News Update - June 28, 2007

By Alan Lee, Esq.

S. 1639 Falls - What's Next?

In Senate voting this morning, the bid to invoke cloture to limit debate on the remaining amendments to the comprehensive immigration reform legislation, S. 1639, failed by a vote of 46-53, and the bill was withdrawn. Further words will undoubtedly be spoken by leaders of both political parties, and a great amount of finger-pointing and blame will be done. However, unless this bill soon again miraculously arises from the dead like Lazarus, comprehensive immigration reform will be tremendously difficult to revive until after the elections in 2008.

If quick resuscitation efforts fail, massive efforts should be made towards convincing legislators to take largely non-controversial parts of the legislation, e.g.-AgJobs and the DREAM Act, and pass them separately. In addition, business organizations and others should press Congress anew to expand the H-1B cap quota, which turned out to be such a fiasco this year when the entire quota was consumed on the first day.


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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