4 ms·

You can take all kinds of policy positions on a campaign, but any president cannot really do much to the H1B system without passing laws. Passing a new immigrat

You can take all kinds of policy positions on a campaign, but any president cannot really do much to the H1B system without passing laws. Passing a new immigration bill is very hard since there are so many competing interests benefiting from the status quo and there is very little to gain electorally. The current administration tried using executive action and regulatory approaches to fulfil their agenda and both keep getting struck down in courts. The new upward revision in wage levels are also expected to have the same fate. There is simply very little regulatory leeway on H1B visas since they are encoded in law. It is highly unlikely for a democratic administration to spend political capital changing H1B when they have bigger priorities (healthcare). At the end of the day, Indians are the only affected population on H1B due to backlogs and aren't a strategic voting bloc for democrats. Everyone else gets a green card in a couple of years anyways. They are more focused on undocumented and family based immigration. A broken immigration system and the H1B status quo is expected to last for a while unless there are external factors (collapse in international student numbers, US emigration, US companies moving jobs out of the country) forcing action.

rayiner 6y ago
> The current administration tried using executive action and regulatory approaches to fulfil their agenda and both keep getting struck down in courts. The new upward revision in wage levels are also expected to have the same fate. There is simply very little regulatory leeway on H1B visas since they are encoded in law. That’s not accurate. The original law in the 1960s was designed to be very different, and one of the basic bargains was that it wouldn’t increase net immigration. That ended up being false because Presidents ended up using executive action and regulations to depart from the original design. For example, Clinton narrowing the public charge exclusion to refer to only cash welfare. Indeed, the H1-B system was never intended to be a vehicle for permanent immigration. That was created by administrative fiat too. Trump’s administrative changes were to make the system more consistent with what the law actually says.
- vsskanth 6y ago
  Immigration laws were passed and signed even after 1960s. Since I only focused on H1B in my original comment I will only seek to address that point. H1B changes were not implemented by administrative fiat. The AC21 act was passed to provide unlimited H1B extensions with an approved employment-based immigration application. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Kind of. H-1B is still supposed to be a guest worker visa. INS didn’t enforce that requirement prior to 1990, but state department did: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-convoluted-path-from-h-1b-to-permanent-residency-a-primer https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-convoluted-path-from-h.... Which led to H-1B’s being unable to leave the country until receiving permanent residency status because state department often wouldn’t issue return visas for people who obviously intended to immigrate permanently. The dual-intent EB system was created in 1990 to alleviate the pain from that, but there still wasn’t real agreement on a permanent immigration visa. That’s an example of how executive action has been used to force Congress to make changes to avoid negative consequences to immigrants who are already here but stuck in limbo. (DACA is another example of that. The President can’t grant legal status to undocumented childhood arrivals, but can trigger a situation by executive action that forces Congress to choose between effectively allowing more permanent immigration and imposing negative consequences on sympathetic people.) Under the 1990 dual intent system, you basically say “for now I want to just work temporarily, but if a spot opens up I might be interested in staying.” In theory, the government should be able to say: “okay, well, no green cards for the foreseeable future” and H1-Bs would say “okay, I’ll wait for a spot to open up” or “okay, I’ll go home.” But of course that’s not what happens: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-immigration-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/us/politics/coronavirus-t.... People flip out because they (for obvious reasons) view the H1-B as the first step to a more or less guaranteed path to permanent residency and citizenship. The current immigration system is a complete clusterf—-ck. It’s not fair to voters, who have the right to have an immigration policy that actually reflects what Congress enacted. It’s also not fair to “guest workers” who get stuck in a precarious limbo.
- belltaco 6y ago
  >That ended up being false because Presidents ended up using executive action and regulations to depart from the original design...Indeed, the H1-B system was never intended to be a vehicle for permanent immigration What? That was an act of Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Non-immigrant_visas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Non-im... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Job-based_immigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Job-ba...

rayiner 6y ago

> The current administration tried using executive action and regulatory approaches to fulfil their agenda and both keep getting struck down in courts. The new upward revision in wage levels are also expected to have the same fate. There is simply very little regulatory leeway on H1B visas since they are encoded in law. That’s not accurate. The original law in the 1960s was designed to be very different, and one of the basic bargains was that it wouldn’t increase net immigration. That ended up being false because Presidents ended up using executive action and regulations to depart from the original design. For example, Clinton narrowing the public charge exclusion to refer to only cash welfare. Indeed, the H1-B system was never intended to be a vehicle for permanent immigration. That was created by administrative fiat too. Trump’s administrative changes were to make the system more consistent with what the law actually says.

vsskanth 6y ago
Immigration laws were passed and signed even after 1960s. Since I only focused on H1B in my original comment I will only seek to address that point. H1B changes were not implemented by administrative fiat. The AC21 act was passed to provide unlimited H1B extensions with an approved employment-based immigration application. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
- rayiner 6y ago
  Kind of. H-1B is still supposed to be a guest worker visa. INS didn’t enforce that requirement prior to 1990, but state department did: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-convoluted-path-from-h-1b-to-permanent-residency-a-primer https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-convoluted-path-from-h.... Which led to H-1B’s being unable to leave the country until receiving permanent residency status because state department often wouldn’t issue return visas for people who obviously intended to immigrate permanently. The dual-intent EB system was created in 1990 to alleviate the pain from that, but there still wasn’t real agreement on a permanent immigration visa. That’s an example of how executive action has been used to force Congress to make changes to avoid negative consequences to immigrants who are already here but stuck in limbo. (DACA is another example of that. The President can’t grant legal status to undocumented childhood arrivals, but can trigger a situation by executive action that forces Congress to choose between effectively allowing more permanent immigration and imposing negative consequences on sympathetic people.) Under the 1990 dual intent system, you basically say “for now I want to just work temporarily, but if a spot opens up I might be interested in staying.” In theory, the government should be able to say: “okay, well, no green cards for the foreseeable future” and H1-Bs would say “okay, I’ll wait for a spot to open up” or “okay, I’ll go home.” But of course that’s not what happens: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-immigration-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/us/politics/coronavirus-t.... People flip out because they (for obvious reasons) view the H1-B as the first step to a more or less guaranteed path to permanent residency and citizenship. The current immigration system is a complete clusterf—-ck. It’s not fair to voters, who have the right to have an immigration policy that actually reflects what Congress enacted. It’s also not fair to “guest workers” who get stuck in a precarious limbo.
belltaco 6y ago
>That ended up being false because Presidents ended up using executive action and regulations to depart from the original design...Indeed, the H1-B system was never intended to be a vehicle for permanent immigration What? That was an act of Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Non-immigrant_visas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Non-im... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Job-based_immigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Job-ba...