If you or someone you know need legal status to stay in this country, the time to act is now. The window of opportunity to legally immigrate to the U.S may be closing soon for many people. Introduced in the Senate last week and endorsed by President Trump, the RAISE Act will severely limit the number of legal immigrants admitted to our country over the next decade. This legislation represents a profound change to U.S. immigration policies that have been in place for the past fifty years.
The RAISE Act cuts immigration by half from the current level of more than 1 million green cards per year granting foreigners permanent legal residence in the United States. Who will be cut from the list of acceptable legal immigrants? RAISE disallows non-minor children and siblings of legal immigrants from getting green cards. Additionally, the bill caps refugee levels at 50,000 per year, and it ends a visa diversity lottery that has awarded 50,000 green cards a year, mostly to areas in the world that traditionally do not have as many immigrants to the United States, including Africa. Brown University professor Matthew Guterl said, “the RAISE Act—an immigration bill noteworthy for its barely disguised roots in American racism.”
While the justification for this bill is immigrants have taken jobs away from American workers, research has shown this claim to be a myth. In fact, as published by the New York Times, a 2016 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that immigrants do not take American jobs. The report assembles research from 14 leading economists, demographers and other scholars, including some, like Marta Tienda of Princeton, who write favorably about the impacts of immigration and others who are skeptical of its benefits, like George J. Borjas, a Harvard economist. Here’s what the report says: “We found little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term,” said Francine D. Blau, an economics professor at Cornell University who led the group that produced the 550-page report.
Essentially, then, the RAISE Act is not likely to improve job prospects for Americans, but it will certainly rip many families apart, forcing loved ones to endure permanent separation across borders. RAISE takes aim at the immigrants who come to the U.S. to join relatives who live here legally, disallowing all but minor children and spouses from joining the family.
Fortunately, immigration activists are speaking out against this bill. Please join us in raising your voices against RAISE. Find contact information for your leaders here: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials/
In the meantime, please contact us if you need help getting your legal paperwork for you or a loved one to stay in the United States. Our team has over forty years of experience as successful immigration law specialists, and we are here for you.