Brushing aside Republican objections, President Barack Obama has unveiled America’s most sweeping immigration overhaul in decades, enabling nearly 5 million illegal immigrants to escape deportation and improving the turf for foreign techies and students with advanced degrees from American universities.
Under a series of executive actions that Obama announced on Thursday night, spouses of H-1B visa holders, predominantly from India, will for the first time be allowed to work in the United States. Indian techies roughly account for about half of the 65,000 H-1B visas handed out annually.
In another area of interest to Indians, Obama has signalled expanded opportunities for foreign students pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programmes in American universities. While China leads foreign students’ enrolment in these universities, it is Indian students who top the STEM stream.
“I will make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders have proposed,” President Obama said in his prime-time address to the nation.
But Republicans, livid with Obama’s unilateral push bypassing US Congress, have threatened to throw a spanner in the works. Terming his action “unconstitutional”, the party is mulling its retaliatory response, wrestling with suggestions ranging from defunding the immigration programme to enforcing a Government shutdown.
Obama sought to make a persuasive case in defence of his decision to protect about 5 million illegal immigrants from the prospect of deportation, initially for a period of three years.
“Mass deportation would be both impossible and contrary to our character,” he said, arguing the push for deportation should focus on “felons, not families”, “criminals, not children” and “gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids”.
Rejecting the Republican charge that he was providing “amnesty” to people who broke the country’s immigration laws, he appealed for compassion, telling fellow-Americans that they, too, were strangers once.
“Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like or what our last names are, or how we worship,” Obama commented.
As Obama announced the plan of action in his televised address, supporters, largely from the Hispanic community that will mostly benefit from the deportation bar, rejoiced outside the White House. Waving American flags, they carried signs that read, “Gracias, Presidente Obama.”
The Obama plan will begin implementation from next spring, when the federal Government will begin accepting applications from illegal immigrants who seek what is officially called “deferred action” (of deportation). Those who qualify will be granted protection for three years, to start with.
Under the plan, undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US for more than five years and are parents of US citizens or lawful Permanent Residents (lPR) will be considered. Only those registering and passing criminal and national security background checks will be given approval.
As part of the action to streamline legal immigration to boost our economy, the Obama plan includes a provision for “portable work authorization for high-skilled workers awaiting lPR status and their spouses”. Right now, employees with approved lPR applications often wait many years for their visa to become available.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will make “regulatory changes to allow these workers to move or change jobs more easily”. The DHS is said to be “finalizing new rules to give certain H-1B spouses employment authorization as long as the H-1B spouse has an approved lPR application”.
As for Indian and other foreign students pursuing STEM courses in US universities, the fact sheet says the DHS will “propose changes to expand and extend the use of the existing Optional Practical Training (OPT) program and require stronger ties between OPT students and their colleges and universities following graduation”.
It also speaks of expanded immigration options for foreign entrepreneurs who meet certain criteria for creating jobs, attracting investment and generating revenue in the US.