GOP Pushes Bill to Ease Path for Skilled Foreign Workers In U.S.
A Republican led house committee this week passed a piece of legislation that could lead to more skilled workers from China and India in the U.S., according to Computer World.
The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act eliminates the per country limits for employment-based green cards.
There is currently a cap of 140,000 employment-based green cards each year. Of those green card holders, no more than seven percent of the total can come from one country.
Proponents of the rule change say that current law leaves backlog of skilled workers from Indian and China, forcing many to wait up to four years to obtain green cards.
“This legislation makes sense,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) said in a statement Thursday. “Why should American employers who seek green cards for skilled foreign workers have to wait longer just because the workers are from India or China?”
The move, however, has been widely panned in some corners, according to Computer World. John Miano, the founder of the Programmers Guild, told the web site that the change in law will skew the system to favor those immigrants from India and China.
“We have an act that sets up a system to make immigration look like India and China,” he told Computer World.
Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, told the web site that the reforms are not necessarily bad, but there are other areas of America’s immigration law that could use reform.
“This tilts the employment-based green card preferences towards higher-skilled workers, which is a good thing,” he said.
“There is of course, much more work that needs to be done. Hopefully, Congress will next turn to helping American high-tech workers by closing the obvious and enormous loopholes in the H-1B, L-1, B-1, and J-1 guest worker programs.”
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