Thread: Bills could swell legal immigration

Bills could swell legal immigration

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... 18d6b.html

Strong praise, criticism for Senate proposals to boost green cards

09:08 PM CST on Thursday, March 30, 2006

By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT and SUDEEP REDDY / The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – From the corridors of Capitol Hill to the streets of Dallas, people are passionately debating immigration – at least the illegal part. Almost entirely unnoticed is that the Senate may be poised to hike legal immigration in dramatic fashion.

Some estimate that bills pending in the Senate could double the nearly 1 million green cards handed out yearly, granting legal permanent residence.

The U.S., which already welcomes more legal immigrants than any other country, would see major increases in green cards under both immigration proposals being debated in the Senate. The bills also would add tens of thousands of temporary visas for workers, from the high-tech industry to medically underserved areas.

Advocates say it's high time Congress expanded a green card quota so miserly that it keeps some would-be residents trapped overseas as long as 22 years before they are reunited with their relatives in the U.S.

Some, such as the parents of Cher Musico of Lewisville, are taking extraordinary steps to cope with limited green card numbers.

The design student at the Art Institute of Dallas said her parents, who live near Oklahoma City, decided in 2003 to adopt two of her young cousins from the Philippines because it was the only way to get them here. The children, now 7 and 12, have been waiting overseas for three years for their paperwork to go through.

"To me, it's awful," Ms. Musico said about the wait times. "It doesn't make any sense."

But others question the drive to increase legal immigration, particularly as the Senate is considering legalizing the nation's 11 million-plus illegal immigrants and creating a guest worker program to bring in 400,000 more foreigners every year.

"There has never been a public opinion poll that indicates [a majority of] Americans want more immigration," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes higher immigration. "Obviously, if the public were asked ... they'd say no to doubling legal immigration."

Just 17 percent of Americans favor increasing legal immigration, while 40 percent say it should be decreased, according to a Pew Hispanic Center poll released Thursday. Thirty-seven percent believe the current level is appropriate, pollsters found.

But tackling illegal immigration without increasing legal immigration would be a recipe for future trouble, said Doris Meissner, a Migration Policy Institute senior fellow who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton.

"You really have to expand legal immigration, otherwise you're just creating a whole other bottleneck in the system in the future," she said. That's in part because newly legal immigrants in many cases would seek to bring relatives from abroad, and if legal pathways don't exist, illegal immigration will begin anew.

Mr. Krikorian and others critical of increased immigration quotas accuse congressional leaders of flying below the radar when it comes to their efforts to boost legal immigration.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican who has crafted one of the two immigration bills on the Senate floor, has stressed the border-control and enforcement aspects of his bill – not his proposed increase in legal immigration.

Likewise, there's been little focus on the virtually identical legal immigration changes in a competing bill that the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Monday.

The way the bills are worded, it's impossible to determine how much they'd increase legal immigration. Judiciary Committee Republican aides estimate the legislation would add 500,000 to 550,000 green cards each year.

That estimate is far too low, said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for Numbers USA, which is lobbying against what she said would "by far" represent the biggest increase in legal immigration in U.S. history.

"It's huge, huge, huge," she said. "I'm estimating it would double legal immigration."

In 2004, the most recent year for which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has provided figures, 946,142 green cards were issued – two-thirds for family reunification.

The Senate bills would significantly increase family-sponsored green cards, currently capped at 480,000 annually, by exempting the spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens from the total. That effectively would add about 260,000 green cards annually.

The bills also would boost employment-based green cards from 140,000 annually to 290,000, and would exempt applicants' spouses and children from the cap. Foreign students would be placed on a faster track for green cards.

And the Judiciary Committee bill would, for the next seven years, permit an unlimited number of green cards for nurses, physical therapists and others in occupations where the Labor Department says workers are in short supply.

Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, welcomed the Senate legal immigration proposals, pegging their increases at 550,000 to 650,000 green cards annually.

While acknowledging that the numbers "seem like a big gulp to people," she noted that legal immigration, as a percentage of the total population, would remain below the historic highs of the 1890s and 1910s. And many of the green cards would go to people already in the country, she said.

"It represents, I think, an understanding on the part of these congressional leaders that our economic system and our social fabric need to be adjusted to take account of 21st-century realities," Ms. Butterfield said.

The Senate bills also would increase the number of students and workers who could come into the U.S. temporarily through a range of nonimmigrant visa categories.

Heeding the pleas of Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and other high-tech leaders, the legislation would raise the cap on H-1B visas from 65,000 to 115,000.

Vikas Yalamanchili, president of Irving-based technology consulting firm Vensiti Inc., said he'd prefer not to use H-1B visas.

But there aren't enough Americans with science and engineering degrees, he noted, making it necessary for Vensiti to rely on H-1B visa holders for nearly half of its 50-member workforce.

Because the H-1B allotment runs out so quickly and his company is unable to get enough visas, Mr. Yalamanchili said he sometimes must enlist subcontractors in India to perform work that he'd prefer be done here.

Others, tired of the H-1B red tape, leave the U.S. to work overseas, Mr. Yalamanchili said.

"If this goes on for a long period of time, we're going to lose our innovators, our scientists, our business leaders," he said.

it is already happening. God Bless and keep safe our border patrol agents!