AMNESTY IS A "NO-GO", FOR NOW AT LEAST!!!

Reid Stripped Amnesty from Iraq Spending Bill But H-2B Increases Remain




(May 21) CongressDaily AM today reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) stripped the AgJOBS amnesty from the Iraq supplemental spending bill (H.R. 2642) last night as well as the increase in visas for employment-based permanent workers. Provisions to increase H-2B visas for unskilled seasonal workers remain in the bill. Please call your Senators to tell them to remove the H-2B visa increases as well, and to keep the AgJOBS amnesty and employment-based permanent worker increases off the bill.







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The H-2B provisions still in the bill, which were sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), would exempt from the annual cap of 66,000 any H-2B non-agricultural seasonal workers who were admitted during the previous three years. This could increase the annual number of H-2B workers to over 400,000 by FY 2011.





Also stripped from the Iraq supplemental spending bill were provisions sponsored by Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) that would have "recaptured unused" employment-based visas from the past couple of decades. Since any employment-based visas that are not used in one year are added to the number of available family-based visas for the following year, there are no "unused" employment-based visas, and so there are none to "recapture." However, this deceptive manipulation of visa numbers would have added an estimated 218,000 employment-based visas to the annual cap of 140,000.