Think that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress will never be able to agree about immigration policy?
Better think again!
When I started working as an immigration attorney, Jerry Ford was the President of the United States. Over the past 35 years, I have seen the two parties unite to pass dozens of immigration laws.
Yes, I know the parties are so divided on the issue of what to do about the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they couldn't even get together a few weeks ago to pass the DREAM Act.
However, when it comes to reforming the legal immigration system, things are very different. The parties have come together to pass dozens of bills providing immigration benefits including the Child Status Protection Act in 2002, the Nursing Relief for Disadvantaged Areas Reauthorization Act in 2005, the Physicians for Underserved Areas Act in 2007, and the bill that ended the Widow's Penalty in 2009.
So, what's on tap for 2011?
On January 6, 2011, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduced H.R. 43, a bill which would "amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to eliminate the diversity immigrant program and to re-allocate those visas to certain employment-based immigrants who obtain an advanced degree in the United States."
In simple English, the bill would eliminate the annual green card lottery and give the 55,000 green cards each year to foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities with advanced degrees in the sciences or in medicine.
With the employment-based second preference category (EB-2) backlogged for many years for persons born in India and mainland China, our country would benefit greatly if 55,000 more green cards were available annually for highly-educated people.
Sure, the bill could be tweaked to provide that the green cards could be given to anyone with an advanced degree, not just those with degrees from U.S. universities. Unused numbers should drop down to help those waiting in the EB-3 category. Also, the bill could be amended to increase or eliminate country quotas in the employment-based categories.
For many years, our country imported over 100,000 persons annually on H-1B temporary professional visas. Congress raised the H-1B quotas, but did not expand the employment-based preference numbers. The result was that hundreds of thousands of highly-educated immigrant workers came legally to the U.S., were sponsored by their U.S. employers for green cards, met all the qualifications and jumped through all the legal hoops, and are now stuck in lines that can only be measured not in years, but in decades.
If the United States wants to remain the world leader in the sciences, in medicine, in biotech and in information technology, we had better revise our immigration laws so that we continue to attract the world's best and brightest.
H.R. 43 is a step in the right direction.
About The Author
Carl Shusterman is the managing attorney of Law Offices of Carl Shusterman based in Los Angeles, CA. He has specialized in immigration law for over 30 years and his six-attorney law firm represents clients in all 50 states. Mr. Shusterman is a 1973 graduate of the UCLA School of Law. He served as an attorney for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) until 1982 when he entered private practice. He is authorized to practice before the Supreme Court of California, the Federal District Court in the Central District of California, the U.S. Court of Appeals in a number of different circuits and the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Shusterman is a former chairman of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), Southern California Chapter and served as a member of AILA's National Board of Governors (1988-97). He has chaired numerous AILA Committees, spoken at dozens of AILA Conferences and has contributed a number of scholarly articles to AILA's publications. Mr. Shusterman is a Certified Specialist in Immigration and Nationality Law, State Bar of California. He has served as a member of the Immigration and Nationality Law Advisory Commission for the State Bar. He has been named as one of Best Attorneys in America and as a SuperLawyer for many years. He is a frequent writer and lecturer on immigration law. Mr. Shusterman has testified as an expert witness before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration in Washington, D.C. His website, www.shusterman.com, receives over 1,000,000 hits each week, and his free, e-mail newsletter has almost 60,000 subscribers in more than 150 countries.
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