'Seasonal' immigrants to US dry up

AHMEDABAD: Visa delays and exhausted visa limits have had a crippling effect on many businesses in the US that depend on seasonal foreign workers.
Many like the hotel and hospitality industry, tourism, construction and agricultural industries heavily depend on these temporary workers.
Employers are facing a severe shortage of foreign temporary workers this summer, as this year''s limit of 66,000 H-2B visas has already been reached.Many employers are pressing for an immediate increase, claiming their businesses will be in jeopardy.
The upcoming elections have led US Senators to offer them various solutions. Three major immigration reforms bills -- focusing on temporary worker shortage -- have been introduced in the US parliament this week. One of these three, ''Safe, Orderly Legal Visas and Enforcement (SOLVE) Act of 2004'' have been welcomed by immigration experts and US employers.
Senator Edward Kennedy and Representatives Robert Menendez and Luis Gutierrez introduced the immigration reform legislation bill to legalise workers, reunite close family members faster, and regulate the flow of legal immigrats by reforming the temporary worker system.
The SOLVE Act would also create a temporary worker programme as well as provide an opportunity for earned legalisation.
Immigration documents issued under the programme would include machine-readable, tamper-resistant biometric identifiers, which would also reduce crime by preventing the falsification of documents.
If approved, this bill can solve the problem of temporary workers that US industries are facing today, comments immigration lawyer Grey Siskind. "Once the H-2B cap was met, employers pressed the panic button and began writing letters to members of Congress last month.
These employers are claiming that Americans don''t want the temporary positions they need filled, as they offer no benefits and typically last a few months. They have started lobbying for approving Senator Edward Kennedy and Republican Bill Delahunt''s ''Save the Summer Act'', which would immediately raise the cap of the H-2B visas to 106,000 for this year only."
According to US immigration experts, the proposal would also provide for timely reunification of immediate family members.
"Currently, the wait times for close family members to be reunited are long. A US citizen parent petitioning for Indian children must wait approximately 10 years and legal permanent residents have even longer waiting periods," says Vipul Patel, a US immigration consultant.
However, the bill''s proponents believe that if passed, the SOLVE Act would broaden the definition of ''Immediate Relative'' to include the spouses and children of legal permanent residents and stop the subtraction of ''Immediate
Relatives'' from the annual cap on family immigration. Senator Orrin Hatch also introduced a bill, the ''Summer Operations and Services Relief and Reform Act''. The bill would exclude all foreign workers returning from the last two seasons from this year''s cap, thus freeing visas for new workers.
A bill submitted by Republican Bob Goodlatte would allow employers who used H-2B workers last year receive the same number again this year, regardless of the overall cap.