Law proposed to cut legal immigration by half

The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment, or Raise Act, introduced by Republican senator Tom Cotton and David Perdue from the Democratic party, would alter the US immigration system to significantly reduce the number of foreigners admitted to the country without a skills-based visa. The bill proposed to reduce the number of green card or legal permanent residency issued every year from currently about a million to half a million. The passage of the bill, which is said to have the support of the Trump administration, will have a major impact on hundreds and thousands of Indian Americans who are currently painfully waiting to get their green cards on employment-based categories. 

Notably, the current wait period of an Indian to get a green card varies from 10 years to 35 years and this could increase if the proposed bill becomes a law. The bill however does not focus on H-1B visas. Cotton argued that the growth in legal immigration in recent decades had led to a “sharp decline in wages for working Americans” and that the bill represented an effort to move the US “to a more merit-based system like Canada and Australia”. “It’s time our immigration system started working for American workers,” Cotton said. 

The RAISE Act would lower overall immigration to 6,37,960 in its first year and to 5,39,958 by its tenth year, a 50 per cent reduction from the 1,051,031 immigrants who arrived in 2015. The RAISE Act, among other things, would retain immigration preferences for the spouses and minor children of US citizens and legal permanent residents while eliminating preferences for certain categories of extended and adult family members. It also proposes to eliminate diversity visa lottery.