News Update - May 16, 2007Senate Negotiations Continuing On Comprehensive Immigration Reform BillFrom gleaned information which is emerging from the closed door negotiations between Democratic and Republican senators, the test vote in the Senate on Immigration Reform is being put off until Monday, May 21st. This is to allow negotiators additional time to agree on a compromise bill and to ward off the threat of a Republican filibuster. Contentious debate includes whether guest workers will be able to establish residence status, and the fate of the families of undocumented workers who will gain legal status. In the negotiations, fines for the undocumented to legalize status will be cut in half; it will take 8-13 years for undocumented workers to obtain permanent residence; border security measures will take top priority in the first 18 months after enactment; the current quota system will be replaced by a merit system making it harder to bring in siblings and adult children, and parents are to be capped at 40,000 entries per year, less than half the number of entries today; a new "Y" guest worker program will allow 400,000 entries per year for two-three years with the workers going back at the end of that time; and the number of green cards that Congress is prepared to have issued annually is up in the air. Senator Kyl (R-AZ) is opposed to any new "Y" guest worker being allowed to establish residence and the questions are whether a guest worker will be allowed to apply for a second tour of the "Y" visa and whether he/she can earn points towards a green card. The current proposal does not allow families of undocumented workers to join them in the States after the worker obtain “Z” visas. Extra green card numbers for the first eight years will concentrate on clearing the backlog of pending applications from people abroad or people here with legal work visas, and after eight years, the extra numbers created to help the backlog are to be shifted to the new merit pool, increasing the numbers for the undocumented to immigrate. Stay tuned. † The author is a 26+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004. ‡ This article © 2007 Alan Lee, Esq.
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