Already America's most popular immigrant gateway, California could be reshaped again by a comprehensive immigration bill that eight U.S. senators are introducing Tuesday after months of negotiations.
The bill offers an arduous 13-year path to citizenship to most of the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, but also shifts the legal immigration system to welcome more people based on their work skills, prioritizing the most educated.
And it pumps billions of dollars into securing the U.S.-Mexico border to curtail the flow of illegal immigration.
"Silicon Valley, in terms of tech, comes out pretty good from this proposal," said Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco. "If you look at the grand scheme of things, it also definitely benefits undocumented immigrants. They're not going to get deported."
But the "ones who are most hurt," said Hing, are many average immigrants who will lose the chance to sponsor their brothers, sisters and other relatives to join them in the country.
The bipartisan group of senators postponed their announcement of the bill Tuesday in honor of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, but a 17-page summary obtained by the Bay Area News Group details how it would work.
In a move away from America's family-focused immigration system, it would create a new "Merit Visa" later this decade that would rank prospective permanent residents, including those now here illegally, using a point system based on their education, employment and length of U.S. residence. About 120,000 of the new visas will be available in the first year of the merit-based program, and up to 250,000 annually if the economy improves.
First, however, the measure aims at clearing an existing backlog of more than 4.5 million immigrants waiting for green cards to move here permanently, most to join relatives who have sponsored them.
And it gives a 10-year "registered provisional immigrant" status to those here illegally, as long as they have lived here since at least Dec. 2011, pay a $500 penalty fee, have not committed serious crimes and meet other requirements. They will able to work and live in the United States for a decade, but not access government benefits, and eventually can seek citizenship if they pay back taxes, learn English and qualify for an existing family or work visa.
A quicker path to citizenship would be offered to young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children and to agricultural workers.
The bill also would expand temporary visa programs for guest workers in both high-wage and low-wage jobs. It would raise the annual cap for 3-year H-1B visas, already heavily used to recruit foreign computer programmers and other Silicon Valley tech workers, from 85,000 to as many as 180,000.
Some engineers critical of the H-1B program for creating unfair competition with U.S. workers were pleased that the bill, while adding visas, bans some companies from gobbling up too many of them.
"It's better than expected," said Saratoga computer consultant Brian Berg, chairman of the Santa Clara Valley chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. "Even though the program is being expanded, the fact that outsourcers are being partly left out of this process is good news."
By outsourcers, Berg means the companies -- most of them based in India -- that rely on H-1B workers for the majority of their workforce. Companies will be banned from hiring more than 75 percent of their workforce from abroad, and will now have to pay a $10,000 fee for each additional foreign worker they hire if more than half of their workforce is here on temporary visas.
Berg was also pleased by the expansion of green cards -- permanent residency visas -- for high-skilled workers, since those immigrants are not tethered to the companies that sponsor them.
The bill would also add a new W visa for lower-skilled guest workers -- 20,000 in the first year, but the numbers would later expand or contract based on a statistical formula.
The bill would eliminate today's "diversity visa," which is awarded randomly to about 50,000 people each year from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
And, after the existing backlog of family visas is cleared, it would end visas for the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, as well as married sons and daughters over the age of 30.
"The proposal to get rid of the sibling category, which has been on the books since 1952, that's going to be very disappointing," Hing said. "It's disappointing for regular immigrants. The vast majority of people who immigrate today come on the family categories."
The so-called "Gang of Eight" senators -- four Democrats and four Republicans -- have negotiated the bill in secret for months. They are Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida, John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and Democrats Chuck Schumer of New York, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Dick Durbin of Illinois.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco, while not part of the group, helped broker its agricultural provision after months-long negotiations between the farm industry and unions.
The first hearing on the bill is expected to happen on Friday, followed by another one on Monday.
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