Immigration Blog

The Prospects Look Good for Bill to Eliminate Per Country Limit

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Legislation that will have a positive direct impact on Indian nationals passed the House of Representatives on Tuesday, November 29. The vote was an overwhelming 389 to 15.

HR 3012, “The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act,” would eliminate the per country limit for employment-based immigrants in a transition over a four-year period. The primary effect of the bill would be to shorten the wait times substantially for highly educated foreign nationals from India and China. The part of the Immigration and Nationality Act that limits nationals of any one country to 7 percent of the total employment-based immigrants in a year will be removed the law books. In addition, by raising the family per country limit from 7 percent to 15 percent it would also help long-waiting family-sponsored immigrants from Mexico and the Philippines.

The House Floor

Speaking in favor of the bill on the House floor, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chief sponsor of the bill, emphasized that the legislation provided no new green cards. He said the measure was necessary to have the law match the way employers in America hire – based on merit, not country of origin.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) also spoke in favor of the bill. He emphasized the long wait times, pointing out that some nationals from India in the employment-based third preference (EB-3) had been waiting since 2002 for green cards. In support of the bill, Rep. Smith asked: “Why should American employers who seek green cards for skilled foreign workers have to wait longer just because the workers are from India or China?”

On the Democratic side, Representatives Steve Cohen of Tennessee and Jim Moran of Virginia spoke in favor of the bill. (No one spoke against the bill.) Rep. Moran talked about the importance of skilled immigration generally to jobs and business development in Northern Virginia.

Prospects in the Senate

The passage of the bill in the House gave bill supporters new information about the chances for the legislation to move in the Senate. The New York Times reported, “The bill seemed likely to pass easily in the Senate, said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a leading Democrat on immigration.”

Explaining the implications of the bill, The New York Times noted, “By far, the main beneficiaries will be highly skilled immigrants from India and China, including many with master’s degrees and doctorates in science and engineering. Because they come from populous countries that send many people to work here who have advanced science and technology skills, immigrants from those two nations had been forced by the country limits into lines that were many years long and growing much longer.”

An Associated Press article also quoted Senator Schumer, the chair of subcommittee that handles immigration in the Senate Judiciary Committee, who is favorably disposed toward the bill: “Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who heads the Senate Judiciary panel on immigration, said he planned to move the bill as quickly as possible in the Senate, ‘where we expect it to find overwhelming support.’ He said the legislation would ‘remove outdated constraints that prevent us from attracting the kind of innovators who can create job growth in America.’”

An analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy concluded that passing H.R. 3012 would reduce the wait for a newly sponsored foreign national from India in the employment-based third preference (EB-3) to 12 years, far less than the potential wait of several decades under current law. In the employment-based second preference (EB-2), the wait would drop to two or three years, rather than the current 6 years or more for a newly sponsored Indian-born scientist, researcher or engineer sponsored in that category.

Immigration Blog

Small House Bill on Per Country Limits Could Mean Big Changes

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Out of the more than 300 million people residing in the United States, it is likely fewer than 1 percent realize highly skilled foreign nationals endure long waits for green cards. On the other hand, those aware of the long waits likely are personally affected, either because they or a family member are the ones waiting. For those waiting the longest for green cards, on a scale of 1 to 10 the issue is an off the charts “50.”

Sponsored by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), HR 3012, “The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act,” is a small bill by any standards. In recent years, various bills to change U.S. health care or immigration policy have reached lengths of 500 to 1,000 pages. In contrast, H.R. 3012 is barely 6 pages in length. Yet since it may have a legitimate chance of becoming law, it could have a bigger impact on people’s lives than bills 100 times greater in length. (A copy of H.R. 3012 can be found here.)

What Would the Bill Do?

After a transition lasting three years, HR 3012 would eliminate the per country limit for employment-based immigrants. Under the law, employment-based immigration is limited annually to 140,000. In addition, per country caps generally limit the number of employment-based immigrants to 7 percent of the total (except if immigrant visas would otherwise go unused). Because of their large populations, India and China are most negatively affected by these limits. As a result, highly educated Indian and Chinese nationals wait longer for employment-based green cards than their peers from other countries.

Under H.R. 3012, in fiscal years 2012, 2013 and 2014, no more than 85 percent of employment-based immigrant visas could go to nationals of one country. That was designed to prevent Indian nationals, who as a group have been waiting the longest, from potentially using up all the employment-based green cards. Still, Indian and Chinese nationals will be the greatest beneficiaries of the legislation.

The legislation would also increase the per country limit for family-sponsored immigrants to 15 percent (from the current 7 percent). That will primarily benefit nationals from Mexico and the Philippines, many waiting more than a decade in the sibling and adult children categories.

Likely Impact

The bill is likely to shorten the wait times for Indians and Chinese in both the employment-based second preference (EB-2) and employment-based third preference (EB-3). A recent analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy (found here) concluded: “A key part of any solution to reducing wait times is to eliminate the per country limit for employment-based immigrants . . . Eliminating the per country limit would reduce the typical wait for Indians applying today in the EB-3 category from 70 to 12 years. While 12 years is still too long, it would be a welcome reform that would provide green cards for Indian and Chinese professionals waiting the longest in the EB-3 and EB-2 (employment second preference) categories and equalize the wait times in the EB-2 category at about two to three years without regard to country of origin (as opposed to potential waits of 6 years or more for Chinese and Indian nationals in the EB-2 category).”

The House Markup

For a bill to move forward in the legislative process it usually must be “marked up” in committee. In an October 27, 2011 House Judiciary Committee mark-up, H.R. 3012 passed by a voice vote. (That means it had sufficient support that no registered vote was deemed necessary.) Some amendments were ruled out of order and no significant amendments passed to change the core of the bill. The full transcript of the House markup can be found here.

Next Steps

The next step for the legislation is to be voted on by the entire House of Representatives. If the bill passes the House, it would then go to the US Senate. If H.R. 3012 passes the Senate, it would be the first bill to improve high-skill immigration to pass Congress in several years.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Pakistan’s Intransigence over Prosecution of Perpetrators of the Mumbai Terror Strikes is Hampering Rapprochement

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Three years ago, on November 26, 2008, ten Lashkar-e-Tayebba terrorists, trained, equipped, sponsored and directed by Pakistan’s ISI, landed by boat at Mumbai and carried out audacious strikes on four iconic targets before nine of them were eliminated by Indian security forces. Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor, was tried by a Special Court and has been sentenced to death. Despite the voluminous evidence provided to Pakistan about the perpetrators and the planners of the diabolical strikes by India, and corroborated by independent investigations conducted by the United States and Israel, the Pakistan government has failed to act against any of them.

Writing in the Hindu last week, Praveen Swami stated, “Sajid Mir, Lashkar commander who crafted the assault plan, has been reported by both the United States and India’s intelligence services as operating out of his family home near the Garrison Club in Lahore; Pakistan’s Federal Investigations Agency hasn’t yet got around to paying him a visit. Muzammil Bhat, who trained the assault team, is claimed by Pakistan to be a fugitive, though two journalists who went looking for the terror commander in Muzaffarabad located him without great effort. Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, sole senior Lashkar operative held for his alleged role in the attacks, has continued to communicate with his organisation from prison. Pakistan hasn’t, tellingly, even sought to question David Headley, Pakistani-American jihadist who has provided the investigators with a detailed insider account of the attacks — including the role of the Inter-Services Intelligence in directing them.”

Pakistan’s intransigence in bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror strikes to justice does not augur well for the recently resumed Composite Dialogue Process. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stated that he will travel to Pakistan only after the terrorists who attacked Mumbai are convicted by Pakistani courts. Even Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of State has expressed her reservations about the Pakistan government’s “continuing failure, in our view, to fulfil all of the requirements necessary for prosecution related to the Mumbai attacks.” Unless Pakistan makes serious efforts to prosecute the terrorists and their handlers, the gains in the relationship made recently due to the announcement of MFN status by Pakistan and the proposed liberalisation of the Visa regime will lose value.

Within India too the follow up action to prevent another Mumbai-type terror strike has left much to be desired. The government had launched five major initiatives to shore up counter-terrorism capabilities. The first of these was to decentralise the deployment of the National Security Guards (NSG) – the agency that had eliminated the terrorists holed up in two hotels and the Jewish centre at Mumbai – to the major metropolitan centres besides Delhi so as to reduce the time taken to react against a terrorist strike. This has been done though the NSG commandos continue to face accommodation problems. The government has set up the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for post-incident investigation of major terrorist strikes. Unlike the U.S. FBI, the NIA lacks a counter-terrorism punch and cannot, therefore, assist in the prevention of terrorist strikes. It is to be hoped that the NIA will not be politicised like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CB).

While some efforts have been made to enhance coastal security, these efforts have fallen much short of the desired capabilities and India’s long coastline remains vulnerable to attacks from the sea. This was demonstrated with telling effect when an abandoned ship drifted all the way across the Arabian Sea to beach on the Mumbai coast without being detected by either the Indian Navy or the Coast Guard or the Marine Police.

Intelligence gathering, analysis, assessment and dissemination still need to be improved by an order of magnitude. The functioning of the existing Multi-agency Centre (MAC) has been streamlined but Home Minister P Chidambaram’s initiatives to establish a National Counter-terrorism Centre (NCTC) to coordinate all counter-terrorism efforts and a National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) database to maintain widely shared records of all terrorism-related intelligence and activities, are still to see the light of day because of Centre-State issues and inter-ministerial turf battles.

Clearly, India’s counter-terrorism responses continue to resemble a lumbering elephant, rather than a tiger ready to pounce.

Immigration Blog

Stuck In Immigration – Immigration Issue

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Every four years usually coinciding with election season, the American people have the privilege of being subject to unintelligible histrionics on the issue of immigration by both contenders for elected office and editorialists.  Candidates from all political quarters tend to treat immigration as an electoral issue for their district rather than a national strategic issue for the country, and therefore many merely choose to master the art of being opaque without sounding evasive, not the least bit interested in developing a realistic policy framework so long as the fewest number of constituents have been alienated.

If we wish to break a cycle in which we are all freely able to talk about immigration reform with only meek expectations that anything would be done, we should first demand an honest dialogue that examines the issue not just from one communities parochial interests—because immigration becomes far too easy to demagogue, and intelligent debate inevitably gets replaced by populism that throws up various quack remedies ranging from mass deportations to a completely open border.

This type of ad hominem debate is not healthy for America or India, so let’s resist indulging in tired ‘feel-good’ clichés about immigrants being the most hard-working, talented, and loyal people in society.  Immigrants are like any other large demographic group: there are many individuals that are wonderful, and there are some that are not so.  So let’s look only at facts.

In the last twenty years, nearly 1 in 4 new public American companies were founded by immigrants, including technology conglomerates like Google, Sun, PayPal, eBay, Intel, Tesla Motors, and Yahoo.  This has translated into hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs for American citizens, that also support hundreds of thousands of more jobs at the support, administrative, and unskilled levels, and billions in both foreign direct investment in U.S. infrastructure and tax revenue to the American government.  An American economic success achieved by not being myopic and lowering impediments for those with provable human capital.

It is a vital American national security and strategic interest that both domestic and foreign human capital should have minimal barriers towards entrepreneurship.  Current regulations which link legal status towards employment with a single firm and demand obtrusively high levels of capital backing as a prerequisite for founding a company actually encourage repatriation of skilled labor with no tangible benefit to the domestic workforce.  Even in a credit constrained global economy, an EB-5 Visa requires an investment petition backed by $1 million and the initial creation of ten domestic jobs for U.S. nationals.  Most high-tech startups begin with less than $50,000 initial investment.

Well paying jobs in America for college graduates will not come in abundance from stimulus packages, protectionism, or changes in the tax code.  America could afford higher barriers towards starting companies when there were few other places in the world where honest and innovative people could prosper, but that paradigm has now eroded.  The cornerstone of American success is that creative and intelligent people can commercialize their talents, and we should not throw away our competitive edge in attracting and enabling those who can create jobs.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Pakistan’s Nuclear Doctrine is Destabilising

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Pakistan’s recent announcement that it has successfully tested the nuclear-tipped Hatf-9 (Nasr) short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) with a range of 65 km has caused serious concern in India as SRBMs are inherently destabilising. The announcement has come at a time when a move to eliminate SRBMs from the nuclear arsenals of South Asia had begun to gather momentum.

Unlike India’s nuclear weapons and missile development programme that was completely indigenous, Pakistan received considerable external help and, in turn, has itself been a proliferator. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons – warheads and delivery systems – are India-centric and have been acquired with Chinese and North Korean help. While India follows a “credible minimum deterrence” doctrine and has declared a “no first use” policy, Pakistan follows a “first use” nuclear doctrine and seeks to India that it has a low nuclear threshold.India’s nuclear weapons are political weapons whose sole purpose is to deter the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons against India.Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are its first line of defence and it aims to use them to negateIndia’s conventional military superiority.

Pakistan has been testing its ballistic and nuclear-capable cruise missiles at the rate of one every two months on average. It is apparently engaged in improving the accuracy of its North Korean origin No Dong and Taepo Dong missiles and of the Chinese missiles M-9 and M-11.

Though Pakistan’€™s nuclear warheads are based on a Chinese design that uses highly enriched uranium as the fissionable core, it is known to be gradually switching over to Plutonium 239 for future nuclear warheads. Dr. Peter Lavoy has written, “According to public estimates of Pakistan’s fissile material stockpile at the end of 2006, Islamabad probably had amassed between 30 and85 kilogramsof weapon-grade plutonium from its Khushab research reactor and between 1300 and1700 kilogrammes of weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the Kahuta gas centrifuge facility. The Khushab reactor can probably produce between 10 and15 kilogrammes  of plutonium per year. Kahuta may be able to produce100 kilogrammes of HEU each year. Assuming that Pakistani scientists require 5 to 7 kilogrammes of plutonium to make one warhead, and 20 to 25 kilogrammes of HEU to produce a bomb, then Pakistan would have accumulated enough fissile material to be able to manufacture between 70 and 115 nuclear weapons by the end of2006.”

Estimates of Pakistan’s nuclear warheads stockpile vary according to the source. However, Pakistan is generally credited with the capability of having stockpiled 60 to 80 nuclear warheads and is moving rapidly towards triple-digit figures. Unlike India, Pakistan is making efforts to acquire tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. It has also been reported that Pakistan is working towards miniaturizing its nuclear warheads for use on the Babur cruise missile.

Pakistan’s nuclear command and control is firmly in the army hands. Its National Command Authority has an Employment Control Committee and a Development Control Committee. Most of the posts are held by senior members of the armed forces. Staff support for day to day functioning is provided by the Strategic Plans Division (SPD). The strategic missile forces are placed under the Army Strategic Command. While on paper the President is Chairman of the NCA and the Prime Minister is Vice Chairman, the NCA was constituted during the Musharraf regime and it is most unlikely that the army will ever hand over control of nuclear weapons to the civilian leadership.