Employment-Based Immigration Reform

IEEE-USA Proposes Employment-Based Immigration Reform Legislation

Building on over a decade of advocacy on the subject, IEEE-USA has developed model legislation reforming America’s high-skill immigration system. The legislation emphasizes citizenship for skilled workers, rather than continued reliance on temporary visas.

The system the United States uses for admitting immigrants based on their skills and education is broken. It can take more than a decade for many immigrants to complete the process and become full American citizens. While they wait, the current system encourages the mistreatment of workers, depressing their salaries and those of their American colleagues. Worse, the current system weakens America’s high-tech sector by pushing high-wage/high value-added jobs overseas and preventing many workers from ever contributing their potential to our economy.

In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, the United States can and must do better.

IEEE-USA wants Congress to fix the system by making it easier for talented, foreign-born engineers and other STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) professionals to earn green cards, the crucial first step towards citizenship. This reform should drastically reduce the need for temporary visas by allowing most qualified immigrants to jump directly from student visas to legal permanent residency status (green cards), skipping the temporary visas entirely.

Unlike workers on temporary visas, workers with green cards can change jobs, negotiate fair wages and start their own businesses just like American workers. By changing their visa status, Congress will allow these talented, innovative and entrepreneurial people to fully participate in, and contribute to, the American economy.

A copy of the proposed bill can be found at www.ieeeusa.org/policy/issues/Immigration/Immigration-Model-Bill.pdf.

IEEE-USA's model bill will:

• Increase the availability of EB visas by:
  • Exempting dependents from the visa cap
  • Exempting students who earn master’s or Ph.D.s in STEM fields from American universities from the visa cap
  • Loosening country cap restrictions for the visas
  • Recapturing unused visas from past years
• Reform the student and exchange visitor visa programs to make them easier to use
• Reform the H-1B and L visa programs to protect workers, both American and foreign
• Remove immigration issues from future trade negotiations

IEEE-USA will use the model bill to influence high-skill admission provisions in broader immigration reform bills currently being drafted by Congress.

For more information about this bill, or about IEEE-USA’s immigration reform efforts, please contact IEEE-USA staffer Vin O’Neill at v.oneill@ieee.org.

Updated:  18 May 2010
Contact:  IEEE-USA GR Webmaster