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**c1ue** · February 10, 2013, 10:40 AM

Re: Immigration

Couple of notes:

1) numbers of new legal residents - it is necessary to look at the percentage of population to truly gauge the relative impact.

Year	New Legal Residents	US Population	% change
1861	91,918	25,905,387	0.35%
1911	878,587	93,863,000	0.94%
1961	271,344	183,691,481	0.15%
2011	1,062,040	311,800,000	0.34%

2) The number above appears to be green card issuance. More detailed info:

http://www.cis.org/kammer/green-card-top-20-2011

What is also interesting is H1B and student visa numbers:

H1B has varied from as high as 195,000 to something like 100,000 today

April 2008

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff signed off on the new regulation
to extend the Optional Practical Training period from 12 months to 29 months. OPT authorizes foreign students to work in internships before and after graduation. This action amounted to a de-facto expansion of the H-1B visa program because it allows foreign students to work in the U.S. for more than twice as many months until they get an H-1B visa. In air traffic terminology, the foreign students will be put into a holding pattern until they get an H-1B visa.

Chertoff's bureaucratic decree to change immigration policy without a vote in Congress, and without public debate.

March 2005

The Department of Homeland security admitted that due to an accounting mistake they issued 10,000 more visas than authorized by Congress. Since Congress approved an additional 20,000 to be issued in 2005 in addition to the 65,000 already mandated, this means that at least 95,000 new H-1B visas will handed out in 2005 to foreign job seekers.

The DHS has no authority to hand out more visas than Congress mandates, but that didn't stop them from doing it. After admitting to the mistake they announced that the 10,000 visas would be issued anyway.

November 2004

The omnibus spending bill passed, and with it an amendment dubbed the "L-1 Visa and H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004". International students who earn a Masters or PhD in the U.S. are now eligible to use an H-1B visa that is exempted from the cap. Exemptions of this type have been estimated to be approximately 20,000 per year so effectively the yearly cap was raised from 65,000 to 85,000. Superficial reforms to the L-1 visa were put in place to limit how contract bodyshops can use L-1 visa holders.
Three senators and one representative were key players behind this legislation. The Senators are Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA). The House representative was Lamar Smith (R-TX).

2003

On October 1 the H-1B visa cap reverted from 195,000 per year to 65,000 for the fiscal year of 2004. On July 31, 2003, the Senate approved the Singapore and Chile Free Trade agreement. The bill got wide bi-partisan support in both the House and Senate. The FTA followed precedents set by NAFTA by containing "embedded visas". The FTA contains a visa called the H-1B1 that has a limit of 6,800 visas per year that are counted against the H-1B visa cap. L-1 visas from Singapore are unlimited.

November 2002

On Friday, November 2, the President George Bush signed H.R. 2215, the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act. Out of 422 House members, 400 of them voted in favor of the Bush proposal, including 206 Republicans and 193 Democrats. This bill includes a provision that allows H-1B visa holders to extend their stay beyond the statutory six-year period if a labor certification has been pending for at least 365 days. This "7th Year Extension" allows H-1B visa holders to continue to get extensions until he/she gets a Green Card. They can request extensions on a yearly basis for as long as it takes to get a green card. ^[25]

Effectively this legislation solidified the dual-intent nature of H-1B by turning it into a de-facto permanent visa.

Another provision in the bill, the Conrad State 20 Program, was expanded from allowing 20 doctors per state to do their residency in the U.S. to 30.

2001

The INS issued the maximum number of H-1B visas that the 195,000 visa cap allowed. President Bush visited Mexico February 2001 and proposed a comprehensive guest worker program, the largest since the braceros of 1942-64.^[11] U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm met with Vicente Fox of Mexico and said we need quick action for this new nonimmigrant labor bill. Gramm said that this guest worker program could start legalizing millions of undocumented Mexican workers. ^[12]

2000

In April 2000 Henry Cisneros, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, proposed that unions and immigrant communities support expansion of the H-1B program in order to get amnesty. ^[20] Pro immigration elements in the union heeded Cisneros' advice and decided to support an increase of the H-1B quota. Even though the AFL-CIO was still holding to an official position that the H-1B program should not be expanded, they didn't campaign against the massive proposed increase to 195,000.^[17] "Democratic Party heavyweights tried to convince the AFL-CIO that by supporting H-1B they could achieve a much more pressing goal, namely amnesty for illegal immigrants". ^[16] Union insiders inside the AFL-CIO made a tacit deal with President Clinton. The Faustian bargain was that the unions would remain quiet on the H-1B increase and in return Clinton would get them amnesty. They told Clinton that he could do whatever he wanted with the H-1B bill even though they knew that Clinton wanted to sign the H-1B increase in order to retain election campaign funding from the high-tech industry. The only concession the AFL-CIO won was to get some toothless worker protections added to the bill, but those protections were filled with loopholes.

The AFL-CIO kept their part of the deal but Clinton was never able to deliver them the amnesty that they wanted.

After intense lobbying by technology firms, Congress voted in October to increase the number of H-1B visas to 195,000. The Senate Oct. 3 approved legislation (S. 2045) by a vote of 96 to 1 raising the statutory cap and the House followed suit later that evening, approving the bill by voice vote. The voice vote occurred after most Members had already left the Hill. The timing of this voice vote was no accident. That evening Al Gore and George W. Bush were in a general election presidential debate. While the public and the media focused on the debate the House silently stabbed American workers in the back.
After the Senate vote on October 3, 2000 to increase the H-1B quota, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on October 4,

`Once it's clear (the visa bill) is going to get through, everybody signs up so nobody can be in the position of being accused of being against high tech,'' said Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, after the vote. ``There were, in fact, a whole lot of folks against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public.''

The sequence of events in the House of Representatives was a far worse perversion of democracy.

In the morning of October 3, 2000, the Senate passed its version of the H-1B bill. At that time, two versions existed in the House, by Rep. Lamar Smith and Rep. David Dreier, both Republicans. Industry liked the Dreier bill (which was largely similar to the Senate version) and was adamantly opposed to the Smith bill, as the latter would have imposed various worker protections. The Smith bill, though, had the upper hand in the parliamentary sense, as it already passed through the proper committees.

That afternoon, it was announced in the House that no vote would be taken on the H-1B issue that day, so the congresspeople went home. Yet a vote actually was taken that evening, with only 40 congresspeople present out of a membership of 435. In addition, the vote was on the Senate bill, adopted whole, instead of either the Smith or Dreier versions, thus slickly solving the problem of what to do with the Smith bill. ^[18]

Here is how the incident was reported by the Cox News Service, dateline October 3, 2000:

WASHINGTON - The speed - and stealth - with which the House voted Tuesday to increase visas for skilled foreign workers left one lawmaker shaking his head. ``Incredible,'' said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, a major supporter of increased visas... Doggett, who had co-sponsored a bill to increase the so-called H-1B visas for foreign workers, gave this account of the evening:
``At about 3:30, it was announced that there would be no further votes'' on important issues in the House, he said. Because many lawmakers wanted to get home early to watch the presidential debates, nearly everyone left, he said.
``But at about 5:30, an e-mail was sent over here'' announcing that an H-1B debate would begin shortly. ``I didn't see the email until about 6,'' he said. Doggett said he scurried to the House floor, while other major supporters of the legislation also rushed back to Capitol Hill.
Using various procedural moves, the GOP leaders ended the debate quickly and called for a voice vote, even though the House was nearly empty. ^[5]

Note that Doggett, a Democrat, also advocated increasing the H-1B quota - perhaps because he reportedly accepted campaign donations from H-1Bs.

1999

The INS approved 21,888 H-1B petitions in excess of the fiscal year 1999 cap. The problem was swept under the rug by passing legislation called "AC 21" which implemented a retroactive increase for 1999 to cover all petitions approved by the INS. KPMG was hired to improve the accounting of this mess. It's not known if the INS was aware that KPMG was a major employer of H-1Bs. There was a glut of students on F-1 and J-1 visas waiting to convert to H-1Bs. They were working for employers who were using the "practical training" part of those visas to allow these students to hold jobs. Since the cap was reached the students couldn't get H-1B visas. The foreign students were granted automatic extensions so they could keep their jobs until they got H-1B visas. ^[23]

Student visas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_visa#Statistics

In Fiscal Year 2010:^[2]

F-1	540,200	385,210	154,990	69,920
F-2	37,054	25,220	11,384	8,171
F-3	1,025	887	138	97

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