Legislation removing “Country Caps” could still become law

UNITED STATES – Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Had it been passed into law in 2017, H.R.392, also known as the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2017, would have changed how green cards for highly skilled workers are divided up. Instead, the legislation remains in limbo.

The bill was written to eliminate “country caps,” restrictions on the number of people from a given country allowed to move from a skilled worker visa to a green card, and would not have in any way limited the total number of green cards distributed.

One side-effect of the country caps—currently set at seven percent of applicants per country—is systemic bias toward smaller countries with fewer people eager to immigrate to the United States. For larger countries, especially India and China, the policy creates huge bottlenecks. There are currently over 300,000 people from India and over 65,000 people from China in line for these green cards according to Politico. As a standalone bill, H.R.392 had strong congressional support. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sponsored it along with a massive coalition of 326 allies spread across both sides of the aisle.

People from India come to the United States on high-skilled work visas (specifically H-1Bs) in higher volumes than people from any other country. How long these Indian workers actually have to wait for green cards seems to depend on who is doing the calculation, but the Cato Institute estimates that some workers’ turns won’t come for up to 150 years.

In a phone interview with OpenSecrets, Aman Kapoor, a co-founder of Immigration Voice, said that was unacceptable. Immigration Voice is a nonprofit in favor of eliminating country-caps.

“Imagine somebody who is already here in a backlog for fifteen years,” Kapoor said. “Then imagine a man and a woman in Malaysia who have not even met yet. One day they will meet, one day they will get married, one day there will be a child then that child will go to primary school, high school, then go to college. And then imagine somehow a U.S. employer wants to hire that child … That child, who is not even born yet, will get a green card before somebody who is already in the country for fifteen years.”

According to Kapoor, the Indian backlog problem is self-sustaining. People with H-1B status can’t switch jobs for fear of losing their place in line, so some employers seek out Indian candidates to take advantage of their H-1B status and their hopes of receiving a green card. Companies can hire them at entry-level salaries and keep them for a cheap and consistent price, even as they accrue on-the-job experience that might make them more valuable employees. Because their green card applications are attached to their job title, Indian workers can be stuck in the same position for years or decades, unable to accept a pay raise or promotion without starting the whole process over.

Immigration Voice spent $15,000 for lobbying in favor of H.R.392 in 2017. The entirety of that lobbying budget was paid to a firm called TwinLogic Strategies. Three of the four lobbyists working for TwinLogic on behalf of Immigration Voice were classified as “revolving door” lobbyists, high-ranking Washington officials who take politically-oriented jobs in the private sector. Among TwinLogic’s most lucrative clients in 2018 are Pandora Media and Consumer Technology Assn, who have retained them for $160,000 each. Amazon and Intel Corp. have both retained them for $100,000, and Dell Technologies has retained them for $40,000.

A significant portion of the lobbying done in favor of H.R.392 was bankrolled by tech companies. Over 100 lobbyists worked on the original H.R.392 bill, representing companies like Microsoft, Texas Instruments, IBM, Amazon and Bangalore-based tech-giant Infosys LTD. Jason Chaffetz, who sponsored H.R.392 before Yoder, also counted companies like Amazon.com, Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft as top contributors.

The Republican Hindu Coalition also supports the legislation. In 2016, the RHC clocked $248,901 in independent expenditures in support of Donald Trump.

More recently, the legislation formerly known as H.R.392 has mutated into an amendment attached to a spending bill, H.R.6776, or the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act for 2019. That bill is sponsored by Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS). Yoder is a member of the House Appropriations Committee and a class of 2010 Tea Party member. He has supported Trump on immigration issues.

Kevin Lynn of U.S. Tech Workers, a group critical of some H-1B-related policies, is concerned about one group dominating the stream of green card recipients. Lynn thinks the removal of country-caps could cause the majority of employment-based green cards to go to people from India for the next decade. He fears this could result in wage-suppression and job loss for American tech workers. In an interview with OpenSecrets, Lynn suggested eliminating this path to permanent residency altogether.

“The best way to engineer a fix to this is just to say the H-1B visa is just an employment visa and not an immigration visa or a dual intent visa,” Lynn said. “Change that and we end the backlog overnight.”

Other opponents of the legislation formerly known as H.R.392 say it will make getting green cards significantly more difficult for people from smaller, high-demand countries, especially when there are pre-existing political challenges. The National Iranian American Council worries that making wait-times longer for people from Iran when they are already facing pressure from the Trump administration’s travel ban could create an especially difficult situation.

“I certainly think the groups that are advancing this legislation can readily point to an unfair immigration system and really long wait times,” NIAC’s policy director Ryan Costello told OpenSecrets in a phone interview. “I don’t think we have a problem with addressing those. [The] problem with this bill in particular is that it addresses this in a very narrow way and shifts the wait times onto the other groups.”

It is still entirely possible that Yoder may fail to pass a version of the spending bill with the amendment eliminating country-caps still attached. However, when this legislation was a bill of its own, it had over 300 co-sponsors and more than 100 associated lobbyists. And although H.R.392 has taken a new form, there is still significant political and corporate interest in making it law. If its advocates are successful, they could change the demographics of legal immigration indefinitely.