AILA Blog

Why Don’t You Just Come Legally–The Visa Mess

5/8/09

Okay, we all know there are no visas available until October 1, 2009 for any third preference employments immigrant. It stinks. It makes no sense in how we grow the economy and bring in “legal” workers. And, we know there is a 5-9 year wait in this category.

We know that there are between 8-50 year waits for the assortment of family based immigrant visas (do the math for Mexican Brothers and Sisters–its not pretty). But we resign ourselves to fixing this disastrous, undocumented immigration causing problem as part of CIR.

But, in today’s Visa Bulletin we get this terrific surprise. India EB-2 has retrogressed to January 2000!

What the Heck? You mean if I am from India, and I have an ADVANCED DEGREE, and my work is in the NATIONAL INTEREST, that I have to wait 9 YEARS before I can even apply for permanent residence? No wonder these advanced degree, economy growing, job creating immigrants are deciding to go home. Vivek Wadwha, whom AILA is honoring with its Media Leadership Award at our Annual Conference, published an excellent study on the Brain Drain FROM the U.S. Foreign students who study and graduate from here with Master’s Degree and Ph.Ds are going back home to India. This is not good for America. This is not good for job creation, this is not good for our economy.

by Charles Kuck