Eight (8) Points from the Senate Immigration Bill
Yesterday, Senators introduced s.744, the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.” Below are eight initial points of interest pulled from the bill’s provisions:
1.) Legalization: Allow noncitizens who are unlawfully present and who entered the US before December 31, 2011 to adjust status to that of Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI). Eligible applicants would be required to pay a penalty and back taxes. RPI’s would receive work authorisation and may travel abroad and would become eligible to apply for LPR status after 10 years and can apply for naturalisation 3 years after acquiring a green card.
2.) Family Based Immigrants: Move the current FB-2A category into the immediate relative classification, allow for derivatives of immediate relatives, eliminate FB-4 category, cap the age of eligibility of married sons and daughters of US citizens at 31 and bring back the V visa.
3.) Employment Based Immigrants: Exempt the following categories from the quota: EB-1 immigrants, doctoral degree holders, physicians who have completed the foreign residency requirement, and derivatives. Add a new “EB-6” category for certain entrepreneurs.
4.) Temporary Workers: Create a W-1 visa for lesser-skilled workers, a W-2 visa for aliens coming to the U.S. temporarily to perform agricultural services or labor under a written contract, and a W-3 visa for “at-will” workers with an offer of full-time employment in an agricultural occupation. The W-2 and W-3 visas would replace the current H-2A agricultural worker program.
5.) Asylum: Eliminate the one-year filing deadline and authorize asylum officers to grant asylum during credible fear interviews.
6.) E-Verify: Require all employers to be on the system after 5 years.
7.) H-1Bs: Increase the quota to a floor of 110,000 and a ceiling of 180,000, increase the U.S. advanced degree exemption to 25,000 but limit it to STEM graduates, add a recruitment requirement for all H-1B labor condition applications involving a detailed posting on an Internet site designed by the Labor Department, add a non-displacement attestation, change the prevailing wage formula, provide EADs for spouses, and add a 60-day grace period after an H-1B has been terminated from his/her job.
8.) Fraud: Make it a crime to knowingly defraud an immigrant or hold oneself out as an attorney or BIA accredited representative when one is not authorized to do so. Require the identification of individuals who assist immigrants with the completion of forms and empower the Attorney General with injunctive authority to act against an unscrupulous “immigration service provider” at the federal level.
Interested parties may read the complete Act by accessing the following link: http://www.aila.org/content/fileviewer.aspx?docid=44069&linkid=260326&utm_source=AILA+Mailing&utm_campaign=fbd53d9470-AILA8_4_17B_13&utm_medium=email.
