Health Care Blog

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) has issued a warning about a fraudulent visa interview coaching program that charges Php 3,888.00 for “visa interview coaching” and Php 5,000.00 for medical tests. The sender, David R. Purvis, used a hushmail.com free e-mail account to solicit prospective victims. This program is not to be trusted.

“No placement fee. No processing fee. No salary deduction. No show money. No experience required. Free accommodation and food allowance,” the email sender assures the worker. job applicants who have received such recruitment emails should forward them for investigation to: info@poea.gov.ph

The POEA seeks to promote and protect Philippine recruits. It issues a license to those overseas employers who want to recruit Philippine nationals. Its aim is to tease out unscrupulous recruiting activities.

As we mentioned in an earlier blog post this week, the viability of HR3012 hangs in the balance. Congress will work until August 4 and then take a month off. The legislative calendar has some openings in September, although many Senators and Representatives focus will be on their own re-election campaigns and supporting other’s re-election efforts. The close Presidential campaign also means that much political momentum will be drawn away from immigration legislation and toward President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney.

Several comments to this blog have raised the very fair question of why Congress chose to pinch immigrant visa numbers away from the Rest of World in order to equalize the Employment Based categories. It’s a very fair point that has been made. HR 3012’s effect will be to delay EB2 and EB3 visa numbers for non-Indian and non-Chinese natives. It is unclear at this time what it means for Philippine natives, although the best guess is that Philippine EB3 will also be hurt by HR3012’s enactment.

MU Law’s position is that this is unfair and that solving one unfair policy (retrogression dates determined by birth) by creating another unfair policy (delaying approval for scores of applicants who have played by the rules) is wrong. The correct thing to do would be for Congress to guarantee reasonable processing times for all EB-2 and EB-3 visa applicants who presently have approved I-140s.

One way to do this would be to create a better phase-in plan than the current three year phase-in plan. HR’3012’s three year phase-in gradually raises the per-country caps until all EB applications are in the same retrogression schedule. The math on the phase-in is complex. It is nearly impossible to guess where the EB-3 priority dates will eventually settle if HR 3012 becomes law. Adding to the complexity is the real-world fact that no-one, including the Department of State, knows how many of those pending EB-3 applications are still viable.

A better plan would guarantee all EB-2 and EB-3 applicants that their retrogression would not increase as a result of HR 3012. So for instance if a ROW EB-3 has a priority date of September 2008 on the day that HR3012 becomes law, and the ROW Visa Bulletin is September 2006, then that applicant would be guaranteed a green card two years from the date of the enactment of HR3012. This plan would be simple to institute and could be crafted in a way as to not increase visa numbers.

Unfortunately, Congress has chosen to use the three year phase-in, which is more complex and ultimately serves neither constituency. It’s neither fair, nor easily applied.

Sen. Grassley (R-IA) has released his “hold” on HR 3012. HR 3012 has many components to it. It notably calls for an elimination of “per-country” immigrant visa (Green card) caps, which historically have limited the amount of employment-based green cards from any one country to seven percent of the total immigrant visa total. These per-country caps have created a longer processing time for those from high visa-demand countries such as India, China, and to some extent, the Philippines. These per-country caps have been based not on the skill-level of the immigrant, but on the immigrant’s country of birth. It seems unlikely that such a policy would ever be passed today. Congress is right to get rid of them.

That having been said, HR 3012 comes with some warts, mainly as a result of a necessary deal with Sen. Grassley (R-IA), who passionately believes that employment-based immigration is bad for America. Sen. Grassley’s amendment gives broad, “big-government” power, to the Department of Labor. The DOL will be allowed to delay and deny Labor Condition Applications for the vaguest of reasons. Sen. Grassley’s expansion of government oversight is intellectually inconsistent for a Senator who just last week found expansions of government oversight by the Food and Drug Adminsitration to be “shocking”.

With the Senate’s summer recess drawing near, whether HR 3012 moves forward is an open question, although still more likely to happen than not. There are rumors that several other Senators are concerned with Sen. Grassley’s amendment and may delay or deny the bill’s passage. This would be a shame because the bill’s main purpose, elimination of per-country caps, is an admirable one.