Indian IT companies must be relieved too for now
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: The comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the Senate has come to a grinding halt in the US House of Representatives. It’s not totally decimated as yet, as debate will rage on for months. Latino advocacy groups will begin a series of pro-immigration reform rallies. Pressure will build up on some House Republicans to reverse course on their Caucus decision. But from the perspective of legal immigrants, it’s good the Senate version has been dumped, and focus shift instead on piecemeal legislation, as the GOP leaders are now saying they plan to do.
The problem with the Senate version all along was that the centerpiece of immigration reform seemed to be legalizing the 11 million undocumented illegals in the country. It seemed to pander to the growing political clout of the Hispanic community. It didn’t place enough emphasis on fixing the problems associated with legal immigrants in the country, of putting clear directives on how long it would take for permanent residency to be granted to qualified workers, some of whom have been waiting for more than a decade after applying for a Green Card.
There was no emphasis in the Senate version to fix the loopholes in the EB2 and EB3 category of Green Cards, no consideration for the fact that applicants in the EB3 category despite having graduate degrees from US universities would according to some immigration lawyers have to wait for 20-30 years to get a Green Card. It seemed absurd that by comparison workers who applied in the EB2 category, despite some of them having degrees from their home country only, and with similar work experience as required in the EB3 category, could get Green Cards in only a few years, as the ‘numbers’ for that specific category moved faster.
The Senate version had grandiose plans to attract the best and the brightest from around the world, with even provisions for granting a Green Card to anybody who had a Ph.D. from anywhere in the world as long as they got a job offer from somebody in the US, and to grant the same to graduates in the STEM disciplines in the US, as long as they had a job offer. There was no language on how long people who already had doctoral degrees from universities here, graduates from STEM disciplines – some of whom are languishing in the EB3 category – facing pressure at work places because of the uncertainty regarding their Green Card applications, would have to wait.
If the Senate version would have been adopted by the House, and made into law, it would have created deep rancor amongst legal immigrants here waiting for permanent residency, who would have seen through the discriminatory practice of granting immediate Green Cards to new immigrants, while they continue to wait till the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fixed the immigration system, process paperwork faster, and clear a hefty backlog of cases.
While much emphasis was placed on border security – and the House intends to introduce piecemeal legislation to have more stringent controls towards that this Fall – not much emphasis was given to how much new personnel the DHS would have to hire to the meet new onslaught of residency applications if the bill had become law.
The DHS employs around 200,000 people at present, but if 11 million undocumented workers had applied for residency, along with the increase in work visa applications, from H1B, L1 as well as agricultural workers, apart from the onus of clearing the backlog of existing applications, including family reunification Permanent Residency applications, the DHS would have been overwhelmed, and most probably not been able to cope with the additional burden.
There were no real plans discussed as to how long the DHS might need to recruit the tens of thousands of new workers, train them, and to start take on the new load. The only thing less for them would have been the elimination of the annual 50,000 diversity visa applications they have to process.
While thought was given to a strong e-verification system, to authenticate legal employees, the Senate version was rather soft on penalties on employers, who exploit workers, and profit from their uncertain legal standing.
The big IT companies in India and the Indian government too also would be glad that for now the bill that they had objected to vigorously citing protectionist and discriminatory rules that would have severely hampered the ability of companies to send more workers to the US, as well as cut into their bottom line, is finished for now.
What legal immigrants and the big IT companies can now hope for is that the House will take up aspects of legal immigration as piecemeal legislation later this year, or maybe early next year. They can also hope fervently that the Senate consider it for a vote, instead of scuttling it as revenge for what the House has done to their much vaunted Gang of Eight bipartisan bill.
There is greater chance of fine tuning legislation for legal immigrants and for advocacy groups to get their message through on measures which are needed, including ‘capturing’ Green Cards from past years, and granting new ones, when immigration reform is delinked from the talk of legalizing illegal immigrants.
It’s imperative that reform or no reform, Capitol Hill must recognize some measures like granting of EAD cards, or permission to work, to spouses of H1B workers, who languish on discriminatory H4 visas. The US has to understand that the practice of not allowing an educated, skilled professional to work, and in the process create emotional and psychological problems for that individual, and for the entire family in certain cases, is a reprehensible rule, to be denounced by any developed nation.
It’s also important that some measures of the Senate version, like giving leniency for H1B workers to be able to switch jobs, and to have grace time to find another job in case they lose their present job, would show that the country cares for the dignity of its workers and new immigrants. It would also go a long way to ward off predatory employers who exploit vulnerable workers.
The comprehensive immigration reform bill may be dead for now, but now is the time for advocates of reforms for legal immigrants, to start taking up the issue more vigorously on Capitol Hill.
(Sujeet Rajan is Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar)