H1B Visa Lawyer Blog

A coalition of high tech companies and bipartisan politicians, “The Partnership for a New American Economy” are planning a Virtual March on Washington D.C. supporting “Smart” Immigration Reform. “The March for Innovation“, is planned for the Spring, but no specific date has been set.

Their main goal is to make sure that comprehensive immigration reform includes provisions to attract and keep the world’s top college graduates and entrepreneurs in this country. On the subject of college graduates they stated, “Power our innovation economy by granting permanent residency to the world’s leading graduates in science, engineering, technology, and math who receive advanced degrees from U.S. universities. We currently train many of the world’s leading innovators in our universities only to send them abroad to compete against us.” On attracting and keeping entrepreneurs they stated, “Drive new business creation by providing visas to entrepreneurs who want to come to America to start businesses and create jobs. Countries like Canada, UK, Australia, Chile, and Singapore give visas and roll out the red carpet for entrepreneurs. We turn them away.”

By now you are probably asking, what is a virtual march? A virtual march in this case is an organized flooding of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter to inform congress and the country on the subject of smart immigration reform. To review their goals in more details and maybe even sign up, review the home page for “The March for Innovation”.

Senator John McCain held two town hall meetings in his home state of Arizona on Tuesday (2/19/13) to defend the bipartisan immigration reform proposal, “Bipartisan Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform“. After some heated comments on both sides, which you can view on the video I posted below, the two main subjects that worried this gathering emerged, “Border Security” and a “Path to Citizenship”.

On the subject of Border Security, Senator McCain stated that immigration reform should be contingent on better border security that must rely largely on technology to detect border crossings. Some wanted to know about the border fence that the federal government has been building along the Mexico border. Senator McCain stated that we have already spent 60 million dollars building it. The border fence is an important subject in Arizona, mainly because about a third of all illegal crossings take place in the state.

Another primary concern of the meeting was the “Path to Citizenship” for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. One suggested they should all become guest workers but not citizens! Another suggested they all be sent back, deported to their own country. John McCain felt that this was not the way to deal with the problem. “There are 11 million people living here illegally,” he said. “We are not going to get enough buses to deport them.” McCain said a tamper-proof Social Security card would help combat identity fraud, and noted any path to citizenship must require immigrants to learn English, cover back taxes and pay fines for breaking immigration laws.

I have just reviewed a blog written on the question of WHY. The blog post is entitled, “The WHY?s of Immigration Reform 2013” and it was posted on the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) Leadership Blog. At first I thought they meant “WHY Immigration Reform.” Quickly I understood it was about why were so many people, whom the government calls stakeholders excluded from the discussions and why the same people who failed at this type of reform in the past seem to be out front with proposals.

There are many WHY questions being asked in this post; however, the author points out that his list of almost forty some questions does not include every question that needs to be asked. Author Michael Mandel (AILA Media Advocacy Committee Member) states, “Of course this list is not exhaustive, and many of the answers are obvious. But I do believe there is value in the asking”. We at MVP Law Group believe that these kinds of questions need to be included in the discussion.

MVP Law Group would like our blog readers to email us with your own questions or comments about Immigration Reform. We may include them in future blog posts on the subject! Remember, MVP Law Group always invites Immigration related questions for our bimonthly Immigration Q&A Forum!