Why hundreds of thousands of kids in the US dread their 21st birthdays
This is incredibly unfair to the children of immigrants who have lived in the US all their lives. Leaving out the ethical discussion it doesn&#x27;t even make sense financially, the government spends all this money on making these people productive members of society and then kicks them out the moment they start paying back into the system. I can&#x27;t think of a single reason to maintain this system other than &quot;foreign people bad&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not even because of dumb racism, as the article highlights through the woman of Northern Irish descent who&#x27;s white as can be; this is due to an arbitrary definition of &quot;foreign&quot; which I don&#x27;t think any reasonable person would apply to someone who&#x27;s lived in their country since they were 3.<p>On the other hand, I wonder what some of their parents were thinking.<p>Their children should definitely get a visa or even the ability to apply for citizenship, but the parents knew what problems their kids face once they become adults. Perhaps those waiting on the green card program couldn&#x27;t have known because the huge wait times weren&#x27;t a problem when they first arrived and they simply couldn&#x27;t have known, but for those on temporary visas with no chance to get their children citizenship, they could and should have known. For decades they let their kids work towards an impossible future.<p>Until immigration policies get fixed, I think it&#x27;s incredibly unfair towards these children to be forced to go through this. I don&#x27;t know what parents were expecting to happen when they took their young kids into a country they knew they couldn&#x27;t stay in, but I can&#x27;t help but feel they&#x27;re part of the problem. I don&#x27;t expect the problem to disappear any time soon either, with Trump aiming at a second presidency and (close enough to) half the American voting population still voting conservatively.