• Group:
• Immigration for international students and scholars in the US
• Topic:
• Petition Letter to the President and Members of Congress
• Posted by:
• Bill

A Petition by New Immigrants United
http://www.niunational.org/signature/petition.php

August 13, 2009

Dear President Obama and Members of Congress:

We are members and supporters of New Immigrants United (www.niunational.org), a fast growing immigrant organization representing highly educated and highly skilled professionals including doctors, scientists, and engineers with foreign nationalities. We are writing to ask for your support to rectify the currently malfunctioning employment-based immigration system.

The United States being the greatest country that attracts immigrants from all over the world not just lay in the fact that it is the lighthouse of liberty, but also because of its government of transparency, legal system of justice, rewarding of hard workings, and protection of fairness. This is why the most talented foreign people will choose this country beyond others to found or co-found Intel, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo!, Google, and tens of thousands of companies, which hire millions of American workers and bring back trillions of revenue from abroad.

It does not take a rocket science degree to estimate what would immediately happen to the American economy if all those companies reside elsewhere. But we ARE seeing this happening in the past five years at a speed faster than anyone's anticipation; and we are not sure what would happen in the next five years if no one stands up and takes actions. The biggest reason for this to become reality is that more and more highly educated and skilled foreign nationals choose other more "rewarding" countries as their home. That special group of people who have chosen to or become inclined to leave represents nearly half of all graduate students and/or advanced degree holders in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) from the US universities.

It might seem hard to understand why this would happen in the first place for people who never went through the painful experience with the current employment-based immigration system, but it can't be more obvious to us, who have been struggling under this system, and it makes great sense to those who made their decision no longer to walk under its shadow and to depart. Simply speaking, the current system violates all the good causes (transparency, justice, fairness, security), by which we like this country; and it significantly frustrated highly educated and skilled foreign nationals and discouraged them from staying in this country.

A simple and common example may explain things better: Suppose Dr. A gets his PhD at the age 28, and then starts working for a company. The current immigration system might take him 10 years or even longer to eventually get his green card. But during this long period of time, if he loses his job for some reason, he will have to leave this country. Thus, until he is 38 or even older, he is at this constant risk and uncertainty that he and his family might be forced to leave some day with short notice. This is not just unfair, inhuman, and a big mental torture for a hard-working and law abiding person, but also becomes a serious issue for a person, especially with a family, who needs and deserves a promising, normal and stable life.

How could one expect a person (like Dr. A) at their golden ages of creativity to whole-heartedly make his contributions when his personal life is in limbo? How could one expect such kind of person to take the costly risk to start up another Google or Yahoo!? It has become more enticing for us to move to other countries, where we do not need to worry about the legal status of stay. And a continuous draining out of highly skilled and educated people from this country will further force the companies to move to countries where they can find sufficient qualified employees, and this will exacerbate the effects of the effects of overseas outsourcing.

We were writing this letter because we surely like this country, and we still hold the best wishes that something could be done to make things right. Specifically, we support legislation that aims to improve the immigration system such as the following bills and respectfully request you to support them in your official capacity as well.

1.The Reuniting Families Act (S. 1085 and H.R. 2709) to recapture unused visas and to raise the per-country immigration limit from 7% to 10%.

2.The Stopping Trained in America Ph.D.s From Leaving the Economy Act (H.R. 1791) to exempt foreign nationals who received a Ph.D. degree in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics from a U.S. university from the numerical limitation on immigrant visas.

3.The Accept Chinese Talents Now Act (Act Now) (S. 1182) to revise the Chinese Student Protection Act ("CSPA") by allotting to highly skilled Chinese professionals the 1000 immigrant visas which CSPA unfairly reduced annually from the Chinese immigrant quota.

We would appreciate your help to hold the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) to its promise that it will engage in rulemaking to streamline adjustment of status application processing by pre-filing of certain applications (RIN 1615-AB82), so as to mitigate visa retrogression and eliminate the bizarre situation where applicants have to wait for visa availability twice in the application process.

We are also concerned about transparency in the administration of immigrant visas by the State Department and the USCIS. The USCIS has yet to publish pending adjustment of status cases by country, category, and calendar year in which priority date falls. The Acting Deputy Director of USCIS, Mr. Mike Aytes, in his April 24, 2009 comment in the Department of Homeland Security Leadership Journal, promised that the USCIS was going to make such information available online, and it is still not available on the USCIS website. The State Department should provide greater transparency by increasing the frequency of publishing preliminary employment visa number usage from annually to quarterly or monthly. More transparency in the administration of immigrant visas is critical to enable hundreds of thousands of employment-based immigrant visa applicants to effectively plan their lives during the ordeal of waiting for their immigrant visas.

The United States was built by immigrants. From Plymouth Rock in the seventeenth century to Ellis Island in the twentieth, people born elsewhere came to America and made long-lasting contributions to the building of this nation. We, a new generation of immigrants, have legally lived and worked in the United States for many years. However, we face extreme undue difficulty in obtaining green cards under the current immigration system. We call on you, the leaders of the United States, to fix the broken employment-based immigration system and help us achieve our American dreams!

Sincerely,
 

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