Source: Daily News 365

The co-sponsors are a mix of mostly left-wing groups, and the bill is a hodgepodge of different ideas and political compromises all too common in today’s Washington. Consequently, few are enthusiastic about it, and many will be outraged.

Republican opposition leaders state that it would exacerbate the unemployment problem during a recession. That economic fallacy, and the readiness with which it is believed, could kill the good in this bill.

Besides a genuine desire to overhaul our flawed immigration system, there are other motivations to introduce CIR ASAP at this time. The health care bill is in serious trouble, and Democrats need a distraction. They also are worried about the midterm election. Throwing a bone to the pro-immigration camp, particularly Hispanics, could help increase turnout and shift votes to Democrats. Regardless, CIR ASAP is the beginning of another long political battle that will stretch long into next year.

Many of today’s highly skilled immigrants come in on H-1B visas. Rules and caps on the number of these visas issued each year hamper economic growth and entrepreneurship. H-1Bs and former H-1Bs have been in on the ground floor of new firms. As of 2008, one-third of all companies founded in Silicon Valley had Indian or Chinese immigrants as co-founders.

Moreover, expanding enterprises rely on H-1B workers to fill needed slots. According to the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy, each H-1B visa requested increases employment by five workers. Foreign skilled workers need support and management, so they typically do not substitute, but complement American labor. A firm willing to employ H-1B foreign workers employs Americans alongside them.

The CIR ASAP should just eliminate the cap for H-1B visas or, as has been suggested, recycle unused H-1B visas from the past. Instead, it creates a government agency to suggest “market” changes to the system. Markets do a much better job as markets.

…

Immigrants come and will continue to come because of economic opportunity. Yet typically it takes 15 to 20 years for a low-skilled laborer to get a greencard – if he’s lucky. Highly skilled workers and H-1B visa applicants fare hardly better. Anyone ambitious enough to seek a better life in a new country isn’t going to wait for a labyrinthine bureaucracy.

Without a legal path to entry, many will continue to break the law and the economy will continue to suffer. CIR ASAP offers some positive reforms, but the politically motivated E-Verify program would be a disaster.

Read the full story on Washington Times.

Good:

1. Prohibits creation of a national identification card (this contradicts mandated E-Verify, see below).
2. “Recapture” of unused worked visas from past years for next fiscal year, including 309,500 H-1B visas for the next fiscal year.
3. Exempts several categories of highly skilled workers from employment based visa caps. This de-facto expands the yearly cap.
4. Removes backlog of visas by updating system and personnel augmentation.
5. Improves infrastructure at ports of entry to smooth immigrant entry and streamline inspection.

Bad:

1. H-1B and H-2B employers must show, through more paperwork, they tried to hire American workers.
2. Allows Department of Labor to conduct more onerous and expensive workplace inspections for H-1B, L-1, and H-2 visas than they already do.
3. Recreates EB-5 visa program to bring in immigrants to blighted communities. Why do this when we can just expand existing visa programs?
4. Gives grants to subsidize English, lawyers for immigrants, and other services. Immigrants can do this on their own, they don’t need government help.

VERY bad:

1. Title II creates a mandatory federal employment verification system (like E-Verify) that will eventually apply to ALL workers and new hires (including natural born Americans). The old E-Verify flawed and prone to errors. The new E-Verify will add new burdens, regulations, and fees on a labor market already under strain. If the goal is to “Europeanize” America’s labor markets, this is a great start. This will also lead to a national ID card because there is no other way to run such a system. There is no point in letting in more immigrants if U.S. laws severely restrict employers from hiring them.

Unnecessary:

1. EB-5 visa program to channel immigrants to blighted communities.
2. Most of the rest of the bill.

Amnesty (Title IV):

To gain legal status an undocumented (some say “illegal”) immigrant must:

1. Pass a complete criminal and security background check, and
2. Demonstrate commitment to the U.S. through employment, education, military service, or other community/volunteer service, and
3. Pay $500 fine (unless entered U.S. when under 16 years of age), and
4. Register for the draft, and
5. Meet English and civics requirements, and
6. Undergo a medical examination, and
7. Pay all taxes, and
8. Demonstrate residency in U.S.

Those who do not qualify do not get a work visa that can lead to other goodies like a green card. The penalty for lying on amnesty forms is up to 5 years imprisonment.

Read the rest of the story on Open Market

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft praises bill to double cap on H-1B visas (infoworld.com)

Looking ahead to next year, it has become increasingly important that concerns about the economy not deter lawmakers from ensuring that reforms to attract and retain highly educated, highly skilled foreign nationals are included in comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Illegal immigration issues have dominated the debate, but the reality is that without addressing our broken legal immigration system, we will short-change ourselves in the long run. Keeping the United States a welcoming place for talented students and workers from around the world will be crucial to our economic recovery and our future ability to innovate, compete, and thrive in the global economy.

In an economic downturn, the temptation to lower the blinds and close the doors is strong. But in an age when work can be sent to other countries with the click of a mouse such an approach simply will not work. Many studies, and the experience of countless U.S. companies, have shown that hiring talented foreign workers boosts innovation and drives job creation. It also supports local economies. Foreign-born professionals buy cars and houses and pay tuition for their kids. At our universities, they teach our students, helping us develop our own talent pool for the jobs of tomorrow, and they collaborate with our faculty in the sciences, medicine, and other important fields. Turning away people with the skills our country needs denies us a much-needed resource to support our economic recovery. No country can be an island in the global economy – not even one as large as the United States.

Talented people from other countries often first come to the United States as foreign students. By the time they graduate from our colleges and universities, they have spent years investing in acquiring the best education in the world, generally in fields like engineering and the sciences, where they make up half to two-thirds of the graduate students. Some of these foreign graduates want to contribute their skills and knowledge in the United States, but increasingly they are going home or to other countries instead because our immigration system makes it too difficult for them to stay – even though it is in our interest to help them do so.

To keep them, and to attract other highly educated workers from other countries that U.S. employers need to fill key positions, we must do two things. First, the enormous backlogs and wait times that plague the green card system must be addressed, and there must be a better path to greencard status for those foreign graduates of our colleges and universities who wish to stay in the United States and whose talent and skills are important to our economy. Exempting from employment-based greencard quotas foreign students who receive a U.S. master’s degree or higher; eliminating the per-country limits that impede, in particular, Indian and Chinese professionals; and providing additional employment visas for backlog relief would constitute major steps in addressing this problem.

Second, we must maintain and improve the H-1B temporary visa system, the primary way for skilled foreign nationals to pursue employment in the United States. Today, H-1B visas serve as a way station for those who really seek immigrant status but are stuck in the long greencard line for 6 to 12 years. Fixing the greencard system will take pressure off the H-1B system, but we will still need a system that can accommodate temporary, high-skill workers. At the same time, where abuses exist with H-1B visas they must be addressed. We must realize it does not make sense in a global competition for highly educated and talented workers to turn away these individuals, many of whom will go to work for companies in other countries that directly compete with our own.

Any effort to address the question of what kind of immigration system the United States needs must begin with an understanding that the mobility of individuals and ideas across borders has profoundly changed. People today possess myriad options for study, employment, and life in countries across the globe. Many nations are aggressively recruiting high-skilled foreign professionals and students, adjusting immigration and work laws to create incentives for them. People, like technology and information, are crossing borders with unprecedented freedom and flexibility. Our immigration laws and visa policy must catch up to these new realities, and must support a climate that encourages the contributions of foreign talent. In the global economy, our future depends on it.

About The Author
Marlene M. Johnson is executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators in Washington, D.C.

Stuart Anderson Executive Director of the National Foundation for American Policy, served as Executive Associate Commissioner for Policy and Planning and Counselor to the Commissioner at the Immigration and Naturalization Service from August 2001 to January 2003.

The program, known as H-1B, has been a mainstay of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, where many companies have come to depend on securing visas for computer programmers from India or engineers from China. Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of Sept. 25 — nearly six months after the U.S. government began accepting applications — only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

Usually, all visas are allocated within a month or two from April, when applications for the following fiscal year are first accepted. But this year, six months later, “you can still walk in with an application and you’re still highly likely to get approved,” said R. Srikrishna, senior vice president for business operations in North America for HCL Technologies Ltd., an Indian outsourcing company.

The sagging economy, which has pushed U.S. unemployment to 9.8%, has crimped expansion in the technology sector, traditionally the biggest user of the H-1B program. Julie Pearl, a corporate immigration lawyer in San Francisco, said that at least a third of her clients have cut their hiring of H-1B visa holders in half from a year ago.

“Most companies just aren’t hiring as many people in general,” Ms. Pearl said.

For Indian outsourcing companies, historically the largest recipients of H-1B visas, the economy as well as political pressures have prompted a cutback in applications. The recession has trimmed technology budgets at their U.S. clients; at the same time, Washington has scrutinized hiring from abroad more closely amid high unemployment at home.

Instead of bringing over Indian engineers, HCL has been hiring American employees who otherwise might have been let go by clients switching the work to HCL, Mr. Srikrishna said. Last year, HCL hired more than 1,000 employees from clients and received just 87 H-1B visas, he said.

Political pressures have come to bear among other applicants as well. Companies that receive federal bailout funds must prove they have tried to recruit American workers at prevailing wages and that foreigners aren’t replacing U.S. citizens. That regulation caused Bank of America Corp., among others, to rescind job offers to dozens of foreigners.

In addition, would-be immigrants from India and China are finding new career opportunities at home as those economies grow relatively quickly while the U.S. economy sags and its political climate appears less welcoming.

Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied H-1B visas, said that trend has been compounded by what he sees as rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. “The best and the brightest who would normally come here are saying, ‘Why do we need to go to a country where we are not welcome, where our quality of life would be less, and we would be at the bottom of the social ladder?’” Mr. Wadhwa said.

The cost and bureaucracy of applying for H-1B visas is another deterrent. Lawyers’ fees, filing fees and other expenses can easily reach $5,000 per applicant.

And immigration lawyers say some would-be employers are put off by a crackdown on fraud. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the H-1B program, has been dispatching inspectors on surprise company visits to verify that H-1B employees are performing the jobs on the terms specified. The fraud-detection unit in coming months is expected to inspect up to 20,000 companies with H-1Bs and other temporary worker visas.

“It’s an invasive procedure that is both stressful for the employer and the foreign national employee,” said Milwaukee lawyer Jerome Grzeca, whose employment-visa business is down 40% since last year.

The numbers represent a sharp turnaround for a program that many companies had complained was too stingy with its visas. Year after year, U.S. businesses braced for “visa roulette,” as applications to bring in highly skilled foreign workers far outstripped demand, forcing the government to hold a lottery to award them.

High-tech companies, such as Microsoft Corp., have been lobbying Congress for years to raise the cap. At the same time, some U.S. legislators have been calling for restrictions on the program, which they say displaces American workers.

Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote a letter this month to the new director of citizenship and immigration services, urging tighter controls on H-1B visas. In April, Mr. Grassley and Illinois Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin introduced legislation to require companies to pass more stringent labor-market tests that would ensure they make a bigger effort to hire U.S. workers.

Companies that use H-1B visas argue the market, rather than Congress, should dictate the number of visas issued. The fact that the 65,000-visa cap hasn’t been reached this year shows that the market will temper demand when necessary, said Jenifer Verdery, director of work-force policy at Intel Corp., who represents a coalition of companies that use the visas.

“Contrary to the claims of H-1B critics, if importing cheap labor were the goal of H-1B visa employers, these visas would have been gone on the first day applications were accepted last spring,” Ms. Verdery said. “In slow economic times, such as today, the demand decreases and the market takes over, which is as it should be.”

In 2008, 44% of approved H-1B visa petitions were for foreigners working as systems analysts or programmers. The second-largest category consisted of professionals working in universities. Indians account for about half of all H-1B visa holders.

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the U.S. work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft’s patent applications in the U.S. came from new inventions by visa and greencard holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

Google Inc. also says that the H-1B program allowed it to tap top talent that was crucial to its development. India native Krishna Bharat, for example, joined the firm in 1999 through the H-1B program, and went on to earn several patents while at Google. He was credited by the company as being the key developer of its Google News service. Today, he holds the title of distinguished research scientist.

[Source: WSJ]