This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 26, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

The President is twain with using executive action to make it easier to give more green cards to some highly skilled workers.

Alex Narasta, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, evaluates the likely changes.

There's a lot of talk right now about executive actions the president could take going forward about immigration that he could take without Congress having to pass a law. Most people are focusing on what he can do to help legalize some of the unauthorized immigrants

currently in the US, but there appears to be some actions he can take to streamline the legal immigration system, especially for highly skilled workers.

All right, so what does that entail?

So under the current system, there's about 140,000 green cards set aside every year for

highly skilled workers but only about 45% of those actually go to the workers the

rest of them go to the workers families families, you know, their spouse, their small children, etc.

So, and it's not clear why exactly those green cards are counted in that way, why family members against the cap and the regulations written to explain this law and how it will be

carried out and enforced. There is nothing that says that family members should be

counted against the cap. It appears to be nothing more than bureaucratic or administrative inertia

and tradition that has prompted family members to be counted against the cap.

So it's likely under the way current law stands that the

president could issue an executive order stating that only workers will be

counted against the green card cap going forward.

Which, I mean, if that's correct, then that's an entirely correct use of an executive

order to direct the federal workforce to behave in a certain way with respect to executing the law.

Absolutely. It's guidance on how to interpret the law and how to enforce the law using

the statutes and regulations on the books as guidance. Now what this executive order could do if it was put into effect is essentially double

the number of highly skilled immigrants coming in every year on an employment-based green

card, essentially wiping out the long wait

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