Tuesday, October 29, 2019
On Oct. 16, Senators Dick Durbin and Patrick Leahy introduced the Resolving Extended Limbo for Immigrant Employees and Families (RELIEF) Act, which is an alternative to the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act ( S. 386) proposed by Senator Mike Lee.
According to Senator Durbin, the new RELIEF Act would:
• Eliminate the current green card backlog over 5 years
• Eliminate the per-country caps for employment-cased green card
• Remove spouses and minor children from the employment-based pool of green cards to the family categories.
Both Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act and RELIEF Act would eliminate the per-country caps on employment-based immigration, when the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act contains no change in the amount of total employment-based immigration amounts, the RELIEF Act would essentially increase the number of green cards issued each year and claiming to clear the existing backlog of employment-based green cards over five years. An intense debate occurred on the U.S. Senate floor. Each of these senators asked for Unanimous Consent (UC) to pass their respective bills, and each objected to the other. Under current deadlocked situation, we are waiting for some other attempts to address the issue.