Respite for Asian immigrants in US

WASHINGTON: Asian immigrants have won a short respite as US immigration reforms, which they attacked for giving priority to skills over family ties, collapsed in the US Congress last week.

But the bigger question over the status of the 1.5 million illegal immigrants from Asia remains in a limbo . The immigration reforms championed by US President George W Bush were aimed at giving illegal aliens a path to citizenship but could not gain a simple majority in a procedure vote last week to speed its passage in the Senate. Many of Bush’s Republican Party lawmakers and their conservative base complained that the reform package was in effect an amnesty.

They wanted to insert a controversial provision which would shift some of the emphasis in legalising the country’s 12 million illegal immigrants from family ties toward an applicant’s skills and education.
But that was opposed by many Democrats who complained it would break up families. “In some sense, this failure of the procedural vote gives us a pause in the debate,â€