Back Door Efforts to Increase Immigration

Congress adopted a major increase in legal immigration in 1990 to cut down on backlogged cases. Now there is an effort in Congress to adopt legislation that represents a ‘stealth’ approach to further increasing employment sponsored immigration. This strategy is unfolding in the House Immigration and Claims Subcommittee where California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, an immigration lawyer, is the chair. Among the bills Lofgren is pushing are the following:

1. remove fashion models from the H-1B (professional worker) visa category – this would make more visas available to high-tech workers;
2. exempt any foreign graduate of a U.S. university in science, math and technology from green card limits;
3. remove per-country limits that have resulted in a backlog of Indians and Chinese ‘green card’ applicants;
4. ‘recover’ immigrant visas that were not used in the previous years.

An article on this ‘stealth’ effort in Computerworld notes that “…it remains to be seen whether she can jump over the legislative stalemate created by [Hispanic Caucus] lawmakers who want comprehensive immigration reform or nothing at all.”

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