• The bill would recapture hundreds of thousands of unused family-based and employment-based visas previously allocated by Congress which remain unused due to administrative backlogs and imperfect estimations. Unused and unclaimed visas from 1992 to 2007 would be placed back into the pool of current visas for families and employers to utilize, and unused visas in future fiscal years would “roll over” to the next year.
• Currently, the immediate relatives (meaning spouses, parents and children under 21) of U.S. citizens count against the annual worldwide immigration cap of 480,000. The bill would ensure that immediate relatives of U.S. citizens are no longer counted against the cap, freeing up visas for the other preference categories of family-based immigrants.
• The bill would reclassify children and spouses and immediate relatives accompanying or following to join of legal permanent residents as “immediate relatives.” This would allow LPR spouses and children to immediately qualify for a visa, and also place more visas in the pool for other family preference categories.
• One provision would increase the per country limits of family and employment-based visas from 7% to 10%. Right now, each country only has a 7% share of the total cap of visas that Congress allocates each year. Increasing each country’s percentage of visas would help countries like China, Mexico, and India receive more visas.
• Every year, a number of immigrants are deported because the U.S. citizen relative or legal permanent resident relative who sponsored them has died. The bill addresses the immigration-related hardships caused by these family tragedies and gives the Department of Homeland Security the discretion to grant lawful permanent resident status to the surviving relatives of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.
• The bill recognizes the sacrifices that certain World War II Filipino veterans have made and would exempt their children from the numerical caps on visas.
• Currently, individuals who have unlawfully resided in the United States are subject to bars for re-entry depending on the length of their unlawful residence and the circumstances of their departure. Bars on re-entry can impose hardships by separating legal residents from their family members who once resided in the U.S. unlawfully. This can be especially difficult if the immigrants barred from re-entry are children or spouses. To address the hardships that the bars on re-entry promote, the bill would expand the categories of family members that Attorney General can grant a waiver to, raises the maximum age of eligibility for exemption from 18 years to 21 years, and narrows the class of individuals ineligible for admission who have been unlawfully present.
