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The Politics of Immigration

By Annie Banerjee

The issue of Immigration has broad bi partisan support. But at loggerheads are two issues, business immigration and granting status to illegal immigrants. Business immigration laws restrict the number of immigrants that can come in for instance on the H-1B visa (professional visa) and employment based green cards. Tech companies like google and Microsoft are severely affected. This year google received more than 1 million application for jobs . They filed only 300 H-1B visas. 90 of those visas did not get accepted. Google has the reputation of being one of the best employers and hire the very best. In fact one of google founders, Sergey Brin, is an immigrant.

Responding to complaints by Google and Microsoft, both the house and senate has bills to increase the H-1B quotas and exclude people in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) from the quota.

But such bills are often not passed, and tend to be rejected by those law makers who believe that there is more pressing need to legalize illegal immigrants rather than do something about business immigration. Comprehensive immigration is great, but almost impossible to pass in this divided congress. Yet the champions of legalizing illegal immigrants often do not want to pass immigration reform to grant businesses more professional immigrants. Ultimately, what those Senators and Congressmen and women fail to see is that Immigration benefits us, no matter what type it is. Restricting professional immigrants just results in those professional jobs being outsources to other countries, and the US loosing its foothold in the world.

Full post as published by US Immigration Matters on June 08, 2008 (boomark / email).