How Immigration Reform Can Help the Economy

Maybe I should title this post as “How Immigration Laws are Helping Destroy the Economy” because that is what is happening. Americans don’t have jobs. Employment based immigrants who are here legally have jobs. Many of these people would like to leave their jobs to start businesses or to work for smaller companies. After all small business is what makes America America.

Unfortunately for most of these immigrants, the process of immigration is worse than it is for illegal immigrants. With the long lines and retrogression for Indians and Chinese it is often taking ten years for people to get Green cards. Take the current processing dates from the Visa Bulletin:

What this means is that if you are from India, EB2 (these are people who are working in jobs that require Masters Degrees or higher or significant experience) then they are currently processing applications that are filed on or before 15-Feb 2004. About five years ago.

The worst hit here are Indians in the EB3 category (there are people with jobs requiring Bachelors degrees or higher). USCIS is processing cases filed before 01-NOV 2001. That is about eight years ago.

The date is a cutoff date and it means that you cannot even file for your last stage of immigration if you started after that date

Chinese also face the same problem but not as severly

It takes about two to three years to get to the point where you can file your application. So people have been waiting for 7 – 10 years currently. Also since Oct 2005, the problem has been getting worse each year. This means that most people cannot switch jobs (not even move to different departments in the same company) without restarting all over.

In my other blog, I’ve mentioned several Bills that can help this issue, one would be lifting country the county cap on Employment based immigration. Another is allowing people to file for all stages of their immigration even if the dates are not current.

This would have a significant impact on the American Economy because

1. These highly qualified individuals would switch jobs, get promoted etc. making room for more jobs to open up. Currently many of these people are stuck in jobs that they are overqualified for because they are afraid to switch jobs and often even afraid to get promoted.
2. Many of these people have the desire to start their own businesses or join small buinesses. USCIS is notorious for rejecting immigration applications from small businesses and you are not permitted to work on your own buiness in US without significant issues with Visas.
3. A lot more immigrants would buy houses. I know from constantly hanging out in forums that many immigrants will not risk buying a house until they have a green card because they might be sent home at any time if their company goes bust, they are unemployed for few months or for some other reason because dealing with immigration is such a pain

Inspite of the fact that America is the land of Immigrants, the current state of people who wish to come here legally and are contributing to the economy (spending, taxes etc.) is worse than that of illegal immigrants and their issues are mostly ignored.

It is a common joke amongst us legal immigrants that our American born children will grow to be 21 and sponsor our green cards before we get our own if this trend continues.