GSN Dec 2015/Jan 2016 Digital Edition

Congress funds government
and extends immigration for
ten months
By Joshua Breisblatt
This week, the House and Senate
overwhelmingly passed a $1.15
trillion omnibus spending bill that
funds the federal government for the
rest of the Fiscal Year (FY), through
September 30, 2016, as well as a package
of tax breaks worth around $620
billion. The spending bill, which was
seen as the first significant test for
the new Speaker of the House Paul
Ryan (R-WI), not only funded the
federal government but contained a
variety of major provisions, some of
which effect immigration policy.
The Department of Homeland
Security funding featured many of
the same provisions from previous
years including the following requirements:
that Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintain
34,000 detention beds, that Border
Patrol maintain 21,370 border
agents, and that U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS)
fund the Citizenship and Integration
Grant Program with $10 million
from its fee account.
The omnibus also funded the nation’s
immigration courts, giving the
chronically-underfunded Executive
Office of Immigration Review
(EOIR) enough funding for 55 new
immigration judges teams, which
will allow EOIR to hire new judges
and necessary support staff. There is
some hope that these new judges will
help to reduce the record backlogs in
the immigration court system.
One of the major policy provisions
included in the omnibus is the
Visa Waiver Improvement and Terrorist
Travel Prevention Act of 2015
which previously passed the House
of Representatives by 407-19. The
bill terminates Visa Waiver Program
(VWP) travel privileges for all citizens
of VWP countries who are also
nationals of Iraq, Syria, Iran, or Sudan,
singling out and discriminating
based on nationality. It also excludes
all individuals who have traveled
since March 1, 2011 to certain countries–
including Syria, Iraq, and other
designated countries. Many organizations
expressed serious concern
over the language, saying it is overbroad
and will have unintended consequences,
with one example being
making it potentially more difficult
for journalists and humanitarian aid
workers to travel.
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Photo: William Beem
The omnibus also contains controversial
changes to the H-2B program.
The H-2B program allows U.S.
employers to recruit foreign workers
to fill job vacancies for temporary
and seasonal positions. There is an
annual cap of 66,000 H-2B workers
per year. The omnibus contains a
provision, commonly called the “returning
work” exemption, which allows
an H-2B worker that has been
counted against the 66,000 cap in one
of the three previous years to return
to work in the H-2B program in the
current year without being counted
against the cap. Some Republican
and Democratic members strongly
objected to the provision.
The omnibus reauthorized three
visa programs and the E-Verify Program
for the rest of the fiscal year,
without making any changes to the
programs. These programs are:
• The EB-5 program: The immigrant
investor program, known as
EB-5, was created in 1990 to stimulate
job growth and capital investment.
It is the only visa program for
investors that leads to permanent
residence, and it requires that applicants
invest $1 million (or $500,000
if the investment is in a rural or
high-unemployment area) and create
at least 10 jobs. There are 10,000
visas allocated per fiscal year for the
program.
• Conrad 30 Program: This program,
created in 1994, allows certain
physicians who trained in the
United States on J-1 visas to obtain
a waiver of the two-year home residence
requirement. In exchange for
the waiver, the physician must work
for at least three years treating medi-