The House Immigration Subcommittee is holding a hearing on H-1B visas tomorrow. The witness list includes USCIS' Donald Neufeld of Neufeld Memo fame, Bo Cooper, a former USCIS general counsel who now practices immigration law, Ron Hira, a professor and well-known H-1B critic and Bruce Morrison, a former Congressman who chaired the House Immigration Subcommittee and has worked privately on immigration advocacy projects over the years.

Should be interesting and I'll try and listen in.

Ruben Navarette writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that four year old Emily Ruiz, the American girl who was denied entry to the US when her grandfather was sent back to Guatemala, was deported despite the denials of an embarrassed Department of Homeland Security.

I will not be cajoled into referring to what happened to Emily as a "de facto deportation."

Baloney. The girl was on U.S. soil, and then she wasn't. And she was sent back to Guatemala, her parents' homeland, under the authority of the U.S. government - specifically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And she was, throughout her ordeal, in the custody of the U.S government. That's a deportation.

 

You can say the process was misapplied in this case because Emily is a U.S. citizen. But let's not allow the government or anyone else to lessen a grave injustice by calling it by anything but its proper name.

No surprise and it illustrates how dependent the US is on these highly qualified foreign professionals. Policymakers need to recognize the immediate need for visa liberalization for science, technology, engineering and math professionals and also begin to address why our young people are not going in to these fields in sufficient numbers. What I can tell you we need to make sure we do NOT do is block high skilled immigrants with the excuse that we need to focus on training Americans for these jobs. We end up blocking immigrants from coming and then no one ever addresses the training part. Immigration is a great way to address short term shortages. Whether it is used to address long term shortages depends on the will of lawmakers and the free market.

Get it together, USCIS. People's futures hang in the balance here.

From this morning's New York Times:

The most recent crossed signals started at meetings last week between immigration lawyers and officials from Citizenship and Immigration Services. The officials said that some cases involving gay married couples had been suspended while the agency sought guidance from its lawyers about issues related to the marriage act.

On Monday, Christopher S. Bentley, the chief spokesman for the immigration agency, confirmed in a statement that cases nationwide involving married gay couples had been suspended. What Mr. Bentley did not say was how long that hold might last and what issues the agency was seeking to clarify.

*****

But on Tuesday, Mr. Bentley issued a new statement, saying that Citizenship and Immigration Services “has not implemented any change in policy and intends to follow the president’s directive to continue enforcing the law.”

Mr. Bentley said the agency’s field offices had suspended cases for a short period, perhaps a week or two, while lawyers clarified a “narrow legal issue” concerning the marriage act. He said the agency would probably resume action on same-sex marriage cases in coming days and would continue to deny immigration status to foreigners based on those marriages.

[UPDATE]: Rumblings abound on the Internets. Dan Savage calls USCIS' decision a "crushing letdown." The Facebook Page of the couple profiled in the New York Times -  "Save Our Marriage - Stop the Deportation of Henry Verlandia" - now has more than 10,000 supporters. Andrew Sullivan calls the flip-flop "outrageous."