Group Seeks Changes For Green Cards
Reprinted from the Sept. 18, 2007 edition of National Journal's Technology Daily
Immigrant Group Wants Changes For Green Cards
By Aliya Sternstein
An alliance representing high-skilled legal immigrants said Tuesday that it is rallying members in an effort to fix a green-card visa system that is inherently designed to create backlogs.
Immigration Voice, a 3,000-member organization that promotes the interests of legal, employed immigrants with pending applications for permanent residency, is urging Congress to make legislative changes that would let high-skilled workers already in the United States stay legally.
"We appeal to Congress" to reform the immigration system by distributing more green cards each year and removing limits on the number of green cards per country of origin, Aman Kapoor, president and founder of Immigration Voice, said on Tuesday.
"The root of the problem" is the per-country limits, he said. "The population of the world is not evenly divided."
Immigration Voice member Jay Pradhan, who moved to the United States in 2000 from India, said that this year, the group's members spent considerable time trying to meet deadlines for federal paperwork because the due dates changed. "The deadlines are short. The paperwork is huge."
Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., joined the group's leaders in calling for an end to the backlog. U.S. productivity depends on streamlining the immigration system for skilled workers, he said.
But he added that green card reform "is no substitute for investing in high-tech education in our own country." Immigration and U.S. education are critical and synergistic, Ellison said.
Ellison co-sponsored a bill, H.R. 1645, that would nearly triple the number of skilled worker visas and make it easier for foreign students with U.S. advanced degrees to stay and work.
Robert Hoffman, an Oracle executive and co-chairman of the Compete America coalition, told the gathering that the United States' ability to compete in the global economy "depends on whether we are able to recruit and retain the world's best talent." But today's green-card system forces that talent to wait nearly five years for permanent residency papers, he said, calling the resultant financial and professional limbo "unconscionable."
Compete America wants changes to both green card and high-skilled worker visa programs. Hoffman said many people awaiting green cards must rely on a limited supply of temporary visas.
Software and Information Industry Association General Counsel Mark Bohannon said changes are needed not only to keep innovators in this country but also to let foreign entrepreneurs create new jobs for Americans. "We want to keep our employment base strong," Bohannon said. "We also want to create new businesses."
But not everyone is convinced that visa changes are necessary. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis, who favors limits on skilled-worker visas, wrote in a Sept. 17 report that the green-card backlog is "a contrived crisis."
Green-card categories for tech professionals are prioritized by level of talent, with foreign nationals of extraordinary ability and outstanding professors having virtually no wait, "merely a few months," he stated. "Thus the industry lobbyists' claims that we are losing the 'geniuses' are completely unfounded."
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