Immigration attorneys examine the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019 and say while its well-intentioned in aiming to resolve a backlog of employment-based green cards for citizens of China and India, it in fact hurts all immigrants and Silicon Valley.
On July 10, the House quietly passed H.R. 1044, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019, a well-intentioned piece of bipartisan legislation aimed at resolving a legitimate problem: a decades-long backlog in the issuance of employment-based green cards for citizens of China and India.
Backed by the Silicon Valley lobby, the bill proposes to lift the existing 7% per-country caps on green card issuance. While this may seem, at first blush, like a reasonable solution, the actual result of the legislation would be to create multi-year backlogs for nationals of other countries, limiting most employment-based immigration for several years primarily to nationals of India and China.
This could, in effect, cripple our current employment-based immigration system and it would be done not by President Donald Trump or Stephen Miller, but by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats.
