Legal immigration may jump

WASHINGTON — From Capitol Hill to cities across the nation, people are debating immigration passionately, at least the illegal part. Almost entirely unnoticed is that the Senate may be poised to increase legal immigration substantially.

Some estimate bills pending in the Senate could double the nearly 1 million green cards handed out yearly, granting legal permanent residence.

The United States, which welcomes more legal immigrants than any other country, would see major increases in green cards under both immigration proposals being debated in the Senate. The bills also would add tens of thousands of temporary visas for workers, from the high-tech industry to medically underserved areas.

Advocates say it's time Congress expanded a green-card quota that keeps some would-be residents trapped overseas up to 22 years before they are reunited with relatives in the United States.

Some, such as the parents of Cher Musico, are taking extraordinary steps to cope with limited green-card numbers.

The design student at the Art Institute of Dallas said her parents, who live near Oklahoma City, decided in 2003 to adopt two of her cousins from the Philippines because it was the only way to bring them to the United States. The children, now 7 and 12, have been waiting overseas for three years for their paperwork to go through.

"To me, it's awful," Musico said of the wait.

But others question the drive to increase legal immigration, particularly as the Senate is considering offering a path to legalization to the nation's up to 12 million illegal immigrants and creating a guest-worker program to bring in 400,000 more foreigners every year.

"There has never been a public-opinion poll that indicates [a majority of] Americans want more immigration," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes higher immigration.

Only 17 percent of Americans favor increasing legal immigration, while 40 percent say it should be decreased, according to a Pew Hispanic Center poll released Thursday. Thirty-seven percent think the current level is appropriate, pollsters found.

But tackling illegal immigration without increasing legal immigration would be a recipe for future trouble, said Doris Meissner, a Migration Policy Institute senior fellow who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Clinton.

"You really have to expand legal immigration, otherwise you're just creating a whole other bottleneck," she said. In part because newly legal immigrants in many cases would seek to bring relatives from abroad, and if legal pathways don't exist, illegal immigration will begin anew.

Congress accused

Krikorian and others critical of increased immigration quotas accuse congressional leaders of masking their efforts to boost legal immigration.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who has crafted one of the two immigration bills on the Senate floor, has stressed the border-control and enforcement aspects of his bill, not his proposed increase in legal immigration.

Likewise, there's been little focus on the virtually identical legal-immigration changes in a competing bill the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Monday.

The way the bills are worded, it's impossible to determine how much they would increase legal immigration. Judiciary Committee Republican aides said the legislation would add 500,000 to 550,000 green cards each year.

That estimate is too low, said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for Numbers USA, which is lobbying against what she said would "by far" represent the biggest increase in legal immigration in U.S. history. "I'm estimating it would double legal immigration."

In 2004, 946,142 green cards were issued, two-thirds for family reunification.

The Senate bills would significantly increase family sponsored green cards, now capped at 480,000 annually, by exempting spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens from the total. That effectively would add about 260,000 green cards annually.

The bills also would boost employment-based green cards from 140,000 annually to 290,000, and would exempt applicants' spouses and children from the cap. Foreign students would be placed on a faster track for green cards.

And the Judiciary Committee bill, for the next seven years, would permit an unlimited number of green cards for nurses, physical therapists and others in occupations where the Labor Department says workers are in short supply.

Students, workers

The Senate bills also would increase the number of students and workers who could come into the United States temporarily with a range of nonimmigrant visa categories.

Heeding the pleas of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other high-tech leaders, the legislation would increase the cap on H-1B visas from 65,000 to 115,000.

Vikas Yalamanchili, president of Irving, Texas-based technology consulting firm Vensiti, said he would prefer not to use H-1B visas.

But not enough Americans have science and engineering degrees, he noted, making it necessary for Vensiti to rely on H-1B visa holders for nearly half its 50-member work force.

Because the H-1B allotment runs out so quickly and his company is unable to get enough visas, Yalamanchili said he sometimes must enlist subcontractors in India.

Others, tired of the H-1B red tape, leave the United States to work overseas, Yalamanchili said. "If this goes on for a long period of time, we're going to lose our innovators, our scientists, our business leaders."

Thousands of immigrants and their supporters chanted, blew whistles and waved flags from dozens of Latin American countries Saturday as they marched across New York's Brooklyn Bridge in support of immigrant rights.

A festive crowd of more than 10,000 people shouted "We are all Americans," and carried banners in Spanish and English saying "We are not criminals" and "Immigrant rights are human rights" in their trek from Brooklyn across the East River to Manhattan.

The New York protest was the largest of several across the country in the Los Angeles area and other cities. Most of the demonstrations in the past week have targeted legislation approved in the U.S. House, which would, among other things, make it a felony to be in the United States without the proper immigration paperwork.

In Arizona, meanwhile, volunteer members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps concerned about the continued flow of illegal immigrants across the border from Mexico gathered Saturday with lawn chairs, binoculars and cellphones for a new monthlong campaign aimed at raising public awareness of the issue.

At a rally kicking off the effort at a remote southern Arizona ranch, politicians and activists opposing illegal immigration called for more border control.

Don Goldwater, a Republican candidate for Arizona governor, said he had a message for President Bush. "Build us that wall now," Goldwater said, referring to a measure that would add 700 miles of fences along the border. He promised that if elected, he would put illegal immigrants in a tent city on the border and use their labor to build the wall. Goldwater is a nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater.