On Thursday June 25 President Obama is expected to host his first stakeholder meeting on immigration at the White House. We understand that only Members Congress have been invited to attend and that the President hopes to have a discussion on how to reform the immigration system. I find it interesting that President Obama has invited both Members that clearly want to see reform and even a new legalization (amnesty) program and also Members that have long advocated for a decrease in over all immigrants coming to the US.
It has been 19 years since the permanent visa numbers have been changed by Congress. Intel believes that the system needs to be reformed and updated and has advocated for changes to the high skilled visa numbers and for reform of the process. When the numbers were set by Congress in 1990 many of the companies today did not even exist. Tight visa quotas means that the waiting time for green cards has been getting longer and longer causing signifcant hardship for employers and employess around the country. We support reform and specifically an increase to the employment based visa numbers for the highly skilled to ensure that we have an efficient, predictable and flexable immigration system so that we can both move our workforce around the world and recruit and retain foreign nationals to work in the US. There is a great deal of policy activity on immigration both in DC and at the State level right now – I will have more posts on this topic and would love to hear what you are thinking. .↧