July 15, 2019

BELIEVE Act (S.2091)

H.R. 1044

BELIEVE Act Raises EB Immigration

EB Green Cards

BELIEVE Act Needs Your Support -
The Right Way to Reform Immigration

On July 11, 2019, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) introduced the BELIEVE Act (S. 2091) as a way to reform legal immigration to the United States. The Believe Act would abolish per-country quotas for employment-based immigration similar to H.R. 1044 which was passed by the House of Representatives on July 10, but would not result in a 7+ year wait in the Worldwide EB-3 category.

For the past few years, professionals born in India have been subject to decades-long waits to get green cards. This is because U.S. immigration laws unwisely impose a 7% per-country cap on the number of persons born in a particular country who can qualify for green cards under the employment-based and the family-based categories. However, since the H-1B and other temporary worker categories have no per-country limits, the number of professionals born in India with temporary work visas numbers is in the hundreds of thousands.

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Only a little over 80,000 professionals and their spouses and children can qualify for green cards in the EB-2 and EB-3 categories annually. As a result of the per-country caps, no more than 5,600 (7%) persons from a single country can get green cards in these 2 categories each year. But there are now over 550,000 persons born in India who are waiting in line for green cards under the EB-2 and EB-3 categories.

The bottom line is that the wait to get a green card through employment for person born in India is not years, but decades! This is crazy and needs to be changed asap!

In July, the House of Representatives passed the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (H.R. 1044) which would eliminate per-country caps for EB immigrants and raise them from 7% to 15% for family-based immigrants. Unfortunately, the House of Representatives never had a single hearing on the bill before it passed. If they had, a basic flaw in the legislation may have been uncovered prior to the vote.

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