| The Lee-Durbin Big Tech Green Card Bill S.386
More foreign workers in de facto residency replacing U.S. workers,
but less diversity
Washington, D.C. (December 20, 2019) - Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has agreed to new provisions that will further distort the US labor market and displace American college graduates from jobs in order to secure Sen. Dick Durbin's (D-IL) support for the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act (S. 386). The resulting bill goes well beyond dealing with the lop-sided waiting list caused by an influx of visa workers from India. It also creates a new form of long-term residency called "early filing," allowing those arriving on certain temporary visas to bypass the annual green card limits and stay indefinitely if they have an employer sponsor.
Under the bill, those on a long-term temporary visa who can secure a job offer requiring a college degree will, after a wait of 270 days, be able to obtain a three-year renewable work permit and permission to travel in and out of the country. It will be a status comparable to permanent residency with a green card, but without having to wait in line or be restricted by annual immigration limits. It will potentially apply to hundreds of thousands of people each year, including foreign students, exchange visitors, NAFTA workers, investors, and more.
Supporters of fast-tracking the visa workers who are now on the waiting list say that eliminating the per country cap is "number neutral" and will not increase the number of green cards awarded nor increase the cap on guestworkers. This is true, but because it gives visa workers a no-strings work permit that is not linked to a Department of Labor-approved work arrangement and specific employer, these workers will no longer be considered part of the numerically limited H-1B program, and those visa numbers will be available to employers to bring in new visa workers from abroad. In addition, the "early filing" work permits will undoubtedly attract significantly more applicants from abroad to come in on other temporary statuses that formerly offered no easy path to a green card. So while there might not be more green cards issued, there definitely will be more foreign workers in de facto residency.
Read the complete analysis of the new provisions: https://cis.org/Vaughan/Senate-S386-HR1044-Country-Cap#update
Archived articles on S386: https://cis.org/Archive-Senate-Action-Big-Tech-Green-Card-Bill-S386
Fact Sheet on House companion bill HR1044: https://cis.org/Vaughan/Fact-Sheet-HR-1044-Fairness-High-Skilled-Immigrants-Act
Some of the flaws of the Durbin-Lee bill: - does not include reforms to ensure that visa workers are highly skilled or highly paid;
- everyone with a qualifying job offer gets to stay with a renewable work permit;
- does not explicitly prevent employers from replacing US workers with visa workers;
- does not tighten the skills or occupational or educational standards for visas;
- does not increase the total number of green cards;
- increases the number of "temporary" visa workers who expect to stay; and
- encourages more employers to lower their labor costs by hiring foreign workers who gain access to the labor market by obtaining a temporary visa.
This bill would dramatically change our employment green card distribution system by eliminating a safeguard that prevents green card numbers from being monopolized by citizens of one or two countries. Known as the "per country cap," this provision ensures that the employment-based visas are available to a truly global pool of talent in a wide variety of occupational sectors. It should not be scrapped; eliminating it would benefit one industry (Big Tech) and two groups of applicants (Indian tech workers and Chinese investors) and squeeze out all others.
Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, writes, "This bill is anything but fair to U.S. workers, because it strengthens and perpetuates a system that is actively displacing them. It offers a major concession to employers who have bypassed U.S. workers for decades, without reforming the system to reduce guestworker admissions or prevent employers from replacing U.S. workers."
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