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Thursday Immigration Bulletin: “Legal Limbo”

Added 2022-11-10 22:17:50 +0000 UTC

Good afternoon! Another huge backlog of migrants in “legal limbo” grows; big tech layoffs hit visa migrants (also in legal limbo) particularly hard; as a universe of immigrant relief advocates (many of them in legal limbo, too) plan returns to Capitol Hill to lobby for their causes. This is your Thursday immigration bulletin…

“Asylum System is Collapsing”

We’ll start with new reporting from CBS News immigration ace Camilo Montoya-Galvez who tweeted this morning that the U.S. immigration system is collapsing under the weight of a massive asylum backlog.

“Fewer than 600 judges are reviewing 2 million court cases—including 750,000 asylum requests. Migrants are waiting 4.2 years for a hearing. An unknown number of migrants have not even received a court date,” wrote Camilo.

“Legal limbo” is a term coming up a lot to describe the perpetual uncertainty of backlogged immigrants. Several backlog relief bills have been introduced in the current Congress. None have passed either chamber.

Tech Layoffs Hit Visa Migrants

Marketplace aired a new story on how the wave of layoffs hitting big tech are impacting visa immigrants in the industry.

“For decades, the tech industry has relied heavily on H-1B visas, a guest worker visa for immigrants with specialized skills that’s usually good for three years. But when H-1B holders are laid off, they have 60 days to basically find a new job … or leave the country,” reports Meghan McCarty Marino,

Ajay Machada, a prominent green card advocate on Twitter was quoted in the segment, but tweeted that he was “disappointed” when the segment aired.

Missing from the segment, said Machada, was the root cause of why so many immigrants from India are not yet green card holders: there are existing artificial country caps on green cards for employment and family visa holders.

Country caps limit the allotment of green cards to a given country to no more than 7% of the total annual green cards.

Country caps on employment visas particularly impact visa migrant workers from India due to the high demand for green cards by workers from that country; while family-based caps have the biggest impact on migrants from Mexico and the Philippines.

In recent days, tragic stories of laid off immigrants have hit LinkedIn where tech workers scramble to find new employers who will sponsor their work visa before it's too late and they fall out of status.

Immigrants Plan Lame Duck Push

Several immigration advocacy organizations are planning to return to Capitol Hill during the lame duck session to pitch their respective legislative proposals.

Immigration Voice, an organization looking to end country caps, began meetings this week with lawmakers that advocates say will continue next week in-person on Capitol Hill.

The backlog relief group will arrive in an extremely crowded legislative calendar, especially in the Senate, where other immigrant relief organizations (and their lobbyists) tell me they, too, are pushing leadership in both chambers to advance their respective proposals to the House and/or Senate floor.

Organizations and lobbyists for DACA recipients, Afghan war refugees, farmworkers, day laborers, mixed-status families, asylum seekers, and other migrant groups plan to make their presence known in Congress as part of an eleventh hour push to pass some form of relief legislation before the GOP takes over the House, Senate, or both.

Of course, the policy calculus on immigrant relief changes if the GOP fails to win a majority in both the House and Senate, which could still happen. As I type this bulletin, neither chamber has been called though the conventional wisdom among forecasters seems to be settling on a Democratic Senate and GOP House.

Shattered Advocacy Infrastructure

The 117th Congress began with bold overtures about broad, ambitious coalitions of migrants working together to achieve relief … ambitions that never really panned out.

The same Congress ends with a free-for-all of advocates approaching lawmakers in a cacophony of one-off pitches and priorities.

The scramble for resources has always created rifts among advocates, but what seasoned Hill aides say is missing going into the lame duck, is a unified proposal or message that lawmakers could rally around.

I’ll keep watching this space and updating readers on the latest immigration happenings. Meanwhile, if you are meeting with Congress about your immigration proposal(s), I’d love to hear from you…