The career growth, job mobility and quality of life of these half a million legal skilled immigrants is subverted by the bill in its current form.
1. Section 501(b) reduces the number of green cards to legal skilled immigrants from the current 140,000/year to 90,000/year and diverts the major portion of those green cards to future low-skills guest workers under the Y visa program. Instead of increasing that number to reduce the backlogs this section take a step backwards and would exacerbate the backlogs. On the other hand, 503(f)(2) of this act would allocate an estimated 11 million green cards over a time frame of 5 years – 2.2 million a year – to undocumented immigrants. Immigration Voice requests congress to treat legal skilled immigrants at parity with undocumented immigrants and increase the number of green cards to at least 250,000 for 5 years for currently backlogged applicants defined under Sec. 502(d)(2) in order to reduce to current backlog before the untested points based merit system is functional.
2. Immigration Voice requests congress to waive per-country ceilings on backlogged petitions to be processed under Sec. 502(d)(2) in order to make the backlog reduction more efficient. The bill provides a very similar waiver from per-country ceilings to family based pending petitions in section 508(b).
Immigration Voice strongly opposes the bill S 1348 in its current form and requests congress to amend this bill and treat the legal skilled immigrants at parity with undocumented immigrants, future guest-workers and pending family-based applicants.
