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Plenty of countries don't allow massive runaway chain migration. A wife is probably fine, but when it's 20 years later and a swarm of everybody who she's even tangentially related to are trying to get into the West then it's clearly massively destructive of limited resources.
I've never understood why anyone other than the spouse themselves, and maybe their children if still under 18, would be allowed in via chain migration.
Originally in the US, chain migration was seen as a backdoor way to privilege the relatives of already existing Americans and minimize ethnic change. More right wing Americans backed it while more left wing ones preferred a more skills based system. The hope was that you would have a few, high quality, people come in from the third world but most immigrants would be relatives of then Americans. That was the theory behind Hart Cellar.
That didn’t happen. It turns out once a country gets rich enough, and it doesn’t have to be equally rich, it just stops sending many immigrants. Few immigrants have come from Europe, but tons of people come from the third world.
Immigration from Europe -- including Western Europe -- never stopped. It's limited by visa availability, not desire to immigrate. However, it's generally not worth it for a European to become an illegal alien in the US.
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They shouldn't be. I'm considerably more pro-immigration than the median Mottizen, and I think that family reunification immigration for extended family members (including for extended family members who are also spouses!) is bad policy.
The legislative history of the Hart-Cellar act suggests that the idiots who wrote the legislation thought that allocating most of a capped quota of green cards to family reunification was a backdoor way of preserving the pre-existing ethnic mix in America without national-origin quotas.
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I feel like a lot of migration policy was set and ideated during the days were there was a Destiny to Manifest, social spending was negligible and Western countries had industrial jobs that needed bulk labor. Being a lot looser made more sense on those terms. Also the transition of University from something that only elite people did, to being widely available, means that a lot of educational Visas are just not really doing what they originally were intended to do.
These days it's pretty clear any common-sense program that's established will be eroded by the courts and politicians till even the tightest Genius-only Immigration policy inevitably gets used to import Deliveroo Enthusiasts 50 years later.
They're being used to prop up schools via higher fees (at least going by Canada's example). They seem to be working quite well in that regard.
Yeah they've transitioned into a University wealth in exchange for Visas program, but the initial idea behind gating immigration behind degrees was fomented when a degree was a top 10% thing to have.
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