DATE
Your name
Your address
Your city, state, zip code
Phone: Your phone number
Email: Your email address
Dear Senator Name,
I write to you as one of the many Indian/Chinese skilled professional workers in the US. Our concerns regarding employment-based immigration have multiplied overnight due to the heavy and the highly unpredicted retrogression mentioned in the October 2005 Visa Bulletin published by DOS for all employment-based immigration categories (EB1, EB2, EB3) for India and China.
According to this Visa Bulletin, the Visa Cutoff Dates for Indians and Chinese are such that we would have to wait for another 6 to 8 years after having waited patiently for 2-3 years just for our labor certifications. The validity of our H1B visas is 6 years and beyond that we have to depend on yearly visa extensions, besides having severe restrictions, such as, we cannot change jobs, we cannot visit our home country and so on. Our plight in this condition is beyond imagination!
I have been working here in the US for the last XXX years and have been paying my taxes regularly. My employer has a permanent employment opportunity in the United States for which they have sponsored me for permanent residency to fill this position. Unfortunately due to annual numerical limits on the employment based immigrant visa, and due to the heavy retrogression my permanent residency petition will be kept pending for need of visa numbers for an almost indefinite period of time, to an extend that I would be forced to return to my home country. This would be very heart breaking for me as well as for my employer. In fact a many of us have already started planning on those lines!
The situation does not seem to have any end in sight if there are no immigration policy changes. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has done and is doing some commendable work in backlog reduction and PERM processing to expedite labor certifications, but this is meaningless if there are no employment based visa numbers available to successfully complete the immigration process.
There are many possible solutions to the problems we face today, such as, (1) Recapturing all the unused Visas for the past 10 years. (2) Allowing I-485 and EAD filings even if the visa numbers are not available, and then processing I-485s in the order of priority dates. (3) Removing the per-country visa limit or modifying it to suit the population ratio of each country (4) Increasing the per-country visa limit (5) Making the immigration process independent of the employer.
As recently as last month, Mr. Bill Gates and Mr. Craig Barrett, some of the country's foremost industry leaders, spoke on the matter of legal immigration and pointed out that America's immigration system needs fixing. These visionaries have recognized that the economic progress and standard of living can only be achieved and maintained through qualified and skilled immigrant labor. Mr. Greenspan also indicated in his last month speech that US needs skilled immigrants for proper economic growth.
USA is called the “land of opportunity”. On behalf of all the legal and skilled professionals from India and China, I request that we be given the well-deserved opportunity to file our immigration status in a timely manner. I request you to please do whatever is there in your powers to ease out our immigration problems which have caused a great deal of pain and depression to our whole community.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Your signature
Your name
Your Email