USA Green Card Immigration Blog

Jobs for green cards; a controversial program expands – The Boston Globe.

Bill Would Give U.S. Visas to Foreign Home Buyers – WSJ.com.

The reeling housing market has come to this: To shore it up, two Senators are preparing to introduce a bipartisan bill Thursday that would give residence visas to foreigners who spend at least $500,000 to buy houses in the U.S.

The provision is part of a larger package of immigration measures, co-authored by Sens. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah), designed to spur more foreign investment in the U.S.

Foreigners have accounted for a growing share of home purchases in South Florida, Southern California, Arizona and other hard-hit markets. Chinese and Canadian buyers, among others, are taking advantage not only of big declines in U.S. home prices and reduced competition from Americans but also of favorable foreign exchange rates.

To fuel this demand, the proposed measure would offer visas to any foreigner making a cash investment of at least $500,000 on residential real-estate—a single-family house, condo or townhouse. Applicants can spend the entire amount on one house or spend as little as $250,000 on a residence and invest the rest in other residential real estate, which can be rented out.

The measure would complement existing visa programs that allow foreigners to enter the U.S. if they invest in new businesses that create jobs. Backers believe the initiative would help soak up an excess supply of inventory when many would-be American home buyers are holding back because they’re concerned about their jobs or because they would have to take a big loss to sell their current house.

“This is a way to create more demand without costing the federal government a nickel,” Sen. Schumer said in an interview.

International buyers accounted for around $82 billion in U.S. residential real-estate sales for the year ending in March, up from $66 billion during the previous year period, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. Foreign buyers accounted for at least 5.5% of all home sales in Miami and 4.3% of Phoenix home sales during the month of July, according to MDA DataQuick.

Foreigners immigrating to the U.S. with the new visa wouldn’t be able to work here unless they obtained a regular work visa through the normal process. They’d be allowed to bring a spouse and any children under the age of 18 but they wouldn’t be able to stay in the country legally on the new visa once they sold their properties.

The provision would create visas that are separate from current programs so as to not displace anyone waiting for other visas. There would be no cap on the home-buyer visa program.

Over the past year, Canadians accounted for one quarter of foreign home buyers, and buyers from China, Mexico, Great Britain, and India accounted for another quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors. For buyers from some countries, restrictive immigration rules are “a deterrent to purchase here, for sure,” says Sally Daley, a real-estate agent in Vero Beach, Fla. She estimates that around one-third of her sales this year have gone to foreigners, an all-time high.

“Without them, we would be stagnant,” says Ms. Daley. “They’re hiring contractors, buying furniture, and they’re also helping the market correct by getting inventory whittled down.”

In March, Harry Morrison, a Canadian from Lakefield, Ontario, bought a four-bedroom vacation home in a gated community in Vero Beach. “House prices were going down, and the exchange rate was quite favorable,” said Mr. Morrison, who first bought a home there from Ms. Daley four years ago.

While a special visa would allow Canadian buyers like Mr. Morrison to spend more time in the U.S., he said he isn’t sure “what other benefit a visa would give me.”

The idea has some high-profile supporters, including Warren Buffett, who this summer floated the idea of encouraging more “rich immigrants” to buy homes. “If you wanted to change your immigration policy so that you let 500,000 families in but they have to have a significant net worth and everything, you’d solve things very quickly,” Mr. Buffett said in an August interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose.

The measure could also help turn around buyer psychology, said mortgage-bond pioneer Lewis Ranieri. He said the program represented “triage” for a housing market that needs more fixes, even modest ones.

But other industry executives greeted the proposal with skepticism. Foreign buyers “don’t need an incentive” to buy homes, said Richard Smith, chief executive of Realogy Corp., which owns the Coldwell Banker and Century 21 real-estate brands. “We have a lot of Americans who are willing to buy. We just have to fix the economy.”

The measure may have a more targeted effect in exclusive markets like San Marino, Calif., that have become popular with foreigners. Easier immigration rules could be “tremendous” because of the difficulty many Chinese buyers have in obtaining visas, says Maggie Navarro, a local real-estate agent.

Ms. Navarro recently sold a home for $1.67 million, around 8% above the asking price, to a Chinese national who works in the mining industry. She says nearly every listing she’s put on the market in San Marino “has had at least one full price cash offer from a buyer from mainland China.”

Corrections & Amplifications
Harry Morrison bought a four-bedroom vacation home in Vero Beach in March. He first bought a home there four years ago from Sally Daley, a local real-estate agent. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Ms. Daley sold the four-bedroom home to Mr. Morrison in March.

Deportations hit record, ICE says.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton said Tuesday that his agency deported nearly 400,000 individuals during the fiscal year that ended in September, the largest number of removals in the agency’s history.

Morton announced the Fiscal 2011 numbers in Washington, saying about 55 percent of those deported had felony or misdemeanor convictions. Officials said the number of those convicted of crimes was up 89 percent from 2008.

Authorities could not immediately say how many of those crimes related solely to previous immigration violations. Individuals can be convicted of a felony for returning to the United States or being found in the United States after being ordered by the government to leave.

Among the 396,906 individuals deported were more than 1,000 convicted of homicide. Another 5,800 were sexual offenders, and about 80,000 people convicted of drug related crimes or driving under the influence.

“This comes down to focusing our resources as best we can on our priorities,” Morton said. “We continue to hope for comprehensive immigration reform at a national level, working with the Congress, but in the meantime, we work with the resources we have, under the laws we have.”

The announcement comes as the Obama administration has sought to address critics on both sides of the immigration debate. Immigration advocates complain law enforcement officials are spending too much of their scarce resources rounding up families living illegally in the country who are otherwise law-abiding. Others say the administration isn’t doing enough to stop the flow of illegal immigration.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said the agency is focusing its resources on criminals, recent border crossers, and those who repeatedly cross the border.

The Immigration Forum of Washington, D.C., immediately criticized the administration.

“In reality, the numbers highlight a failure of our government to come to grips with our broken immigration system,” the group’s statement said.

Review & Outlook: A Better Idea for Green Jobs – WSJ.com.

Washington has spent years trying to force-feed green jobs, to little good effect. So here’s a better idea: Expand the number of green cards, as in the number of immigrant visas for foreign-born graduates of American universities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

This could even be bipartisan. President Obama this week praised the latest report from his jobs council that proposed more such visas. And this week Idaho Republican Raúl Labrador, a freshman of tea party provenance, introduced a bill in the House to do the same. The evidence is overwhelming that if we let these young people stay in America, rather than sending them home, they’ll end up building new companies and tens of thousands of new jobs.

Consider the immigrant record on technology start-ups, which is summarized in a 2009 Kauffman Foundation study, “Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs.” Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University researcher, found that in 25% of “the U.S. science and technology companies founded from 1995 to 2005, the chief executive or lead technologist was foreign born.” In 2005 those firms produced $52 billion in revenue with 450,000 employees. In Silicon Valley alone, the percentage of immigrant-founded start-ups was 52%.

Mr. Wadhwa found that 74% of these entrepreneurs held advanced degrees, and three-quarters of those who had advanced degrees had concentrations in science, technology, engineering or math. “The vast majority of these company founders didn’t come to the United States as entrepreneurs—52% came to study, 40% came to work,” he writes. The study adds that in 2006 the inventors or co-inventors of more than 25% of U.S. patent applications were from foreign nationals residing in America.

None of this is news to American industry. “Innovation requires innovators,” Darla Whitaker, a Texas Instruments senior vice president, told a House subcommittee last week. Many of the graduates her company recruits are foreign born. The long wait for a green card, she said, is “frustrating for them, limits employer flexibility, and diminishes productivity.” Many of them pack up and go home.

Here’s another bureaucratic wrinkle: India and China have a disproportionate number of such science and engineering graduates, but U.S. law says that any one country can only tap 7% of the total green cards available. This has pushed many of the most attractive recruits to the back of the line. Yet Mr. Wadhwa reports that Indian immigrants founded 26% of immigrant-founded start-ups in Silicon Valley in 2005, which is more than the next four groups from Britain, China, Taiwan and Japan combined. The law’s country limit means that the green card wait can be nine years for many Indians.

Mr. Labrador’s bill would create a special green card category for science, technology, math and engineering master’s and Ph.D. grads who have a job offer. There would be no quota caps, and company recruits would be fast-tracked through the visa process.

Opponents claim these foreigners steal jobs from Americans, but unemployment is low in industries that recruit these highly skilled workers. Everyone wishes more Americans studied science, engineering or math, but not enough do. For example, 55% of U.S. master’s degrees and 63% of doctorates in electrical engineering go to foreign-born students. Mr. Labrador’s bill would collect a fee from employers who sponsor these foreign-born recruits that will go to scholarships for American students.

Meantime, the U.S. has to compete for talent. “We’re finding a lot of these graduates get job offers, but when they find out how long it will take them to get green cards they leave and go work in other countries where they become our competitors,” Mr. Labrador says. The global competition for human capital is as fierce as it is for financial capital, and the U.S. can’t afford to reject either one.

This year’s Diversity Visa Lottery, also known as the “Green Card Lottery,” opened on October 4th and runs through November 5th.  If you would like to learn more about this program, you can visit http://www.usa-green-card.com  Complete instructions and an application form are available on the same site.

Peter Robinson: The GOP’s Immigration Fixation – WSJ.com.

The fight for the Republican presidential nomination has produced a spectacle that seems truly odd. Although illegal immigration has in recent years been drying up—according to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center, it has fallen to 300,000 in 2009 from 850,000 in 2000, while Princeton’s Douglas Massey says that “[f]or the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero”—the issue remains bitterly contentious in the GOP race.

During a debate in Orlando last month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry defended his state’s policy of charging undocumented aliens the same tuition at state-run colleges and universities as ordinary citizens—a policy that commanded bipartisan support in the Texas legislature when he signed it into law in 2001. Mitt Romney, Herman Cain and the other GOP presidential candidates practically hissed Mr. Perry off the stage, and after the debate much of the tea party joined plenty of regular Republicans in denouncing the man.

If illegal immigration is down, why do Republicans still care so much about it? Permit a Californian to attempt an answer.

Since 1986, when President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, the undocumented population of California has risen to around 2.6 million from around one million. This influx has done just what you would have expected: It has affected every aspect of life in the Golden State.

In California’s public schools, the proportion of children in kindergarten through third grade for whom English represents a second language now stands at almost two out of five. In agricultural regions, entire towns have turned over—with a little zig-zagging, you could hike from town to town for much of the 450-mile length of the Central Valley without hearing any language but Spanish.

Consider one neighborhood in Redwood City, a town on the San Francisco peninsula. Known locally as Little Mexico, the neighborhood, which centers on the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Middlefield Road, looks and feels so pervasively south-of-the-border that if you were led there blindfolded you would think you were in Tijuana or Mexicali.

I assumed when I moved to California almost two decades ago that Little Mexico, which then comprised perhaps a dozen blocks, would gradually shrink or atrophy, like North Beach, the Italian neighborhood in San Francisco, or Little Italy in Manhattan. Instead, Little Mexico has roughly tripled in size. Just miles from the headquarters of Apple, Google, HP and Oracle, the engine of assimilation has been humming ineluctably along—in reverse.

Yes, I know. The economic benefits California has derived from immigration, including illegal immigration, have proven enormous. Some studies even suggest that, taking into account the economic growth their labor has made possible, and the sales taxes and other imposts they have paid, undocumented aliens have contributed more to government coffers than they have drawn down.

And even after the American economy finally recovers, falling poverty and birth rates in Mexico suggest that illegal immigration may return only as a small stream—perhaps even a trickle—and not a flood. Over the next decade or so, many of the aliens now in the Golden State will perhaps go home to a modernizing Mexico while Californians come to accept—or at least become resigned to—those who remain, acquiescing in measures that would grant them legal residency and eventually citizenship.

Yet even if a single alien were never again to enter California, and even if half those now in the Golden State illegally were suddenly to return home while the other half magically became citizens, the federal government would still have permitted millions to enter the state in violation of the law. This raises fundamental questions about our constitutional order. How can the federal government fail for years on end to perform a duty as basic as policing the border?

Strangely, in Tuesday evening’s “economic” debate in Hanover, N.H., immigration, legal or otherwise, was never mentioned. Indeed, Messrs. Romney and Cain have demonstrated less interest in illegal immigration itself than in using the issue to attack Mr. Perry. Mr. Romney, whose jobs plan includes no fewer than 59 points, has said of illegal immigration, “Of course we build a fence,” as if that were all there were to it. If the other GOP candidates wish to place themselves to the right of Mr. Perry on this issue, fine. But Republicans would have more faith in their ability to secure the border if they demonstrated that they had given the matter some thought.

Mr. Perry should stop sounding so defensive. He has opposed illegal immigration as stoutly as anyone, but, alone among the candidates, he has dealt with the reality of life on the border. Since his state has the good sense to provide only modest welfare benefits, he should explain, Texans understand that immigrants come to Texas to work, not to collect handouts. And they see no contradiction between calling on the federal government to enforce the law and making the best of the situation Washington has imposed on them, helping undocumented aliens, once in the state, to acquire skills and an education.

A quarter-century after Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, his example remains instructive. Reagan supported one provision of the 1986 act, an amnesty for the three million undocumented aliens then in the country, only because he believed that other provisions, which fortified border enforcement and required employers to verify the legal status of their workers, would end illegal immigration. “Future generations . . . will be thankful,” the president said, “for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship.”

Thankful? Americans instead feel angry—and, for all his big-hearted openness toward immigrants, I believe Reagan would have shared their anger, recognizing the failure of the federal government to “regain control of our borders” as a profound breach of faith. That breach of faith, he would have insisted, must now be repaired.

This year’s visa lottery ends on November 5, 2011. You can learn all new requirements and complete your application form online here: http://www.usa-green-card.com Do not delay!