Every year, the U.S. sets aside permanent resident cards, known as “green cards,” including 226,000 family-preference green cards for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, 140,000 employment-based green cards and 50,000 diversity green cards. But the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, plus the Trump administration’s gutting of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, have slowed the processing of all green cards. And if they aren’t processed by the end of a fiscal year, these green cards — typically, tens of thousands of them — go unused and disappear. This bureaucratic vanishing act only exacerbates the bloated green card application backlog of around 5 million and counting. That backlog is made worse by per-country caps, which create decades-long waits for immigrants from countries such as India and China. Our nation’s immigration “system” — system being an overstatement here — does not meet the 21st-century opportunities and threats we face today. But now, Congress’ budget reconciliation negotiation presents an opportunity to recapture unused green cards and begin to bring our immigration system into the 2000s. President Joe Biden’s latest reconciliation plan includes a proposal that would recapture hundreds of thousands of green cards that have gone unused over several decades and make “them available for immigrants who are currently caught up in the backlog.” It’s a smart approach. While the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan adviser on procedural issues, has not ruled on whether green card recapture can be included in a budget reconciliation measure, there’s precedent: A similar measure was passed by a Republican-controlled Senate in 2005. Although the provisions were not included in the final budget, no challenge was raised on procedural grounds. The New York Times reported that at the time, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) supported “recapturing unused visas for high-skilled workers in a reconciliation package as a way to ‘keep jobs here in America, rather than export them to places like India and China.’” In 2021, this is no longer just a matter of keeping jobs in the U.S. Source:https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/579507-recapturing-green-cards-immigration-is-american-advantage-over-china
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