The Senate Judiciary Committee spent several days last week discussing the almost 300 amendments proposed by committee members. Many of the more anti-business and anti-H-1b amendments proposed by Sens. Grassley and Durbin were defeated however, several measures did pass. TechServe Alliance has posted a brief summary. Advocacy, education, and lobbying continues to be needed to protect the utilization of H-1b visas by staffing and consulting firms.

In a report released earlier this week, the NFAP claimed that the Senate’s proposals to restrict the usage of H-1b’s were not based on sound evidence and represented poor economic policy. This report was issued before Sen. Grassley and others introduced amendments which would create even further restrictions on the H-1b. Whether or not the Senate will allow uncontroverted facts and sound economic policy to get in the way of imposing restrictionist policies is yet to be seen.

Senators on the Judiciary Committee have proposed almost 300 amendments to the Senate CIR bill. Many of these amendments would have disastrous effects on IT staffing cos.  Senator Grassley, a long-time opponent of the H-1b program and its use by IT staffing cos. proposed 77 himself.   A listing of the amendments can be found here at ILW.com.

The Senate has released the text of the proposed CIR bill. It is a mere 844 pages long but, in general I would say 4 things: 1. Forget everything you read in prior summaries 2. The business community will like most of it and can live with all of it 3.  International workers will like it but, not love it and 4. It is a long way from being signed into law.  We will provide a summary of key sections as soon as we are able to read and digest it.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) today released an outline of the Senate CIR proposal. The actual text of the bill has not yet been released but, is expected to be released this week. The outline shows significant changes to the employment based permanent residency system including  measures that will help to reduce retrogression. The proposal also includes significant restrictions on employers deemed to be dependent upon H-1b workers and also added a labor market test to all H-1b filings. After the text of the bill is released, we will provide a summary.

On Friday, the USCIS announced that it had received enough H-1b cap petitions in the first 5 days of filing to exceed both the Master’s cap and the regular cap thereby creating the need for a lottery. It will likely be several weeks before anxious employers and potential H-1b beneficiaries find out if they have been chosen for processing. Although the cap being hit this early should spur Congressional action, early word out of Washington is that the Senate gang of 8 is considering significant restrictions on the H-1b program.  No reason to let economic realities get in the way of politics.

The DHS recently released a report which provided statistics on the characteristics of persons who obtained permanent resident status in FY2012. these statistics highlight the need for the reform of our legal immigration quota system. Only 4% of persons who became permanent residents had advanced degrees and only 12% came under the employment based categories EB1, EB2, or EB3.

Both IT and health care staffing companies  have traditionally been major users of H-1b visas.  Due to the recent prediction by the USCIS of the H-1b quota for FY 2014 likely being reached in the first week of filing,  many staffing companies are concerned that the artificial restrictions being placed on hiring of the best candidates possible will harm their growth in 2013.  Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), a leading professional association for companies employing or using contingent workers, recently published on this topic. One of our partners, Mike Hammond was quoted in the article.

Over the past week, several groups have expressed public support for improvements in our legal immigration system and have touted the benefits of increased legal immigration. These include a wide range of advocates including: NYC Mayor Bloomberg teaming with Silicon Valley leaders,  a group of Midwestern business leaders, and a conservative Republican group. We remain hopeful that relief for legal immigrants will not be overlooked.

A few weeks ago, Charlie Oppenheim, from the Visa Office at the Department of State met with several AILA representatives including super lawyer and friend Michael Nowlan and discussed visa demand, retrogression, and priority date movement for the balance of FY 2013.  In summary, it was a somber meeting with lots of bad news for those of you hoping for quicker priority date movement. The predictions provided were summarized and published in the March Visa Bulletin. In addition, there were several items of interest I wanted to share:

-The India EB2 cutoff date continues to see very little forward movement due to upgrades (EB3 to EB2 while maintaining the earlier priority date). In December 2012 alone, India EB2 had 125 cases approved that were from 2003 or earlier. 

- USCIS does not appear to be working to develop any processes or procedures to better capture upgrade EB cases, and so there is no better information expected from that agency to assist Mr. Oppenheim’s office in better managing these numbers. Upgrades are impacting other categories as well. Worldwide EB3 had 1,100 upgrades in December 2012 alone for cases which had priority dates of 2011 or earlier. In 2007 for example, there were only 72 upgrades for the year.

-EB1 India and China appear to have used their numbers for this year, but the rest of open EB1 numbers can “fall across” to satisfy the need from India and China for EB1, so no retrogression is expected at this time.

-Current numbers indicate that there are approximately 42,000 India EB2 cases in line with priority dates prior to May 2010. There are 12,000 India EB3 cases with priority dates before January 2004. India EB3 has 44,000 cases with priority dates before August 2007

-For 2012, 45% of the visa numbers in the queue are for the principal applicants, and 55% are for dependents.

The need for immigration reform which addresses the long waits for legal immigrants is sorely needed.