S Folinsky

Heads up: In a bi-partisan voice vote the House Judiciary Committee approved HR 3012 "Fairness For High Skilled Immigrants Act" which will go to the full House at some point for consideration.

Given that this is "British Expats" -- if this bill should become law, the waits for UK employment based immigrants will become ever longer.

Paul S

yup, been keeping an eye on this one. Its quite funny to see the reaction over on some of the other forums where people from India/China are welcoming it as they say the current system is skewed in favour of applicants from ROW groups (yet they are the ones with their own groups, and not 'fighting' other countries for a share).
We all know its a long haul, but surely this will make it worse.
I've already been close to having my priority date going current once before (filed in the 07 'fiasco'), and again we are nearly current (4-5 months off).
If it does change it for the worse and pushes us back even further I suspect we may 'up sticks' and move on

S Folinsky

Back in 1979-82 -- I actually litigated a case involving a provision of the visa allocation system. So, early on, I obtained a basic working knowledge of the allocation system.

The system is actually fairly neutral. Before 1965, there was a national quota system which was quite skewed. That year they went over to world-wide quota with a cap on what any one country can use. The underlying basis has been since that time to spread the visas around a bit.

Do note that on the family end of the shop, China and India are just like everyone else, but Mexico and the Philippines are capped. In order to be capped, it means that your country is using more visas than anyone else.

However, because of all your own countrymen ahead of you, each individual has a longer wait.

[Olivares involved an unintended consequence of the cap. The cap was applied to the entire number of visas being allocated, but not within each classification. Mexico demand was so high in the family end of things that it exhausted its cap in the "higher" classifications. This then caused an ameliorative provision to spread the cap numbers among the classifications. However, State would not allow those numbers to go past the world wide cut-off. So, in the categories with a lower demand, those visas went unused and that caused a reversion to the prior scheme which resulted in all the visas being exhausted in the higher categories which caused ... Nice and circular, eh?].

An immigration lawyer friend of mine noted that the words "fair" and "immigration" do not belong in the same sentence.

Paul S

ohh, that's made my day. Must print this out and stick it next to the PC

md95065

Any time that a bill has a fancy name like that you know that the actual effect of the bill will be something completely different.

US politicians are masters at "marketing" their legislation in this way - I mean who could possibly vote against "The Patriot Act" or "The Hero Act" or anything called "The Fairness ... Act" ...