Bill Seeks to Tip the Scales in Legal Immigration, Favoring Some Nationalities over Others

FAIR Take | December 2023

Earlier this month, Congressman Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) introduced the Immigration Visa Efficiency and Security Act (IVES Act). The bill would eliminate the per-country caps for employment-based visas and double the cap on family-based visas. The IVES Act represents the third attempt in as many Congresses to rally support for these measures.  The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act and the Equal Access to Green Cards for Legal Employment Act (EAGLE Act) were its predecessors.

Per-country caps were added to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in 1965 to create a basic rule of fairness: that no country or group of countries should be able to dominate or manipulate our immigration system.  These annual caps were instituted for both employment-based and family-based green cards.  Under this system, the law limits each country to an annual cap of seven percent of family and employment-based admissions. This means that no single country may gobble up more than seven percent of the total number of employment-based or family-based green cards.

The IVES Act would undo his long-standing law.  First, it would eliminate altogether the per-country cap on employment-based green cards.  Because the vast majority of aliens waiting in line to get employment-based green cards are Indians and Chinese who are in the U.S. on H-1B visas, the change would give the overwhelming majority of employment-based green cards to nationals from those countries, at the expense of applicants from the rest of the world.  It would also fuel demand for the H-1B program as it will become the only realistic way of obtaining an employment-based green card.

With respect to family-based green cards, the IVES Act would double the per-country cap from 7 percent to 15 percent.  Because a large majority of aliens waiting to get family-based green cards are from Mexico, the Philippines, India and China, here the law would direct more family-based green cards to those countries—again, at the expense of individuals from every other country across the globe.  Because of chain migration, which enables green card holders and citizens to bring in extended family members, this would only multiply the demand for green cards from these countries in the future, squeezing out the chances of other nationalities emigrating to the U.S.

Proponents of the IVES Act claim that the “reforms” will help the U.S. economy and allow foreign workers who have invested in the country to stay here and not be subject to the “arbitrary” cap.  The economic reality, however, is that the IVES Act would incentivize more foreign nationals to seek entry into the U.S. through the H-1B visa program, as it would become the quickest, most reliable path to a green card. Eliminating per-country caps would allow nationals of the two countries with the largest number of employment-based applications — India and China — to gobble up the majority of the immigrant visas allowed each year under current law. 

As FAIR has previously noted, the proposed reform is premised on a false narrative that it will better protect American workers and be fairer for foreign nationals who have waited years to obtain a green card.  The real beneficiaries of the IVES Act will be the tech industry and the Indian workers who have dominated the H-1B visa program, not American workers who are disadvantaged by cheaper foreign labor.  FAIR also believes that eliminating per-country caps is deeply unfair to employment-based green card applicants from every other country in the world.

Even open-borders groups have also come out strongly against bills like the IVES Act. When the EAGLE Act was considered last year, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) noted that the bill “does not strike the right balance of eliminating per-country limitations without adversely impacting others.” Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Immigration Taskforce, likewise came out against the bill in December 2022, writing that it runs contrary to the goal of establishing a fair and just immigration system.

As the economy struggles, any employment-based visa reform effort must truly change the deeply flawed H-1B program, which is the pipeline for such green cards.  Rather than ensuring American workers get the first opportunity at jobs before an employer imports a foreign national, the IVES Act reinforces the broken system without meaningful reform.