FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 18, 2012
SCHUMER, COONS INTRODUCE VISA REFORM PLAN TO KEEP BEST AND BRIGHTEST IN U.S. TO FUEL VITAL INDUSTRY, CREATE JOBS AND BOOST ECONOMIC GROWTH
Current Immigration Policy Encourages Foreign Students With Advanced Degrees To Move Home, Despite Shortage of Engineers in U.S. “BRAINS Act” Would Make It Easier For Most Talented Foreign Students To Stay In U.S. After School And Fill High-Tech Jobs Vital To Emerging Start-ups and Tech Giants
Senate Plan Would Create 55K New STEM Visas In Each of Next Two Years
WASHINGTON, DC—U.S. Senators Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) and Chris Coons (D-DE) unveiled legislation on Tuesday to reform the U.S. visa system in order to encourage the world’s best and brightest to stay in the United States after receiving graduate degrees in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.
The “BRAINS Act” would fix a long-existing problem in our visa system that, despite the worsening shortage of highly-skilled tech workers based in the United States, forces many of the world’s brightest students to return to their country of origin, taking with them any economic growth and jobs that they might create.
The legislation creates a pilot program through which 55,000 new green cards per year will be available for foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities with advanced degrees in STEM fields. It also reduces the red tape to obtain a student visa, and allows high-tech workers currently in the United States on temporary visas to renew their visas without having to first return to their country of origin.
“It makes no sense that America is educating the world’s smartest and most talented students and then, once they are at their full potential, kicks them out the door,” said Schumer. “We should be encouraging every brilliant and well educated immigrant to stay here, build a business here, employ people here, and grow our economy. Fixing our broken greencard system will help ensure that the next eBay, the next Google, the next Intel will be started in America, not in Shanghai.”
"American colleges and universities are educating some of the sharpest technical minds on the planet," Coons said. "So why are we sending them away to pursue their ideas in other countries? We are fueling the economies that are trying to beat us in the global marketplace. The BRAINS Act clears a path for foreign-born, American-educated students with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and math to stay in the United States after graduation to pursue their ideas and create jobs here. This bill is a creative solution to a significant problem, and a smart way to inject new innovations into the American market. I'm proud to support these needed reforms to our immigration system, and to help unite families who are an integral part of the fabric of this country."
Current immigration policy encourages foreign students to study and get their degrees from America’s top universities, but discourages those same students from remaining in the United States and starting new companies in America. Schumer and Coons noted that those students who wish to make America their permanent home must compete for very limited H1-B temporary visas that make it difficult to change jobs, earn a promotion, or travel abroad; or they must eventually give up and return home—wasting what is often up to a decade of educational investment by our American schools.
A summary of the new STEM proposal appears below.
Overview of the Benefits to Research and American Innovation through Nationality Statutes Act of 2012 (‘‘BRAINS Act’’)
The BRAINS Act will finally provide the much-needed reform to our high-skilled immigration system that America needs to ensure that the industries of the 21st century take root here in the United States. It will accomplish this goal in the following ways:
1. It creates a 2-year pilot program to provide 55,000 new green cards per year for foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (“STEM”).
2. To be eligible, an alien must 1) have received a master’s degree or higher from an eligible U.S. university in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics; 2) have an offer of employment in the U.S. in a STEM field, and 3) be petitioned for by an employer who has gone through labor certification to show that there are not sufficient American workers able, willing, equally qualified and available for the job at the wage level paid by the employer to all other individuals with similar experience and qualifications for the job.
3. To be eligible for its students to receive green cards, a university must be: 1) accredited; 2) at least 10 years old; and 3) classified as a research institution by the Director of the National Science Foundation. The school cannot provide incentive payments to persons based on securing foreign students for the university.
4. It encourages the best and brightest foreign students to study, live, and work in the United States by allowing them to receive student visas to attend our colleges and universities to study in STEM fields. STEM students will no longer be required to demonstrate that they have no desire to stay permanently in the U.S. as a precondition to being allowed to attend school here.
5. It provides any unused green cards from this program to be used to reduce the backlog for employment-based green cards that exists for highly-skilled STEM advanced-degree graduates from foreign universities.
6. It allows temporary workers on high-skilled visas who have not violated their status to renew their visas from within the United States.
7. I provides labor protections to ensure that foreign workers do not take high-paying high-skilled jobs that American workers are available to fill.
8. It codifies the practice that the priority date (for determining an alien’s place in line) for an employer’s green card petition is the date that the employer files the labor certification application. The bill also ensures that an alien who switches from one green card family-preference category to another retains their original priority date, and that an alien who switches from one green card employer-preference category to another retains their original priority date.
9. It expands “age-out” protection in current law to benefit minor children who turn 21 while they wait for their green cards to become available.
10. It encourages highly skilled workers to remain in the United States by providing for faster reunification with their spouses and minor children. This is done by creating a new entry slot for a nuclear family member of a highly-skilled permanent resident when a lawful permanent resident is deported. Consequently, net immigration is not increased, but family reunification is expedited.