Big Tech Green Card Giveaway Cleared Senate, but Expired with the 116th Congress
By Jessica M. Vaughan on January 7, 2021
Editor's Note: Obsolete articles and updates from this page have been archived.
Update 12/3/20: A unanimous consent agreement for S.386 was reached and the bill was passed as amended.
Congress.gov has updated H.R.1044 as "Passed/agreed to in Senate" and has made the text of the Senate amendment available.
Updated 1/7/2021
Yet another effort to discard the per-country cap for employment green cards fizzled in the waning days of the 116th Congress. But it's sure to come back in the new 117th Congress.
As described in previous posts, this change would give a fast track to permanent residency mainly to tech workers from India who came on temporary visas, at the expense of applicants from other countries who currently are farther up on the waiting list, which operates to ensure country of origin diversity in employment green card issuances.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) finally managed to engineer passage of a new version of the controversial measure in the lame duck Senate last month, without an open hearing or meaningful debate. In the process, he had to make concessions to colleagues and special interest groups, and include provisions that ultimately made the bill unpalatable to House Democrats, which had passed its own (worse) version in 2019. But the Senate changes were substantial enough to make it impossible to get to a final vote of approval by both chambers by the end of the session, which would have sent the bill to the president's desk.
https://cis.org/Vaughan/Senate-S386-HR1044-Country-Cap
