better English language abilities and skill sets from immigrants (eg winners being China and India, losers being Mexico)

> Moving to a points based immigration system without country of birth consideration may one day happen.

Anything, honestly, to end the need for informal lawyering that even immigrants with straightforward situations still have to do.

Even if the system is simple enough to not need a lawyer, you should always use one.

Depends on the visa category. Family preference visas for siblings can have waiting lists in the decades. But family preference visas for spouses of citizens have no wait list. It's just the system is slow. We went through some of it long ago, her time here threw us into proximity, proximity turned to love. That meant an adjustment of status, her old visa became invalid when we applied, but you have permission to stay while such an application is being processed. A hair under 6 months from application to first interview, a hair under two years before she got conditional permanent residency. (And I think that timing was not a coincidence, they stretched it out to just below the point it wouldn't have been conditional.) I would be terrified to do that under the current administration.

This really depends on your relationship with the other person and your status (e.g. US citizen, permanent resident, etc). Long story short, if you are the spouse or immediate family of an US citizen, there isn't any queue to get permanent resident status aside from whatever time it takes the US government to process the various forms. That time can be substantial, e.g. 2-3 years but it's nothing like the multi-year wait that a spouse of a permanent resident needs to go through just to apply for permanent resident status.

Only if you think it is crazy and cruel to disallow someone from another country to become a legal resident and then eventually a citizen of the US.

In many circumstances - including when that person is married to a US citizen, or when they'll likely be killed on return to their country of birth - it is indeed crazy and cruel.

(In more ordinary circumstances it's merely arbitrary and unjust.)

I wanted to be a citizen of Singapore and was never approved.

I agree it was arbitrary and unjust. I deserved to be a citizen.

Yes, this is by no means only a U.S. problem. Some countries are worse, even where birth rate trends seem like they should make it more obviously self-destructive. A tendency towards xenophobia seems to be an unfortunate human universal, although one we can sometimes overcome.

When they're married to an American? When they have kids that are American? It's not crazy nor cruel, to you, to separate a mother from her infant?

You are demanding that their American spouse either divorce them or spend the rest of their life in another country. Of course it’s crazy and cruel.

The issue is spousal visas. I did not seek to marry a foreigner, our relationship was proximity turning into a whole lot more. We consider it cruel to tear apart couples.