Gregg-Cantwell Advanced Degree Visa Lottery Amendment
U.S. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), Chairman, Senate Appropriations
Subcommittee on Homeland Security
Mr. Gregg: Mr. President, this amendment is offered by myself and Senator Cantwell. The purpose of this amendment is really pretty simple. We as a nation are in the process of addressing how we handle the illegal immigrant situation, how we handle immigration generally. We're about to basically give a large number of people -- 10 million, maybe 12 million people -- who arrived here illegally the opportunity to get in line and earn their citizenship. Those people for the most part don't have any unique skills that made them special to America's society.
But we didn't seek them out because we felt they were going to add and create jobs here in the United States. But we do have this program called the lottery program where we essentially say to anybody in certain countries which are alleged to be underserved in the sense that they have few people coming into this country -- emigrating into this country, you can get into a lottery and you can get in line and become an American citizen, get a green card and become an American citizen. And there are 50,000 winners handed out every year. And it just seems to us that if you're going to have such a program in the context of overall immigration reform, you ought to be saying that people who can participate in this lottery are people who we as a nation actively need in order to make our nation stronger socially and economically. Rather than simply saying to everyone in the Ukraine, you can participate in the lottery so that you might get a cabdriver or an unemployed cabdriver as your winner of the lottery, we would suggest that we say to the people of the Ukraine, if you have an advanced degree, which America feels would be constructive to our society in making us a stronger society, then you can participate in the lottery.
So what we've done is taken two-thirds of the lottery options -- 33,000 -- and said that for those options, for those underserved countries, alleged underserved countries, people with advanced degrees will be able to compete for those. Then we left one-third in the "anybody can compete for the lottery" status. And this only seems to make sense.
You know, if you look at the debate around this floor, you heard a lot about outsourcing of jobs, the fact that America's losing jobs here and losing jobs there overseas. What we're proposing essentially is to bring people into our country who will create jobs, who are job creators by definition because they have certain skills and abilities, certain talents which we as a nation we know we need. Take, for example, the issue of engineers. We are confronting a world where countries like Japan and especially China are graduating literally four, five, six times the number of engineers we're graduating. We're just not producing enough people in those disciplines, the science disciplines to keep up with our needs as a nation to be competitive economically. So it makes sense that we should go around the world and say to people who have those types of talents, if you want to come to the United States, we've got certain programs which we can use to help you come here.
Now one, of course, is the H-1B program which under this bill has been significantly expanded and is an appropriate program. But in order to participate in the H-1B program, you must have an employer who went out and said we'd like to bring you to the United States to work for us. What we're suggesting is that there are countries in this world today where a lot of these American employers aren't going to go to because the return on their effort isn't that high. And there are a lot of places where people who have these degrees don't have family members in the United States, so they're totally shut out of their ability to participate in coming to America, even though they may have skills and talents which we in America feel very strongly would help us.
And so rather than having a lottery system which says to the unemployed cabdriver in Kiev, you should have a chance to come to America, we're going to have a lottery system that says to the physicist in Kiev, you've got a shot at coming to America. And this seems to make sense, because it isn't as if we as a nation haven't already attracted to us a large number of unskilled people. We've already got that situation. And this bill is trying to address that situation. We've really only got millions of unskilled people who are going to be made, put in line for American citizenship under this bill. It would be appropriate, therefore, it seems, to take this small number of people who can't qualify to come here even though they may have the skills that we need, because they don't have a family member and they don't have an employer sponsor, and say to those folks, yes, we're going to give you the opportunity to come here to through participating in this lottery system. And that's what this proposal does.
Now the idea that some of these nations that have been described as diverse, that's one of those nomenclature feel-good politically correct terms that you put on something when it doesn't make a lot of sense; in this instance it has no applicability at all. The fact is these countries which qualify under this, what's called diversity lottery actually have a large number of people here already illegally. And most of those people are unskilled. They've just shown up and they came here illegally and they're going to be able to get in line now under this bill. So it makes sense that we should say to those nations -- for example, Poland has approximately 50,000 people here that we know of that we estimate are here illegally. Most of them don't have unique skills. We should say, well, if you're in Poland and you want to come to the United States and you want to use the lottery system to come here, you have to have a skill that we need as a nation in order to participate in that lottery. There are almost 200,000 by the estimates, people in this country from Africa who are here illegally and who are probably totally unskilled. What we're suggesting is bring a skill with you if you want to come in here through the lottery system. So we're not suggesting that these countries don't get their fair share of people who are the types that were described by the Senator from New York who come here with a desire to produce and be successful. Those folks may already be here illegally, and they will be able to get in line. Or they can compete for the third of the lottery system that is not going to be targeted towards talents that America needs.
What we're suggesting is that we should have a win-win situation here. If we're going to set up a lottery, not only should the person who wins the lottery be the winner by getting the right to come to the United States, but the United States, the people of America, should be winners by attracting into the country people who we have a pretty good idea are going to be able to contribute to the betterment of our nation because they're going to bring the talents which we need. And this is critical in this world today.
As I mentioned before, we are confronting a world where our capacity to compete is tied directly to our brainpower. You know, we can't compete with the Chinese on labor, because they've got a billion more people than we have. But where we can compete with them is by producing ideas that are better, by taking ideas that are good and making them better, by adding value to things through talent and ability. And so we should be attracting to America people who can help us do that. We should be going across the world basically and saying, give us your best and your brightest and come here and participate in the American dream and raise the waters so that all the boats float higher. And this lottery system, to the extent it makes sense, should be built around that concept. It should not be built around the concept that if you happen to have a high school education or you happen to have held a job in two out of the last five years, you have some unique right to participate in a lottery that gets you into the United States. That makes no sense to us as a nation.
This is not a unique approach, by the way. In fact, most nations do not do what we do. We basically have an open approach to immigration as to talent. Most nations require some sort of qualifying talent in order to be able to emigrate to those nations, especially western nations. And so with this small group, 50,000, as was pointed out -- very small in the context of this entire bill where you're dealing with maybe as many as 12 million people -- in this small group at least we should do it the right way, because who knows? One of those folks who comes in here with that advanced degree in science or advanced degree in medicine may be the person who produces the vaccine that saves us if we confront a terrorist attack or produces the next thought process or software process that creates the next engine of dramatic expansion in the telecommunications world, or is the next Bill Gates of the world. So attracting people who have talent and ability should be one of our purposes, I think. And in the context of a lottery system, it should clearly be our purpose, because the lottery by definition means you should win. And not only should the person who wins the lottery win, but the people who are basically underwriting the lottery should win. And the way America will win under a lottery system is to attract people who can contribute or who have a likelihood of contributing significantly to the betterment of our nation.
So that's why we've proposed this bill. It's been proposed by myself in this amendment, proposed by myself and Senator Cantwell. Granted, there's been some big issues on this floor. It's not the big issue on this floor, but it is an issue of significance. I appreciate Senator Cantwell being my cosponsor on this. She comes from a state where a commitment to high-tech and intellectual property is something that is really built from the state up and been a great driver not only of the prosperity of Washington state, but of the whole nation. And so she understands the importance of this type of an approach. And so I thank her for joining me in this approach of taking two-thirds of these available lottery slots and saying that they should be made available to people from underserved countries, but people in those countries who have obtained degrees in areas that we as a nation determine are important to continuing to promote our prosperity as a culture and as an economy. At this point I reserve the balance of my time. And I yield to the senator from Tennessee.
http://gregg.senate.gov/statements/2006%20statements/0524_gregg_cantwell_visa_lottery.htm