Thread: Romney: U.S. Needs Skilled Immigrants

http://abcnews.go.com

Romney: U.S. Needs Skilled Immigrants

Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney Tells Calif. Republicans That U.S. Needs More Skilled Immigrants

By LAURA KURTZMAN

LOS ANGELES Aug 20, 2006 (AP)— Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney told the California GOP convention Saturday the United States should encourage foreigners with skills to immigrate, while discouraging those who come here illegally and without skills.

"It is wrong for us to build an absolute concrete wall against those with skills and enterprise," he said, referring to foreign students who come here for advanced study, "and have a wide open door for people with no education and no skills."

His remarks were greeted with enthusiastic applause from this conservative crowd, for whom illegal immigration is a hot issue. Romney, a Republican governor in a Democratic state, is exploring a presidential run in 2008. California, with its reservoir of campaign cash, is a key stop along campaign trails.

Romney, a social conservative, also criticized gay marriage, saying, "every child deserves a mother and a father." He praised President Bush's aggressive foreign and military policies, and said the nation should wean itself from oil.

"This country is using too much oil," he said, adding that billions of dollars were being poured "down black holes in countries who don't like us."

He said improving education and investing in technology was the way to keep America competitive as Asian economies grow.

Skilled immigrants are great if they come legally.

U.S. Needs Skilled Immigrants

We might but we need to look hard at out visa and legal immigration system too. Just who are we letting in here? How does it all work? Besides we also need to take a good look at our education system. Why are we needing so many "high skilled" immigrants?



As one example of our visa system. Why do we have or need the following? Why is this a good thing?

Congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program

DV Lottery Instructions

The congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is administered on an annual basis by the Department of State and conducted under the terms of Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Section 131 of the Immigration Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-649) amended INA 203 to provide for a new class of immigrants known as "diversity immigrants" (DV immigrants). The Act makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

The annual DV program makes permanent residence visas available to persons meeting the simple, but strict, eligibility requirements. Applicants for Diversity Visas are chosen by a computer-generated random lottery drawing. The visas, however, are distributed among six geographic regions with a greater number of visas going to regions with lower rates of immigration, and with no visas going to citizens of countries sending more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the past five years. Within each region, no one country may receive more than seven percent of the available Diversity Visas in any one year.

For DV-2007, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply because they sent a total of more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the previous five years:

http://travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants ... _1318.html