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Immigration Blog

Green Cards or H1B Visas? That’s the Question Posed at Recent House Hearing

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Should Congress raise the limits on H-1B temporary visas or only for green cards? That was the question at a House immigration subcommittee hearing, held on March 31st. And the question may foreshadow the course of future legislation. Given that typically half of H-1B visa holders were born in India, the issue is of importance to the Indian-American community.

As those who have gone through the immigration process as either an employee or an employer know, the primary difference between an H-1B temporary visa and an employment-based green card is the answer to the query: “How long can you stay?” If you have a green card, you can stay in the United States the rest of your life, so long as you don’t commit a crime that makes you deportable or leave for an extended period of time. And even those exceptions essentially disappear if you become a U.S. citizen.

In contrast, an H-1B visa generally only allows an individual to stay in the U.S. for up to 6 years (renewable after three years), with the only exception being that the immigration service can grant an extension of H-1B status if a green card application is pending.

At the hearing, former Democratic Congressman Bruce Morrison, a Washington, D.C. consultant, represented the IEEE, the electrical engineers professional group. He summarized the difference between green cards and H-1B visas like this: “With ‘green cards’ you do not have to write endless rules regarding portability and prevailing wages. The job market sorts all this out. Employers keep their workers by providing an attractive employment opportunity. Employees keep their working conditions up by having options. That is the better way to attract and keep foreign-born talent without adversely affecting American workers or exploiting the foreign born.”

Morrison added, “In short, there are no problems for which green cards are not a better solution than temporary visas. And there are no problems with the H-1B program itself that a system built on green cards will not help to fix.”

There is considerable debate about the extent to which H-1B temporary visas results in either harm for American workers or exploitation of foreign workers. However, at the hearing, the tone was considerably negative among both members and witnesses toward H-1B visas, while generally positive toward increasing the number of green cards for highly skilled foreign nationals. The only defender of H-1B visas was Bo Cooper, former general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and now a partner at the law firm of Berry, Appleman and Leiden LLP.

Cooper noted that given the long waits for employment-based green cards due to years of backlogs and the long processing delays even when a number is current, it may never be wholly realistic to have a U.S. immigration policy that relies solely on green cards and eschews H-1B temporary visas. For example, in addition to the need to bring individuals into the country on projects or shorter-term assignments, it can take several months, in some cases years, to complete the highly bureaucratic labor certification process for employment-based green cards with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Cooper testified, “The H-1B is often the only way to get highly skilled foreign professionals on the job quickly, when the economy needs them. The H-1B is often the only way to bring in a person with pinpointed skills to perform a crucial temporary assignment. And it is overwhelmingly the only way to bring bright foreign talent across the bridge to permanent residence, and a permanent role as contributors to the U.S. economy.”

It remains unclear whether Congress will pursue legislation that includes more green cards, more restrictions on H-1B visas, or a combination of the two. The bottom line is that the debate on this issue is not over. It really has just begun.

Immigration Blog

Indian-Americans and the DREAM Act

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Although Indian-Americans take an active interest in immigration issues, the DREAM Act did not stir the same emotions among Indian-Americans as among other groups. Why?

For those who didn’t follow the spirited debate in the second half of 2010, the DREAM Act would have allowed individuals in the country illegally today to legalize their status and eventually gain a green card if they came here as children and (in the past or future) completed high school, attended college or served in the U.S. military.

The primary argument in favor of the DREAM Act is that children living in the United States illegally because of their parents should not face punishment for the sins of their fathers. Opponents argued the bill amounted to “amnesty” and that Democrats were pushing the bill for political purposes.

In the end, in December 2010, the bill failed to gain the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate. In a mostly party line vote, only three Republicans voted in favor of the bill and only 5 Democrats opposed the legislation. We don’t know the fate of the DREAM Act in this Congressional session, although House Republicans are unlikely to move it forward in its most recent reform.

Rep. Elton Gallegly, a California Republican, and the chair of the House Immigration Policy and Enforcement, wrote in a letter to the New York Times (February 25, 2011), “I am sympathetic to illegal immigrant children like Isabel Castillo who were brought here by their parents. Because their parents disregarded America’s immigration laws, they are in a difficult position. But by granting citizenship, the United States would actually reward their illegal immigrant parents, who knowingly violated our laws. It would perpetuate the problem the bill claims to solve . . . Once they become citizens, illegal immigrants could petition for their parents to be legalized; the parents could then bring in others in an endless chain.”

Immigration attorney Greg Siskind responded on his blog (December 9, 2010) to this often-made argument: “ One of the bigger myths floating around regarding DREAM is that it will lead to chain migration. The thought is that DREAMers will get citizenship and then quickly sponsor their parents for green cards. Not quite. DREAM Act recipients must wait ten years in a non-immigrant conditional status to apply for a green card. The adjustment of status will probably take a year or so to get and then a person must wait three more years for citizenship (which could take a year to get). So we’re talking about 15 years to citizenship in all likelihood. Then they FILE for green cards for their parents. But because the parents are very likely subject to reentry bars, they’ll then have to exit the country and wait TEN years before they are allowed to step foot in the U.S. with permanent residency.”

During the House floor debate on the DREAM Act, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) estimated “it will be 25 years before any person whose status is adjusted under this legislation will be able to petition for the parent that brought that kid here . . . The chain migration argument is another bogus argument, just like the amnesty argument.”

A July 2010 Migration Policy Institute study estimated that 10 percent of the 2.1 million potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act came from Asia. And according to a February 2011 Department of Homeland Security report, approximately 200,000 illegal immigrants from India were residing in the U.S as of January 2010.

However, no reliable data are available on how many potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act are from India. It’s possible there are more Indians in the United States eligible to legalize their status under the DREAM Act than we realize. But until they step forward we may never know.

India-US Relations Blog

Maximum India

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The Kennedy Center’s mega-celebration of Indian culture – an extravaganza dubbed “Maximum India” – is now well underway, with sold-out performances and throngs of people in attendance. The three week long festival is the latest indicator of how decisively American perceptions about the country have changed. Not too long ago, India was regarded as the very epitome of what the term Third World meant – decrepit, destitute and pitiable.  Yet in a relatively short period of time, the popular view of India changed in critical ways. Nowadays, it is broadly viewed as a fast-rising economic and technology powerhouse and home to a vast reservoir of highly-trained brainpower that will inevitably sap the U.S. edge in innovation. When President Obama points to Bangalore as a threat to America’s competitive advantage or invokes India as part of a new “Sputnik moment,” one quickly understands how far we have traveled from yesterday’s stereotypes.

Of course, a segment of U.S. opinion, attracted to Indian cultural traditions and the moral precepts of Mahatma Gandhi, has long held the country in high regard.  But for many decades most Americans were inclined to the views of Harry S. Truman, who dismissed India as “pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges.”  Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had an even more incisive perspective: “by and large [Indians] and their country give me the creeps.”

A decade after Indian independence, Harold Issacs’s classic 1958 survey of U.S. elite opinion, Scratches on Our Minds, revealed that influential Americans held very negative perceptions of the country, associating it with “filth, dirt and disease” along with debased religious beliefs. A State Department analysis prepared in the early 1970s found that U.S. public opinion identified India more than any other nation with such attributes as disease, death and illiteracy, and school textbooks throughout this period regularly portrayed it in a most negative light. This view was again underscored in a 1983 opinion poll, in which Americans ranked India at the bottom of a list of 22 countries on the basis of perceived importance to U.S. vital interests. A generation after Harold Issacs, the 1984 adventure film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom depicted India along essentially the same lines – as a country was filled with hapless, impoverished villagers and benighted religious practices.

Official attitudes in Washington tended to parallel public opinion. U.S. policymakers during the Cold War paid only episodic attention to New Delhi and when they did it was largely a function of the superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union rather a desire to meaningfully engage Indian leaders. The Kennedy administration placed considerable if anomalous emphasis on India, making a massive commitment of economic assistance. But by the end of the Johnson administration, leading Democrats grew fatigued with the country’s seemingly insuperable problems. As Dennis Kux notes in Estranged Democracies, his history of the bilateral relationship, by the late 1960s “India, in Washington’s eyes, had become just a big country full of poor people.” The Nixon administration similarly believed that India was not worthy of heavy engagement. President Nixon himself held denigrating views of Indians, seeing them as supine and indecisive, and regarded Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in an even worse light. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan was U.S. ambassador to India from 1973-75, he regularly lamented that Washington was utterly indifferent to the country’s fate; writing in his diary, he confided that it “is American practice to pay but little attention to India.”  In a cable to the State Department, he complained of dismissive attitudes, “a kind of John Birch Society contempt for the views of raggedly ass people in pajamas on the other side of the world.”

So, what accounts for the significant shift in cultural perceptions that is increasingly registered in government statements – such as, President Obama’s calling India an “emerged” country and an “indispensable partner” – and in high-profile cultural events like the Kennedy Center’s?  An obvious part of the answer lies in the dramatic turnabout in Indian prospects launched by the 1991 economic reforms. Long gone are the days when India was seen as an economic laggard or a marginal factor in global commerce. In a remarkable sign of changing fortunes, the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog in late 2010 convened seven experts for a discussion on which lessons in economic competitiveness the United States could learn from India.  Along similar lines, Fareed Zakaria in Time magazine contrasted a dejected America with an India filled with people “brimming with hope and faith in the future,” while Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times proclaimed that “It’s Morning in India.” And a new Citibank report concludes that India will likely be the world’s largest economic power by 2050.

But a less obvious, though equally important, factor is also at work: The increasing stature of Indians in American society has changed how all Americans think about India. Large-scale Indian migration to the United States did not begin until the late 1960s and though the community remains relatively small – less than one percent of the overall U.S. population – it is one of the country’s fastest-growing ethnic groups. But the community’s growing success has given it an influence and impact wholly disproportionate to its size. As one analyst puts it, “Indians in America are emerging as the new Jews: disproportionately well-educated, well paid, and increasingly well connected politically.”

According to a recent report by the RAND Corporation, Indian-American entrepreneurs have business income that is substantially higher than the national average and higher than any other immigrant group.  High-skill immigrants from India are a significant driving force in U.S. prosperity and innovation, most famously in the information technology industry.  As Vivek Wadhwa and his colleagues document, Indians stand out among immigrant entrepreneurs, having founded from 1995-2005 more U.S.-based engineering and technology companies in the past decade or so than immigrants from the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan and Japan combined.  According to industry estimates, Indians are involved in 40 percent of all start-up ventures in Silicon Valley.  India-born scientific and engineering talent is also an important pillar of the faculties in America’s top universities.

The rising profile of the Indian diaspora has helped change public opinion in relatively short order.  For example, in contrast to the traditional sentiment of disdain or pity, a February 2010 Gallup survey found that two-thirds of Americans now have a positive impression of India, a favorability level equal to that of Israel.  In my next post, I will explore further how this societal factor has contributed to the new era in U.S.-India relations and how policymakers in Washington and New Delhi can capitalize on it.

India-US Relations Blog

K Subramanyam and the Indo-US Relationship

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K Subramanyam

On 2 Feb, K Subramanyam, often referred to as the Bhishma Pitamaha of the Indian Strategic community passed away. During his years of published writing, Subbu’s views and analyses swung from a consistent but measured anti-American stance to one favoring a joint US-India approach on most world strategic issues. This extraordinary u-turn was another measure of the greatness of the man – that in a changed world he was capable of changing his views and his conclusions on Grand Strategy. Many thinkers his age plodded on in their furrows, too inflexible or too frightened to change their outlook and their explanations on how the world conducted its affairs.

In the 1970s, much of what the U.S. did to apparently win the Cold War hurt India, and of course Subbu deeply. A great deal had to do with arming Pakistan, but Subbu was alone, raising a voice in panic alarm in the eighties as he saw Islamabad moving towards a bomb capability , unheeded by his own colleagues. He saw the U.S. as complicit as much as he saw the consequences of Pakistani state irresponsibility, once they had the bomb under their belt. His computer-like mind was never at a loss for precedents, incidents and promises that the U.S. had made, often going back a quarter century, to prove Washington’s unbroken anti-India stance. This cold blooded accuracy won him respect among his American critics because they saw they confronted facts and not sentiment.

All his disapproval changed in a few short years after the end of the Cold War and when the India-US relationship re-began, after both sides acknowledged how bad it had been. When Bush went out of his way to remove India’s technological isolation with the nuclear deal, Subbu saw that it signaled a seminal change in India’s status – a lift for India to help it on its way to a possible great power status. It wasn’t that Subbu had no sentiment; he did- even on behalf of his ungrateful countrymen who thought that lack of gratitude signaled high statesmanship.

Subbu soon pieced the new jig-saw puzzle together. There were many pieces to fit in. One was the Manmohan Singh reforms that jetted India into the 9% growth league and the possibility of greatness. A second was the huge, rich and successful Indian Diaspora who, by denying themselves luxuries, had clawed their way to becoming the richest ethnic community in the US, almost all of them as technological professionals. A third was Cancun, where Subbu saw the outlines of the next technological revolution which the world was demanding – to simultaneously live well, and yet not pollute the Earth. The fourth and final one was that which brought all these pieces smoothly together – The removal of the technological isolation would enable the brilliant Indians in the U.S. to be part of the next alternate energy revolution. The great final pieces of innovation would take place in the US, with India as the research supporting base. The resultant prosperity would halt the U.S. economic decline, and propel India forwards, even possibly past China, with the two democracies joined together in mutual success. What, Subbu would ask, was the alternative to the Democracies deciding how the world should be run?

When Subbu made his pronouncements, after careful analysis, the audience always presumed that it would, and must be brilliant. Few realized, what intellectual honesty was required for a man in his late seventies to make the U-turn that he did. But the ideas that Subbu came up with were worth the courage and clear headedness that he put into his U-turn, tyres smoking. As the world is challenged by the possibility of a rising but autocratic power, calling itself a Republic, it is well that the democracies and the real Republics, independently analyze their way into mutuality.

Immigration Blog

Notes on the Great Indian Exodus

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The Indian-American Diaspora in the United States has historically evoked mixed feelings in India, running the gamut from envy, to resentment to admiration.  Now, apparently, it is the Diaspora that feels a mixture of envy resentment and admiration every time they come home to a rapidly changing India.  Even as one ponders over this improbable turn of the dice, news items such as this about the rising tide of illegal migration from India into the United States make one wonder whether moffusil India is yet to get the memo…that the green pastures of the West are gradually turning brown. Or, are people willing to sell all their worldly belongings and put life and limb at risk in their efforts to get out because the green pastures back home are still so illusory, and seemingly ephemeral?

Reading these news reports, it’s almost as if people from different states have devised different routes to migration. The above report mentions that most of the migrants are Sikhs, who, once caught, ask for political asylum citing religious persecution back in India. Of course, the very nature of illegal immigration is such that there is no way to verify these claims and they might well be from any country in the South Asian region. This would also explain why India was cited as one of eight countries that had refused to take back illegal immigrants in a Congressional Bill that sought to sanction such countries. Statistics from the DoJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review show that, from 2006 to 2009,on an average, a thousand Indians have applied for asylum every year. Whilst 450 were granted asylum in 2006,the authorities seemed to have wised up since then, with the number of approvals seeing a precipitous decline.

The other case that hit the headlines was that of the Tri-valley University scam. From all accounts, there were students who enrolled in good faith as well as those who were willingly party to the scam. With 20,000 H1-B visas reserved for those who have a masters or a higher degree from American institutions, one may well see an increase in scams such as this.

For the Indian government, handling student issues is a headache, especially since the missions are under staffed and barely able to cope with normal consular duties. This is even as the media turns the continuing saga into a pot boiler. There is the cruel step-mother in the form of the U.S. government, the over-protective father personified in the Indian government, and then there are the hapless students and their guardians, shouting from the rooftops about their mistreatment by the stepmother and abandonment by the father despite protestations to the contrary.  Even though the media frenzy has resulted in some positive developments, this promises to be a long drawn out affair as the various cases wind their way through the judicial process. One wonders if there is any coordination between the nodal Ministries of External Affairs, Overseas Indian Affairs, and Human Resource Development. In the case of the students returning from Australia after the student related troubles there last year, the Human Resource Development Ministry has now been tasked with recovering the balance of the fees due to the students who have cut short their education in Australia after the change in the Australian government policies.

It goes without saying that the great Indian exodus continues largely because of the abysmal failure of successive governments to provide adequate education and generate employment opportunities to the youth. Since that state of affairs is unlikely to change any time soon, the only advice one can give the government is to create posts in its missions abroad specifically to deal with Indian student affairs!

Endpiece: All this is even as there is by all accounts, a reverse migration of professionals taking place from the United States to India, with some predicting as many as 100,000 returning over the next ten years.  Whilst this can’t be confirmed independently,t he U.S. Census Bureau does show a decline in both permanent residency and citizenship figures from India.

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