The Strive Act of 2007: Congress' New Legislation

Congress is a busy place. It is a body of our government that undertakes enormously complicated issues, seeking to reach the best solutions through enacting complex laws. All within the boiling hot cauldron of politics. No thank you - I'd rather eat lint than do that for a living. But I digress again - back to Congress....
As we all know from studying for our naturalization test, Congress has two chambers: The House of Representatives and the Senate. Immigration Reform has been a hot topic for some time now, with the House of Representatives killing the Senate's best efforts at passing a workable solution for our immigration problems in 2005. It did so by responding to the Senate's bill by passing an enforcement only bill that was the polar opposite of the Senate bill.

A promising new bill called the Strive Act of 2007 was recently introduced in the House. If you have serious problems getting to sleep at night, you can read all about it at the Library of Congress here. I will give you the skinny on what the law proposes as concisely as I can.

Strive is an acronym for The Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy Act. It was introduced in the house by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) on March 22, 2007. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, chaired by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), is reviewing the legislation now, and it appears the Senate is close to introducing and voting on its own version of immigration reform. Senators McCain and Kennedy will likely sponsor that legislation in the coming days.

The high points of the House version include:

• A new worker program allowing for 400,000 new temporary visas to be issued for workers in shortage occupations. The visas would be called H-2C visas. Most importantly, the bill provides a path to permanent residency for qualified workers if the employer agrees to sponsor the foreign national. The legislation seeks to protect American workers by requiring the same wages, benefits and working conditions as similarly situated U.S. workers. Further, any would-be petitioning employer must first offer the opportunity to a U.S. worker. New workers on H-2C visas would also be prohibited outright from working in areas with an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent for low skilled positions;
• An earned legalization program for the undocumented population in the United States with a twist - a "touchback" provision that requires people who are in the U.S. without status to return home and re-enter with their new status. This idea of penalizing beneficiaries of the law by requiring them to return home and enter with a clean slate, was apparently an effort to placate certain legislators who wanted to include some measure of a penalty along with the benefits of allowing a track towards permanent residency and eventually citizenship;
• An increase to the annual employment-based visa quota from 140,000 to 290,000. Such an increases would alleviate the new backlogs in the EB-3 category that have led to thousands of valuable workers having to leave the United States because the visa they once had in their sights evaporated;
• An increase to family-based visas by taking "immediate relatives" out of the 480,000 annual quota.

There is no point in reviewing the minutiae of the proposed bill because even if STRIVE becomes law, it will undergo significant changes during the legislation process in the coming months. Suffice it to say, no matter the final rendition, new legislation will add a few hundred, if not thousand, of pages to the Immigration Law and Regulations book I cart around with me on a daily basis. I look forward to understanding how it will help thousands of good people who will add to the quilt of our amazing country. Stay tuned.