On your way to a Green Card: US bill may open doors for the high-skill Indian

Highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs from India, China, and elsewhere around the globe should find it easier to obtain residency in the US if new legislation introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday comes into force.

The Immigration Driving Entrepreneurship In America Act of 2011 ( IDEA Act ), sponsored by California Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren, is an attempt to address the tricky policy tension between protecting American jobs during economic recovery while embracing foreign skilled workers in a globalised business landscape.

“For generations, immigrants have flocked to our shores to build their dreams, and in turn they have grown our economy and provided hundreds of thousands of jobs to their fellow Americans,” Lofgren said in a statement. “Companies like Intel, Google, News Corp, Yahoo, and eBay were founded by innovative immigrants and now employ tens of thousands of people. … Immigration has historically made our economy stronger. My bill embraces that history and encourages the world’s thinkers and doers to join us.”

[caption id=“attachment_25824” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The comprehensive immigration reform bill introduced by US Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren could open the doors for many more skilled migrants from India and China to make it to the US. Getty Images”] [/caption]

The bill addresses a number of policy issues related to so-called skills-based immigration, and it borrows concepts from existing legislation such as the STAPLE Act (which would provide automatic green cards for permanent residency to some foreign born students) and the Start Up Visa Act (which would offer visas to promising entrepreneurs).

As currently proposed, the IDEA Act would:

• Create a new EB-1 green card category for foreign-born students who receive an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) from a top US university. EB-1 holders would be exempt from the 140,000 annual green card cap.

• Provide green cards for entrepreneurs who can show they have secured significant financing from investors, or who can demonstrate that their existing business creates jobs for US workers. (Some undocumented entrepreneurs would also qualify for this visa.)

• Ease the green card backlog by, among other things, doing away with per-country limits to the green cards that are issued.

• Impose a $2,000 fee on companies that file petitions for employment-based green cards; these funds would be directed toward STEM education and training for US students. (Some undocumented students would also be allowed to remain in the country.)

• Streamline US Department of Labour processes, and require, among other things, that 80% of a US-based company’s stateside employees and new hires are American workers.

• Amend the current wage standards (known as the “prevailing wage” system) from a four-tiered pay scheme to three tiers, thereby eliminating the lowest wage category. According to the bill, this will “prevent employers from using foreign workers to undercut US workers.”

• Reform the H-1B visa programme with the aim of protecting US jobs by, among other things, awarding visas to the highest paying companies first, and requiring firms to recruit US workers before looking abroad.

• Provide increased flexibility for H-1B visa holders by allowing them to accept promotions without risking their visa status, permit their spouses to obtain work permits. Visa holders would also receive a 60-day grace period from deportation if they are laid off or fired by their sponsoring employer.

Supporters of the bill include companies and organisations such as Microsoft, Intel, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Semiconductor Industry Association.

“The IDEA Act would not only make it easier for U.S. companies to hire the workforce they need but will address the concerns of foreign-born workers who must deal with the challenges and uncertainties of the immigration system,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement.

For Microsoft, the bill would “modernise the employment-based green card system to streamline permanent residence for well educated, highly skilled professionals so that they can continue to drive ideas into innovations in order to create jobs in the U.S. as opposed to other countries,” according to a statement emailed to Firstpost. “Making educated professionals and their employers wait through a green card backlog that can last a decade, as they must today, is self-defeating and not in the long-term interests of our country.”

The pros and cons

But for Norm Matloff, a UC Davis computer science professor who is a long-time critic of the H-1B visa program, the IDEA Act is no panacea.

“No bill by Zoe Lofgren will address my concerns,” he said. “She’s a very nice person, but it’s clear where her loyalties lie, and that is with the employers and not with the workers.”

Matloff takes issue with various aspects of the skilled-labour immigration policy, but he is especially concerned with the potential for companies to hire foreign-born workers at depressed wages using loopholes under the current workplace visa program.

He said he is “glad to see” that the bill takes aim at this problem by requiring H-1B visas to go to the highest paying employers first. But he finds the provision that creates a three-tiered prevailing wage scheme lacking, and argued that salaries should be based on the overall wage median of a profession.

He is also especially opposed to awarding green cards to some foreign-born students. “It’s not justified,” he said. “I’m about to come out with an article on that very point, refuting the notion that foreign students are somehow all geniuses. They’re the same as Americans in nearly every statistical way.”

Meanwhile, Vivek Wadhwa, an immigration and entrepreneurship scholar with Duke, Harvard and UC Berkeley, said he is “very enthusiastic” about the Lofgren legislation. “The bill is very comprehensive,” he said. “It is tackling some of the biggest issues head on, and coming up with good solutions.”

Wadhwa is particularly pleased with the portion of the bill that alleviates the backlog for green card holders. “There are hundreds of thousands of Indians and Chinese waiting for green cards,” he noted.

He said his one quibble with the IDEA Act was that it does not make it easy enough for innovators to remain in the country. Still, because he believes the Lofgren bill addresses a number of fundamental issues, he is throwing his weight behind the legislation. “You win some, you lose some,” he said.

But given that immigration is such a hot-button topic, he’s not expecting any policy miracles. “It’s great what Lofgren is doing,” he said. “It’s comprehensive. I’m not optimistic it will pass, but in politics, you never know. It’s a Hail Mary pass.”