Yet another immigration Bill has been introduced in the US Senate and this one proposes to cut legal immigration by a whopping 50 per cent with the stated aim of protecting American workers and wage levels.
While three other recently-introduced Bills aim to tighten H-1B work visas used predominantly by Indian IT firms and software professionals, the new Bill seeks to slash green cards from the present average of one million a year to 5,00,000.
Sponsored by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, the new Bill, called “Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act”, aims to reduce overall immigration by half and rebalance the system towards employment-based visas and immediate family household members.
The new legislation specifically targets family-based chain migration under which the US has been giving preferential treatment to immigration applications from relatives of American citizens and legal permanent residents. This system is thought to have given rise to a massive influx of low-skilled labour over the years, leading to a downward pressure on the wages of working Americans.
A rising Republican star, Cotton indicated that he has been in “close contact” with President Donald Trump’s team on this issue, saying: “He (Trump) strongly supports the broad concept of moving legal immigration towards a merit-based system.”
Asked if he would support expansion of H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, Cotton told reporters, “There are obviously abuses of the H-1B visa program. I think those abuses need to be addressed before we even consider expanding the programme.”
“That said, if the evidence demonstrates that say, software companies need PhDs with computer science degrees and they’re going to pay them a wage that’s in the top 1, top 5, top 10 percent of local wages, I’m open to that kind of evidence,” he added.
The RAISE Act, while retaining immigration preferences for spouses and minor children of US citizens and legal permanent residents, seeks to eliminate preferences for the extended and adult family members, including adult parents, adult siblings and adult children.
For US citizens who wish to bring elderly parents in need of caretaking to the US, the Bill moots “a renewable temporary visa on the condition that the parents are not permitted to work, cannot access public benefits and must be guaranteed support and health insurance by their sponsoring children”.
The new legislation also eliminates the “Diversity Visa lottery” under which 50,000 visas are handed out annually to citizens of countries that traditionally have low rates of immigration to the US. Cotton and Perdue feel this visa lottery is plagued by fraud and does not advance any economic or humanitarian interest.
“We are taking action to fix some of the shortcomings in our legal immigration system — returning to our historically normal levels of legal immigration will help improve the quality of American jobs and wages,” Senator Perdue said, calling it a first, rational step.