Hitting close to home, reminding us that immigration problems are not limited to the Latina/o, Mexico families and loved ones.

Thanks to Reappropriate for the heads up on this article.

BAY AREA
Asians frustrated, angry over immigration plan

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, May 24, 2007
Mahesh Pasupuleti, a software engineer from India, stands… Francisco Villacrusis sits in his San Francisco apartment…

San Francisco resident Francisco Villacrusis and his wife petitioned 13 years ago for their grown children to join them from the Philippines and keep them company in their final years.

But if Congress passes immigration changes now being proposed, Villacrusis has little chance of realizing his dream because the immigration service canceled the paperwork when his wife died because she had filed it, and the changes would invalidate any new petitions for adult children or siblings filed after April 30, 2005.

“I’m lonely. It’s very hard to live alone,” said Villacrusis, a retired sales manager and a U.S. citizen since 1999. “I have prayed for this for a long, long time.”

In the Bay Area, with a high concentration of Asians, who face some of the longest waits to immigrate, proposed changes to family-sponsored and job-specific green cards are angering Asian American community leaders. Immigrant advocates say the changes would undermine the family ties that bind most immigrant communities. They also would unfairly shut out the region’s large population of highly skilled workers here on visas from building a permanent life in the United States.

“I feel frustrated, angry, deceived,” said Mahesh Pasupuleti, a software engineer in Emeryville who came from India eight years ago on an H-1B visa and has applied, with his employer’s sponsorship, for a green card. Under the changes, he wouldn’t be able to stay longer than six years, even if he were in line to receive a green card.

“There are half a million people like me,” said Pasupuleti, who is a member of Immigration Voice, a group that lobbies to ease the path to permanent residence for highly skilled temporary workers. “If anybody gets special treatment, it should be us, because we’ve been playing by the rules and contributing to this economy.”

Much of the debate over the Senate bill has so far focused on legalizing an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants and creating a temporary program for low-skilled workers, elements that tend to affect immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, who make up about two-thirds of the nation’s illegal immigrants.

Foreign-born Asians — who make up 40 to 63 percent of immigrants in the Bay Area’s five largest counties, compared to 27 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population, according to 2005 census estimates — are more likely than immigrants from Latin America to naturalize.

Immigrants from China, India and the Philippines in particular must wait longer than most other immigrants to bring in family members because their countrymen have tended to fill the annual immigration quotas for their countries more quickly than immigrants from other countries.

The current “family reunification” system — the system that required Villacrusis’ children to wait 15 years, but at least allowed him to apply for them to immigrate — would be replaced by a point system. New weight would be given to a prospective immigrant’s education, job skills, English ability and other measures, and the importance of kinship ties would decline dramatically.

“It’s the only part of the bill that would affect U.S. citizens and the only part that’s retroactive,” said Joren Lyons, a staff attorney at San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus, who is assisting Villacrusis with his case.

Lyons and other leaders in the Bay Area Asian community spoke out Wednesday to denounce the scaling back of family-based immigration, which has been central to U.S. immigration law since 1965.

“The point system is discriminatory because it works against low-income, limited-English speakers,” said Christina Wong, a staff member for Chinese for Affirmative Action, at a press conference in San Francisco. “We deserve a system that truly eliminates backlogs, that respects our communities and that looks at the contributions we’ve provided this country.”

Other immigration analysts said it is time to eliminate the “chain migration” that arises when immigrants can sponsor their relatives. Instead, the United States should focus on attracting immigrants who can make the greatest contributions to the national interest.

“The rationale, and I think that was sound reasoning, was that (family-based immigration) didn’t seem like a good idea economically,” said Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., which favors reducing immigration. “So many of these people are unskilled, they create a fiscal problem and seemed to be overburdening the bureaucracy.”

Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California, said many immigrants who come on family reunification visas actually are highly skilled. But he said the point system could bring a different flow of well-educated immigrants to the Bay Area.

“This proposal would favor people with high skills but not necessarily those with family here,” he said. “It could lead to more migration from Asia, but not necessarily family members of people who are already here.”

Nam Vo, a 25-year-old immigrant from Vietnam sponsored by his mother, was sworn in as a U.S. citizen Wednesday in San Jose. An electrical engineer and a graduate of UC Berkeley, Vo said the current immigration system allowed his family members to reunite and put their talents to work in their adopted country.

“I think it’s terrible,” Vo said, of the proposal to eliminate some family preference visas. “I feel bad for all the families whose brothers and sisters could not come. If they cannot come here, they lose their parents.”
KEY PROVISIONS OF
PROPOSED CHANGES:

Illegal immigrants: Anyone in the country illegally before January could receive probationary legal status, a four-year “Z visa,” renewable once, if they come forward immediately. To adjust their status to lawful permanent residence, they must also pay $5,000 in fees, and the head of each household must temporarily return to the home country.

Green cards: None would be processed for Z visa holders until border security and workplace enforcement goals have been met and an existing backlog of green card applications is cleared (an estimated eight-year process).

Point system: 380,000 immigrant visas would be awarded annually (with 50 percent of weight for employment criteria, 25 percent for education, 15 percent for English proficiency, 10 percent for family ties). This system would replace 226,000 family-preference green cards, 140,000 employer-sponsored green cards and 50,000 other green cards currently awarded annually.

Family ties: Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and permanent residents would continue to be eligible for green cards, but adult children and siblings would not. Visas for parents of U.S. citizens would be capped at 40,000 annually and those for spouses and children at 87,000 a year.

Source: Associated Press; Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (Senate Bill 1348); U.S. State Department.
BAY AREA IMMIGRANTS,
2005

— Alameda County: 30 percent foreign-born (including 30 percent Latin American, 57 percent Asian)

— Contra Costa County: 23 percent foreign-born (43 percent Latin American, 40 percent Asian)

— San Francisco: 36 percent foreign-born (20 percent Latin American, 63 percent Asian)

— San Mateo County: 35 percent foreign-born (34 percent Latin American, 49 percent Asian)

— Santa Clara County: 36 percent foreign-born (28 percent Latin American, 60 percent Asian)

— United States: 12 percent foreign-born (53 percent Latin American, 27 percent Asian)

Source: U.S. Census Bureau estimates for 2005 (available only for geographies with more than 1 million residents).

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/24/BAGI7Q0MVO1.DTL

This article appeared on page B – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle