Tag Archives: United States

How Did We Get Here? Chinese Exclusion Act — Implementation (1882-1910)

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On May 29, 2013, co-blogger Chris Hendrix started off a very promising post series to explore the origins of immigration restrictions, the rationales used when introducing them, and how they were gradually modified into their present form. His first post in the series took an in-depth look at the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first large-scale restriction of immigration to the United States after nearly a century with nearly unrestricted migration. Chris went into considerable detail into the rationales proffered for the law, and found them flawed in light of both the evidence available at the time and the evidence that would accumulate over the coming decades.

With Chris’s permission, I’m taking this very important series over from him. This post will look at the Chinese Exclusion Act, but from a different angle: how was it implemented? As the United States’ first foray into a systematic control of a border, what legal ambiguities did it give rise to, and how were those resolved? What aspects of the modern immigration control regime, in the US and elsewhere around the world, can be traced to the way these ambiguities were resolved?

Let’s first get an idea of the sort of world that existed at the time.

A different world

Migration back in the day was qualitatively similar to South-South migration today: relatively unregulated and unprotected. But this is part of a broader feature of society back then: goverment was less centralized and far less powerful and all-knowing than it is today:

  • Passports did exist, but most people didn’t bother to get them.
  • Social Security, and Social Security Numbers, didn’t exist.
  • There was no federal income tax.
  • Since there was no tax withholding, employers had no federal reporting requirements, and they didn’t have reporting requirements in most states either. In other words, the state didn’t have a reason to record most work activity.
  • There was no Green Card, or Green Card-equivalent. Non-citizen permanent residents had no document that directly established that status for them.
  • There was no nation-wide interior enforcement for immigration law.
  • Entry by land from Mexico and Canada was largely unrestricted.

So what did exist?

  • Ports of inspection for people and goods coming by sea, from the Atlantic or the Pacific. These ports were not intended primarily for immigration enforcement, but were mainly used for customs enforcement. At the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act, there were, as far as I am aware, no designated ports on the West Coast exclusively for immigration enforcement. Angel Island, the main such port, would become active only in 1910. The corresponding port in the East Coast, Ellis Island, would open only in 1892, though there were other immigrant processing stations before that on the East Coast, such as Castle Garden.
  • City officials in various cities could act as de facto immigration enforcement. They could ask residents of the area for documentation proving that they were citizens (this would typically involve a birth certificate that would need to match with the city’s records, or a demonstration that the parents were US citizens, or a proof of naturalization). Enforcement would therefore be zealous only in places where the natives and the officials representing them cared enough about the matter. In practice, therefore, immigration enforcement followed the principle of subsidiarity — even though the legislation was determined at the federal level, interior enforcement was largely a local matter.

Racism, citizenism, territorialism, and high versus low skill

All the elements found in the modern border control regime could be glimpsed in the Chinese Exclusion Act as it played out. First off, the act was overtly discriminatory in a racial and ethnic sense. It could be argued that many immigration laws today are racist, albeit in many cases they are not overtly so. But the racial/ethnic component to the Chinese Exclusion Act was both more morally acceptable and palatable and more practically enforceable.

If you are trying to enforce immigration law, that requires a lot of potential violations of civil liberties, not only for the immigrants, but also for people who might be suspected of being immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly restricted itself only to targeting (a subset of) the ethnic Chinese. This subpopulation was sufficiently distinctive in appearance, customs, and linguistic habits. Thus, the collateral damage inflicted by the law on those not in violation of immigration law was limited to other ethnic Chinese.

In today’s world, it is possible (though still far from easy) to carry out some semblance of border and interior enforcement targeted at potential immigrants that has minimal collateral damage for citizens, without being so explicitly racially targeted. For this, we can thank (or blame) the record-keeping surveillance state that can track people much better. At the same time, it is somewhat harder to use explicit racial/ethnic targeting, because of greater levels of ethnic mixing. People of different national origins no longer look so obviously different, thanks to some degree of global convergence in culture, and also (to a less extent) greater interbreeding leading to many many more intermediate forms of physical appearance.

The racism of the law was therefore necessary for it to get off the ground, and for immigration enforcement to get an early testing bed while leaving the majority of the population unaffected. Just as the income tax started out as a tax on the super-rich and gradually grew to cover a majority of income-earners in the United States (and most other countries) immigration enforcement sharpened its ax on a relatively vulnerable, distinctive, and reviled population before spreading its wings to society at large. As they say, First they came for the Chinese. As history.com puts it:

American experience with Chinese exclusion spurred later movements for immigration restriction against other “undesirable” groups such as Middle Easterners, Hindu and East Indians, and the Japanese. The Chinese themselves remained ineligible for citizenship until 1943.

The second interesting emergent feature of the law, as it came into practice, was its citizenism, in more senses than one. First, as Chris described at greater length in his post, the law was justified in terms of citizenist premises, though there was the occasional nod to how it would be good for China as well to keep all its population within. Second, those Chinese who were already citizens continued to enjoy citizenship — at least in principle. They still were at greater risk of getting into trouble (because they were in the ethnic group suspected of harboring illegal immigrants) and they often couldn’t bring family members in, but they still enjoyed the constitutional rights of citizens. They could leave the country and return as they pleased (provided the officer at the port of entry was convinced they were actually citizens, and there were sometimes messups).

Third, the implementation of the law provided the early contours of territorialism: Chinese who had immigrated but not naturalized prior to the passage of the Act were not allowed to naturalize, but they were not required to leave the country. As long as they were physically present in the country, they enjoyed the rights of non-citizens (subject to the caveat of being harassed due to the suspicion). However, if they left the country and tried to return, they could be denied entry. This was formalized in the Scott Act of 1888 discussed later in the post. This was an early precedent for the current regime that distinguishes between entry visas and authorized stays.

Fourth, the high versus low skill distinction emerged in the law. The law banned the migration of skilled and unskilled laborers, but allowed for the migration of people in white-collar professions, if they could get documentation from the Chinese government to that effect, and could convince the officer at the port of entry. In practice, many people in white-collar professions also found it hard to enter due to lack of adequate documentation. This again resembles the current system, where high-skilled immigrants need to, and often fail to, jump through the many hoops needed to demonstrate their high skills.

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Carry your Green Card at all times: the why and how

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The Green Card, originally called the Alien Registration Receipt Card, is a card possessed by non-citizen Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) in the United States. You can read about the history and color of the card here and here. The card, first introduced in 1940 as part of the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (aka the Smith Act), carries with it an interesting regulation — those having the card are required to carry it with them at all times. Here’s how the USCIS puts it:

A green card is issued to all permanent residents as proof that they are authorized to live and work in the United States. If you are a permanent resident age 18 or older, you are required to have a valid green card in your possession at all times.

As far as I can make out, there is no obligation to carry documentation of citizenship status with one at all times, nor are non-citizens who are not permanent residents obliged to carry their identifying document (such as the Employment Authorization Document (EAD) card) with them at all times. What accounts for the apparently unique status of the Green Card?

This post explores the origins of the regulation, how it was somewhat practical back in the day, and whether it can still be enforced.

Puzzling aspects of enforcement

Today, enforcement of the Green Card regulation would be difficult because there is no easy way of identifying the category of people who should carry Green Cards (i.e., Lawful Permanent Residents, or LPRs) from:

  • US citizens, who have no legal obligation to carry identifying documentation proving their citizen status, and most of them do not carry around such documentation (a large number of them carry driving licenses or state ID cards but, in many states, these cards do not include information about citizenship or immigration status).
  • Those on authorized non-immigrant statuses, such as short-term business/tourism visas (B1/B2), student visas (F), and temporary worker visas (H). Those whose visas allow for employment do need to have an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) but, as noted above, are not required to carry it with them at all times.

So an obvious problem with enforcing the Green Card regulation is that somebody, asked to produce a Green Card, could simply claim to not be a LPR but instead be a US citizen or authorized under a non-immigrant status. Since those statuses don’t carry any requirement, how can anybody intent on enforcing the Green Card regulation push forward? You could argue that:

  • The Green Card regulation is still helpful in cases where people are trying to access benefits (such as welfare benefits) only eligible to citizens and LPRs. But there aren’t any welfare benefits accessible to LPRs and not to citizens. And in any case, government offices have their own requirement for documentation you are supposed to bring, and being required to carry your Green Card at all times is unnecessary for that purpose.
  • It still doesn’t make sense for a person to lie to an official enforcing the Green Card regulation about whether he or she is a LPR, because the officer can investigate the person and know if he or she is lying. But to the extent this is true, it also renders somewhat superfluous the requirement to always carry the Green Card — if officers can investigate you anyway, why do you need to carry the card?

Current enforcement

Though about half of Green Card holders I personally know are aware of this regulation, many people have been skeptical of whether it can actually be enforced. Here’s what online law resource NOLO has to say:

If you are 18 or older, you do have to carry your green card with you. Section 264(e) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (I.N.A.) requires all lawful permanent residents (LPRs) to have “at all times” official evidence of LPR status.

Failing to have your green card with you is a misdemeanor and if you are found guilty you can be fined up to $100 and put in jail for up to 30 days. (I.N.A. Section 264(e).) A copy is not good enough, because the law does not use the word “copy” or refer to “other evidence” of LPR status.

The official evidence of LPR status that most people eventually receive is an “alien registration receipt card,” also known as Form I-551 or, more commonly, a “green card.” Sometimes, people do not have their green card, but are already LPRs. For example, when somebody first arrives in the U.S. with an immigrant visa, they first receive an “I-551 stamp” in their passport. Weeks later, they receive the actual green card in the mail. In the time before receiving the green card in the mail, the LPR would have to carry his or her passport “at all times” or risk breaking the law.

If you decide to carry a copy of your green card instead of the original because you want to keep the original safe, you will be violating the law. Will you actually be stopped by immigration, prosecuted and fined or jailed for not having your original green card with you? It’s unlikely. Like any other government agency, immigration authorities have limited resources and cannot spend precious government time and money on prosecuting people for not carrying their green card “at all times.”

But there have been cases where LPRs are detained or arrested during workplace enforcement actions for not having their green card on them. So to be on the safe side, and obey the law, you should actually carry your green card with you everywhere you go. And it probably goes without saying that if you will be traveling internationally, you should take your original green card with you to board a plane or boat back to the U.S. and to reenter the U.S. as an LPR.

You might also be interested in discussion of the issue at ImmiHelp, Immigration Road, and Immigration Forums. Here’s an excerpt from the latter:

> When there are 20 million illegals easily walking in the streets of USA we the law abiding ones should not have issues.

When the law says you have to carry it with you and you don’t carry it with you, then how can you be a law abiding one?

I believe you cannot apply the photo-copy-is-okay argument to a green card, like you do for approval notices or certificates. Green card is obviously different with the magnetic stripe and stuff.

If we can say photo-copy is sufficient, then we can logically extend the argument to drivers license and start carrying a xerox copy of our drivers license with us instead of the original.

We have to accept what the law says and have to learn to live with it even though it may not be to our liking.

In an Open Borders Action Group post discussing the issue, it was pointed out that immigration regulations in the United States can only be enforced by federal immigration enforcement authorities, and these are active generally only at airports and close to the border, so in practice this does not affect most people. There is much truth to this, but some important caveats:

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee! If you, or people at your workplace, are non-citizen LPRs of the United States, then a federal immigration raid of your workplace could lead to you or your co-workers getting arrested for a month. Is this likely to happen? Probably not — arresting people for not carrying Green Cards is a “low priority” for the ICE because they have so many bigger fish to fry (such as deporting illegal immigrants). Still, better be careful! The law is the law.

Historical enforcement

The Green Card began after World War II. Althogh the Smith Act was passed in 1940, cards began to be issued only after the War. 1950 saw an important step in the formal codification of the idea that non-citizens had a burden of proof of responsibility in maintaining documentation to demonstrate legal status. As Citizen Path puts it:

The Internal Security Act of 1950 increased the value of Form 151, Alien Registration Receipt Card. Effective April 17, 1951, aliens holding AR-3 cards could replace them with a new Form I-151. However, only those with legal status could replace their AR-3. What’s more, aliens who could not prove their legal admission into the United States were subject to prosecution for violating U.S. immigration laws.

As a result, the Form I-151 card represented security to its holder. It indicated the right to live and work in the United States permanently and instantly communicated that right to law enforcement officials. Because of the card’s cumbersome official name – Alien Registration Receipt Card – immigrants, attorneys, and INS workers came to refer to it by its color, calling it the “green card.”

So having a Green Card was a way of getting around an otherwise capricious and uncertain law enforcement process. Mandating that people carry it could be considered a form of libertarian paternalism — nudging people in the direction of doing something they should want to do anyway.

Historically, the Green Card regulation was important because of two salient differences with the present.

First, in response to the present difficulty of distinguishing between citizens and non-citizen LPRs: a foreign-born person in the United States could not be a citizen unless that person was “white” (as defined by the Naturalization Act of 1790) or of African ancestry (this change was made in the Naturalization Act of 1870, as part of the process of post-Civil War rectification of racial injustice). Note that birthright citizenship existed even for people of other races and ethnicities, but the foreign-born of these races were not formally eligible for (or at least had no official process for) acquiring citizenship. This would change with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. But it does mean that back in the day, if somebody looked neither white nor black, you could have high confidence the person wasn’t a US citizen. (It was still conceivable the person was born in the US and therefore a US citizen, but given that this was about a decade after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, that effectively closed the US border to Asians and East Europeans, there would be very few children of immigrants among the population anyway).

So, back in the day, ethnicity as a statistical discriminator allowed almost all US citizens to avoid getting harassed by immigration enforcement (and the few who did get harassed were anyway from an ethnic group that didn’t enjoy a lot of broad support and sympathy). Thus, the regulation was enforcible.

What about my second point about the difficulty of current enforcement, i.e., the fact that people on temporary statuses aren’t required to carry documentation at all times? It’s important to remember that the landscape of temporary statuses and related regulations has changed a lot since that time. The H visas, including the H-1B and the H-2, didn’t exist back then — they were created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. There did exist a Bracero Program for temporary agricultural labor, and deportation also started becoming a systematic operation with Operation Wetback. The primarily Mexican people in these situations may not have been required to carry green cards, but they had bigger problems and fewer legal protections overall.

Why hasn’t the regulation been repealed?

If the requirement to carry a Green Card is no longer practical to enforce, why is it still on the books? This is best understood in terms of the principle that laws are hard to repeal, particularly if they give power and authority to vested interests in government. Even if immigration enforcement officials do not generally use this regulation, the existence of this regulation gives them more power — power that they can use as and when they see fit. In general, any source of power will be liked by those wielding it, and they will not easily give up.

This ratchet effect is observed everywhere, but is particularly likely in situations where the people enforcing the law do not have direct accountability to the people affected. Non-citizens can’t vote, so getting rid of clauses that could be used against them doesn’t have a strong political constituency.

Featured image credit: Jason Scott, licensed under CC-BY 2.0, via Flickr

UPDATE: Rob Zidar writes in with a personal anecdote:

I’ve been here legally (from Canada – my wife is American) for 25 years. My last GC renewal took 1.5 years, 5 trips to Newark and I was actually illegal for a few weeks between extensions. The reason for the snafu was primarily that when I originally went in for the renewal, my card was cracked from having been in my wallet for 10 years. Because it was cracked, the would not put a sticker on it to serve as the normal extension. I had to apply for a separate in-person meeting to request an extension, which took weeks. Months later, my replacement card was lost in the mail (I’m guessing it was stolen) and the window for my fingerprints being valid had expired. I had to restart the whole application process.

I understand that it is a law that people carry their GC at all times, but I think the law is unpractical and probably toothless. I’ll keep mine with my passport in a safe place from now on.

US immigrant processing: funded by user fees since 1882

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The first piece of US federal legislation detailing procedures for immigration enforcement was the Immigration Act of 1882 (passed at about the same time as, though distinct from, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882).

The first component of the act, as described by Wikipedia, was its self-financed nature:

The first was to create a “head tax” that would be imposed upon certain immigrants entering the country. The Act states that “There shall be levied, collected and paid a duty of fifty cents for each and every passenger not a citizen of the United States who shall come by steam or sail vessel from a foreign port to any port within the United States.” This money would be paid into the United States Treasury and “shall constitute a fund called the immigration fund.” These funds would be used to “defray the expense of regulating immigration under this act.” Scholar Roger Daniels commented that the head tax eventually “would rise, in stages, to eight dollars by 1917. In most years the government collected more in head taxes than it spent on administration.”

The fact that the costs of immigration administration are largely borne by user fees, unlike most other government agencies, continues to be true today. For instance, Wikipedia says:

Unlike most other federal agencies, USCIS is funded almost entirely by user fees. Under President George W. Bush’s FY2008 budget request, direct congressional appropriations made about 1% of the USCIS budget and about 99% of the budget was funded through fees. The total USCIS FY2008 budget was projected to be $2.6 billion.

This is true not only of the USCIS as a whole but also of incremental programs. For instance, co-blogger Michelangelo notes that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), announced by Barack Obama in June 2012, is funded by user fees:

Even if DACA explained the recent surge, Senator Cruz should be aware that no federal funds go towards the management of the DACA program. The DACA program is funded by user fees; currently set at $465. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which administers DACA, is unique in being funded almost entirely by user fees. If only that were the case with the rest of the federal government!

Similarly, when, after September 11, 2001, people on student and exchange visitor visas were required to go through a criminal background check in order to be able to get a visa (the so-called “SEVIS record”) that cost was also “user-financed” — recipients had to pay $100 in order to have a background check run on them.

Angelo Paparelli notes that Obama’s November 2014 deferred action proposals would also be financed by user fees:

Understandably, public and media attention since then has focused on the four to five million people who soon may come out from hiding in plain sight. Parents of citizens and permanent residents, and an expanded class of DREAMers, will be given deferred action and work and travel permits. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is now preparing to accept and decide a flood of new applications, all of which will be funded by user fees.

It should be noted that the “funded by user fees” applies specifically to the USCIS, the branch of immigration enforcement that deals specifically with processing immigrant applications, and not to the other branches of immigration enforcement, namely U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). ICE and CBP, focused as they are on interior and border enforcement of immigration and customs laws, don’t really have “customers” — and they cost the taxpayers a decent chunk of money (though still chump change relative to the overall US federal budget). [The SEVIS fee alluded to above is an exception, since the Student and Exchange Visitor Program is managed by ICE rather than USCIS. It is somewhat of an exception to the general rule that status processing is managed by USCIS.] Here are the approximate budgets:

  • USCIS: About $3.2 billion, about 99% funded by user fees.
  • ICE: About $5.3 billion, negligible user fees funding.
  • CBP: About $12.9 billion, negligible user fees funding.

These numbers suggest that liberalizing migration, raising user fees somewhat (cf. immigration tariffs), and cutting down on some enforcement functions would probably lead to significant budgetary savings in the short run. However, all these numbers are small relative to the lifetime economic or fiscal effects of immigrants (even though the signs of the fiscal effects are much disputed, their magnitudes are likely to be at least one order of magnitude greater). This is one reason why “save the costs of border enforcement” is not an argument made prominently on this site or by open borders advocates in general. But in the narrowest sense, the fiscal cost of immigration enforcement arises not from immigrants (who seem to be bearing their share of the burden) but on those who seek to keep them out.

Some might object that illegal immigrants don’t pay any user fees. This is technically true, but they pay amounts that are far greater in fees to human smugglers. And when given the opportunity to regularize their status by paying user fees, as happened with DACA, many avail of the opportunity. Those who don’t are deterred not so much by the cost as by the uncertainty of whether registering themselves with the federal government might endanger them.

PS: See this Open Borders Action Group post where the relative costs of the immigration enforcement agencies and their extent of user funding are discussed.

High-skilled hacks: the case of Optional Practical Training

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This post is part of my “high-skilled hacks” series, focused on immigration to the United States. The series explores various workarounds and caveats to immigration law that high-skilled workers and their employers have discovered in order to further their own interests, at the expense of the original intent of immigration law. Through the series, I try to argue that, although these hacks are an improvement over an alternative where only the basic immigration system existed, freer migration for all would be simpler, fairer, more efficient, and more just. The introductory post of the series is here.

Roughly, the situation is like this: creating new visa categories requires legislative action. However, modifying the terms of existing visa categories is a matter of executive discretion. This means that various sorts of extensions can be built into existing visa categories even as people wait for “comprehensive immigration reform” to provide a long-term fix. In this post, I talk of one such stop-gap measure from which I personally benefited (and that was basically my only option): Optional Practical Training.

The system based on original intent

The visa system’s original intent is to try to be as restrictive as possible in granting visas, and to make it hard for people to smoothly transition from one status to another. So, the idea is that those who are on student visas have non-immigrant intent. Once their stay is over, they should go back home. If they want to come back for a job, they should re-apply back from their home countries, without any special advantage over all the other people who didn’t go to the US to study.

What influential high-tech people want to mimic

The students themselves, the universities that they go to, and the companies that wish to hire them, would like another ideal: despite the fact that they are on non-immigrant visas, the students should basically be able to apply for and get jobs, and start working just like US natives. This goal is very clearly at odds with the stated purpose of the student visa, which is intended to encourage study, not a transition to long-term settlement.

With that said, the idea that the US should allow high-skilled students to easily transition to Green Cards has a lot of sympathy within the legislative and executive branches of the US government. Thus, for instance, there have been talks, on and off, of a “staple act” that would allow permanent residency to any U.S. university student who graduates with a Ph.D. in science, technology, engineering or mathematics. But for various gridlock-related reasons cited by Alex, that I discussed in the introductory post, and the fact that this is fundamentally at odds with the purpose of the student visa, this proposal hasn’t really made progress. Incidentally, as Chiappari and Paparelli note, the SKIL bill, an earlier proposal quite similar to the staple act, aimed to do this for student visas. Chiappari and Paparelli:

The Securing Knowledge, Innovation, and Leadership Act or SKIL Act, which was never enacted, included a proposed extension of F-1 OPT to 24 months and would have relaxed for STEM students the statutory restriction prohibiting F-1 foreign students from in tending, at the time they enter the United States or apply for a visa, to stay in the United States indefinitely.)

One direction that high-tech people have made progress in is introducing new skill-based migration schemes, many of which are somewhat niche (this was accomplished with the EB visas, part of the Immigration Act of 1990, and will be the subject of another post). Another direction is to use existing visa statuses, such as the student status (F) and exchange visitor status (J) and tag on more and more at the end of those. These extensions are typically justified based on arguments of “national competitiveness” such as those made in the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act (2000). This post discusses one such extension of the F status: (post-completion) Optional Practical Training. There are a number of related programs, including Curricular Practical Training (CPT), pre-completion Optional Practical Training, and Academic Training (this one is for the J status), but for simplicity, this post will focus only on post-completion OPT.

The annual cycle of the H-1B

In principle, you can apply for the capped H-1B (the H-1B category used by all organizations except non-profit research institutes) any time of the year. In practice, however, the quota for a given fiscal year (starting October) is closed within a few days. And applications can be submitted at most six months in advance of the start date. So if you want a shot at the H-1B, you have to apply on April 1 (or rather, the first weekday of April) to start the H-1B October 1.

This poses a problem for people who want to start a job immediately after finishing their studies. Let’s say you intend to graduate on June 15. If you want the H-1B, you need to have found your employer before April 1, and have him or her agree to put in your paperwork by April 1. And then when your studies are over, you have about two months to wrap up and leave. That means you need to leave the US by August 15. And then, since you are now no longer physically present in the United States, and your status has changed from student to worker, you need to apply for a new US visa. Hopefully, you’ve received the H-1B petition approval by then (even though the H-1B itself starts on October 1) so that you can get the new visa. Then, you can start the job on October 1. And graduating in June is the lucky case. If you’re graduating in December, you basically need to spend the next couple months finding a job (potentially violating the terms of your student visa) that you can only hope to start in October, then leave the US by February 15, while your employer files the H-1B petition on your behalf by around April 1. Then, you wait in your home country till around July or August, by which time you have received the petition approval. You then apply for the visa and then enter the US.

So basically, the annual cycle means that students in the US have less of an advantage over the masses of people outside of the US in terms of getting jobs. They still have a huge advantage — they can interview in person for jobs and shop between multiple jobs. But basically, they need to find employers who are willing to agree to file petitions on their behalf seven or more months before they can actually join the job. And unless they graduate in August, they basically need to go back home and get a new visa, with all the uncertainty that engenders.

Enter Optional Practical Training

Optional Practical Training timeline

Source University of Alaska Anchorage

In practice, post-completion Optional Practical Training is a hack around this problem for those on “F” student status. One can apply for 12 months of Optional Practical Training that can start any time within 60 days after the completion of one’s academic program. The terms of the OPT are quite flexible: you don’t need to have a job offer when you apply, and the status is not tied to a particular job. You do need to work during the OPT: a maximum of 90 days of unemployment is allowed. But the work can include contract work (a minimum of 20 hours per week) giving you some flexibility to shop around for jobs.

The most typical use case of OPT is that it serves as a stop-gap for the months between completion of the academic degree and the beginning of the H-1B program. For instance, if you are graduating in June, then you can start your job in July on OPT while your H-1B petition isn’t yet active. This still requires that you secure your job by February so that your employer can file the H-1B petition on your behalf by April, but at least you can start the job right after graduation, and you don’t need to travel back home and re-apply for the visa.

Another use case of the OPT is for somebody who is genuinely unsure about what to do after graduation. The person wants to experiment with different kinds of work. The OPT offers a little breathing room to do that without losing physical presence in the United States.

Related to the program of study

Another bureaucratic requirement of the OPT is that all jobs you do under the OPT must be related to the program of study. That’s because the OPT is tied to your program of study, and is allegedly for the purpose of giving you additional “practical training” in the domains you studied in your degree program (even though in practice it’s just transitional to a H-1B or other longer-term employment status for most people).

However, after some informal investigation, I discovered that relation to program of study was interpreted more loosely than one might naively think. It’s okay for somebody like me, who has studied group theory, to take up my current job that involves machine learning, data science, and programming, as long as I can clearly explain how the skills I learned in graduate school are relevant to my job. Moreover, unlike the H-1B, the job choice doesn’t need to be pre-approved by the USCIS. Rather, what they can do is retroactively ask you to justify how the job (or jobs) you did to meet your OPT requirements were related to your program of study. Having letters from your supervisors at each job, that clearly explained the relation, would generally be sufficient. In most cases, the USCIS didn’t bother. But I heard anecdotally of a chemistry Ph.D. who went into a finance job and was asked by the USCIS to justify it. He was successful in convincing them of the relationship. Basically, unless you are going into a completely unrelated domain (such as a math Ph.D. becoming a barista or an economics Ph.D. becoming a performing artist) you should be fine. (The fact that the relationship to program of study is interpreted loosely is tacit knowledge that you won’t find explicitly mentioned online in any authoritative source. Most university websites that provide detailed information on OPT will not put this information in writing. Oh well. Non-transparent rules and regimes create huge information asymmetries between those in the know and the general masses.)

The cap gap and the STEM extension

H1B cap gap

Optional Practical Training H1B cap gap explained diagramatically. Source: University of Chicago

The OPT has gradually grown to accommodate more and more cases. In the example above, what if you get your job offer only in May? With the original 12-month OPT, you can start your OPT in July (after finishing your academic program in June) but since you can only apply for the H-1B next cycle, you’re still in trouble: your OPT will end by next July. Your employer can file a petition for you next year, but that job can start only on October 1, so basically you are forced to take two or three months off from work, plus you need to travel home to get the new visa. An ingenuous workaround called the “cap gap” has been incorporated into the OPT: if, at the time of the completion of your OPT, you already have a H-1B petition pending with the same employer as you are working with on OPT, you can continue working on OPT with that employer until either your application is denied or your H-1B period begins.

Finally, consider a case like mine. I finished my degree program in December 2013. I didn’t have a job immediately out of graduate school, and was planning on working on a mentoring service with a friend at the time. I did contract work for some employers, including MIRI, using my Optional Practical Training. I finally transitioned to my full-time job in August 2014. It was too late for me to apply for the 2014 cycle. And my OPT would end in January 2015, too early for me to have my H-1B petition for 2015. So what could I do?

Enter yet another ingenuous workaround to the OPT: the STEM extension. This allows a 17-month extension to the OPT for people who have degrees in STEM subjects. The STEM extension comes with heavier restrictions than the usual OPT (in particular, employers need to be enrolled in e-verify). But still, that extra 17 months gives me a chance to apply for a H-1B in 2015. In fact, the STEM extension can be combined with the cap gap, so even if I am rejected in 2015, I can still apply in 2016.

Interestingly, the STEM extension can be attributed to the efforts of one man: Bill Gates. Here’s what he said in testimony to Congress:

First, we need to encourage the best students from abroad to enroll in our colleges and universities and, if they wish, to remain in the United States when their studies are completed. One interim step that could be taken would be to extend so-called Optional Practical Training (OPT), the period of employment that foreign students are permitted in connection with their degree program. Students are currently allowed a maximum of 12 months in OPT before they must change their immigration status to continue working in the United States. Extending OPT from 12 to 29 months would help to alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage. This only requires action by the Executive Branch, and Congress and this Committee should strongly urge the Department of Homeland Security to take such action immediately.

Congressional Testimony from Bill Gates, March 12, 2008, that seems to have directly led to the OPT STEM extension

Both the cap gap and the STEM extension, and the contribution of Gates to the passage of the latter, were noted in an article by Ted Chiappari and Angelo A. Paparelli. They write (pp. 2-3, footnotes removed to improve readability):

One of the expansions allows those foreign students lucky enough to win a number in the H-1B lottery to
have their OPT automatically extended until October 1, 2008, when their H-1B status will begin. This makes permanent an accommodation that was first introduced in 1999, but that has lain fallow since 2004. In 2005, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the sub-agency of DHS that took over responsibility for administering the F-1 student registration program known as the Student Exchange Visit Information System or SEVIS, refused to implement this provision any more because of its concerns about its ability to track foreign students if they were granted a blanket authorization to stay here beyond their period of OPT. These security concerns are addressed in the new rule, which now requires employers to notify the school’s Designated Student Officer (DSO) of the departure or termination of the student within 48 hours.

The second expansion is an increase in OPT by 17 months to a total of 29 months for students with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (so-called STEM degrees). This appears to have been inspired directly by the March 12, 2008, testimony of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates before the Committee on Science and Technology of the House of Representatives. In his testimony, Mr. Gates suggested: “Extending OPT from 12 to 29 months would help alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage.” He also correctly observed that “This only requires action by the Executive Branch,” and he pleaded that “Congress and this Committee should strongly urge the Department of Homeland Security to take such action immediately.” (The regulatory change may also have been inspired, indirectly or in part, by some ideas floated in legislative proposals introduced in 2006 and again in 2007 to meet U.S. employers’ need for skilled workers with STEM degrees. The Securing Knowledge, Innovation, and Leadership Act or SKIL Act, which was never enacted, included a proposed extension of F-1 OPT to 24 months and would have relaxed for STEM students the statutory restriction prohibiting F-1 foreign students from intending, at the time they enter the United States or apply for a visa, to stay in the United States indefinitely.)

DHS did in fact take action quickly, but it added a requirement that was not part of Mr. Gates’s testimony: mandatory participation by F-1 students’ employers in E-Verify in order to qualify for the additional 17-month extension. Moreover, DHS limited the 17-month extension to those in practical training in connection with one of the identified STEM degrees. The STEM degrees include a variety of disciplines in computer science, engineering, engineering technologies, biological and medical sciences, physical sciences, mathematics and statistics and science technologies, as well as in actuarial science, military technologies and health professions and related clinical sciences. DHS has designated STEM programs using the list of Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes published by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The DHS action, which appears to have been announced formally by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on April 2, 2008 (you can see the full memo here) was ignored by most, but did get noted and critiqued by some people concerned about the wages and employment opportunities of high-skilled workers (see for instance here and here).

Continued repercussions for visa renewal and travel

The hackish way in which OPT has been conceived — an extension of a non-immigrant student status that’s in practice treated as an interim to a dual-intent temporary worker visa — leads to some interesting contradictions. In particular, if somebody wants to travel outside the US for OPT, the person faces complications at two stages:

  • If the person’s student visa is still valid, he or she does not need to renew it. If, however, the student visa has expired, the person needs to re-apply for a student visa. However, a student visa can only be granted if non-immigrant intent is explicitly demonstrated. OPT applicants generally fail to meet this requirement, and might have trouble getting visas.
  • Re-entry at the port of entry is also complicated. For those within their usual student status (who have not yet begun OPT) a valid visa and travel signature on their I-20 suffice — few are subject to additional questioning. However, people on OPT have additional burdens of proof: they need a valid visa, a recent travel signature (within the last six months rather than within the last year), they need their Employment Authorization Document (EAD) card, and they also need proof of continued employment. Those who have applied for OPT and not yet received their EAD card are strongly advised to not travel. The travel signature requirement arises from the fact that the OPT is still part of student status, even though the student may be working in a different part of the country and has little relationship with the university otherwise.

The Georgia Tech Office of International Education offers a particularly candid description:

Students who decide to travel while the OPT application is pending are highly discouraged from leaving the U.S until the application has been received by USCIS and the I-797 receipt notice has been issued. Students should bring the receipt notice with them as proof that an application has been submitted. Although the receipt notice is a good substitution, admission into the U.S. is up to the discretion of the CBP officer, and there have been reports of students without their EAD work permit having problems at the port of entry.

[…]

OPT is a benefit of the F-1 status. Therefore, students traveling while on OPT and have an expired F-1 visa are required to apply for a new F-1 visa. Although the U.S. consulates/embassies are permitted to grant visa renewals to students participating in OPT, these students may be subject to additional scrutiny. The F-1 visa is a non-immigrant intent visa. Therefore, applicants are required to provide proof of “binding ties” to their home country. This may be more challenging for some students on OPT.

Procedures and requirements for visas can vary between countries and are often subject to change. As such, reviewing the visa requirements on the website for the appropriate U.S. Embassy/Consulate is the best way to prepare you for the visa application process. Visit www.travel.state.gov to determine the procedures for applying for a visa at the U.S. Embassy/Consulate in the country in which you’ll be traveling.

Proposed changes to OPT

While US President Barack Obama’s November 2014 immigration executive action announcement was primarily about deferred action for unlawfully present migrants, the memo from Secretary Johnson also contained some guidelines for changes to the Optional Practical Training program. The main changes being mooted are:

  • Increase the base length of the OPT.
  • Increase the length of the STEM extension.
  • Expand the set of degree programs eligible for the STEM extension.
  • Allow people to be eligible for the STEM extension based on their undergraduate degree program, even if that was outside the US. For instance, somebody who gets an engineering degree from India and then gets a MBA in the US would be eligible for the STEM extension under the proposed scheme.

Here’s a summary from the National Law Review:

Most foreign students on F-1 student visas are eligible for a year of post-graduate optional practical training (OPT) as long as the work experience that they gain is in a field that relates to their degree program. But 12 months of authorized OPT frequently is not enough time to bridge the time between the foreign student’s authorization to work on OPT and the granting of a temporary work visa status. The H-1B quota opens every year on April 1st, and the H-1B visas do not become effective until the following October 1st, at the beginning of the government’s new fiscal year. The quota has been exhausted immediately in the last several years, leaving no H-1B visas available until the next government fiscal year – resulting in a 17-month period with no H-1B visa availability.

This problem is less severe for F-1 foreign students who major in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering or Math) fields. These students are eligible to apply to extend their OPT work authorization for an additional 17 months, as long as they are employed by US employers participating in the government’s E-Verify program. (E-Verify is a program that any employer can participate in, if it is willing to check its employees’ documents through a government database to ensure the employees are legally authorized to work in the United States. Some employers don’t have a choice: if they have certain federal government contracts, or operate in certain states, they must sign up for E-Verify.) Qualified foreign students who graduate with US STEM degrees are able to continue to work legally through multiple government fiscal years, increasing their chances of “winning” an H-1B visa before their OPT period expires.

The list of STEM “majors” that qualify a foreign student for a STEM OPT extension is limited, however, and the focus until now has been on the US degree program that the foreign student has just completed. It would be much more useful if the government would expand the program to allow for STEM-based OPT extensions for F-1 students who either graduate with a US STEM degree OR complete a STEM degree prior to studying in the United States. For example, many of our MBA students come to the United States with a STEM undergraduate degree. Furthermore, the list of STEM “degrees” should be expanded to be much more robust.

Accordingly, Secretary Johnson directed USCIS and ICE to “develop regulations for notice and comment to expand the degree programs eligible for OPT and extend the time period and use of OPT for foreign STEM students and graduates.” The business community would like to see a significant expansion of STEM eligibility in the new rules. But the business community may not appreciate some OPT restrictions that the Secretary has suggested might be paired with expanded STEM eligibility. Currently there is great flexibility associated with OPT. F-1 graduates on OPT can be self-employed or work as independent contractors, and if they work as employees on a W-2, there is no prevailing wage requirement associated with their employment. The flexibility associated with OPT has proven extremely helpful to foreign entrepreneurs and inventors who use the post-graduation period to refine their inventions, products and business ideas, form companies, and find investors.

A later article from the National Law Review made some further suggestions:

But the STEM fields are narrowly defined. If the STEM fields are expanded, the STEM extension would benefit a larger number of foreign students and employers. In his memo, Secretary Johnson calls for USCIS and ICE to develop regulations to “expand the degree programs eligible for OPT” and to “extend the time period and use of OPT” for foreign Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) graduates.

We hope that the expansion of degree programs will include degree concentrations in business administration, finance, economics, etc. so that a larger percentage of foreign students can take advantage of the STEM OPT extension option. In light of the H-1B visa crisis, employers across the US are clamoring for options to hire and retain foreign talent, and expanding eligibility for a post-graduation OPT extension responds to this need. Expanding the degree programs list would also bring value to the US by keeping talented graduates in the US Secretary Johnson also ordered USCIS and ICE to take steps to ensure that OPT employment “is consistent with labor market protections to safeguard the interests of US workers in related fields.” We hope that the end result of this directive does not decrease the flexibility that the OPT program currently offers foreign students. Students and graduates on OPT can be self-employed and work as independent contractors, a flexibility that is not afforded by other widely-available temporary work visa statuses. F-1 students and graduates are not subject to prevailing wage requirements during their employment on OPT which is particularly helpful to new entrepreneurs who sometimes volunteer their time to their own start-ups.

The current flexibility of the OPT program means students can take internships and employment that offer value and further their education. During this limited period, they now have a range of choices and options, including working on their own start-ups. Undue restrictions on the F-1 OPT program would be counterproductive to the goal of improving and enhancing the program to provide the US with talented, energetic and motivated foreign students and graduates.

Lawsuit

I also recently came across a report of a lawsuit challenging the Optional Practical Training program. The lawsuit predictably attacks the half-truths and hackish workarounds used to justify the program. Although approval for the lawsuit came after the memo suggesting possible changes to OPT, the lawsuit had been filed a while earlier and challenged the OPT as it had existed in the past. The article says:

The WashTech lawsuit, which is being heard in federal court in the District of Columbia, challenges the OPT program. If the judge ultimately sides with the plaintiffs, the case could be bad news for the OPT program generally, as well as Obama’s plans to further expand it.

Students still in school or recent graduates can use their student F-1 visas to take jobs through the OPT program. Employers don’t have to pay them a prevailing wage, or Medicare and Social Security taxes. These tax breaks make OPT workers “inherently cheaper” to employ than U.S. workers, the lawsuit argues.

The last para is somewhat inaccurate. It’s true that students on F status, whether currently enrolled or on OPT, are exempted from paying Social Security and Medicare taxes during their first five calendar years (see the Substantial Presence Test for more). On the other hand, those who have been in the US for more than five calendar years do generally need to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes while on OPT. It is also true that the prevailing wage requirement does not apply to OPT, but a large fraction of OPT employment is meant as a stop-gap prior to a H-1B petition, and the latter is subject to prevailing wage rules.

The article continues:

The 17-month extension may have acted as a catalyst in generating interest in the OPT program. There were 123,000 approved OPT students last year, compared to 28,500 in 2008 when the added time was approved.

John Miano, an attorney involved in the case and founder of the Programmers Guild, said the DHS “knew when they promulgated the OPT expansion that it was illegal.”

The justification for the 17-month expansion of OPT for STEM workers “was a ‘critical shortage’ of STEM workers,” said Miano, adding that the DHS had “no objective evidence to support the claim of a worker shortage.”

Miano said the only justification of a worker shortage is from one government study that made no such conclusion, the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report from 2007.

Now, the government will have to explain “where in the cited reported does it say there is a critical shortage of STEM regulations?” said Miano. And with that, “the regulations fall apart.”

There had also been an earlier lawsuit from the Immigration Reform Law Institute, back on May 29, 2008, challenging the STEM extension shortly after its announcement. However, the lawsuit was thrown out by a New Jersey district court judge (you can see the full proceedings here).

Conclusion

I’m personally quite grateful for this series of hacks. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to stay in the United States. Or I might have been able to stay but would have been much more constrained in my choices. Without the STEM extension, I could not in good faith have accepted my current job. Just a few weeks ago, I was a little worried, because my case status for the STEM extension wasn’t showing up on the USCIS website. If my case had been lost, this would have been terrible for me and my employer. However, after a long phone conversation with USCIS representatives, I learned that the reason my case status wasn’t displaying online was that Obama’s deferred action announcement had required some system upgrades so they weren’t up-to-date. I finally got information that my case was proceeding normally, and my application was approved last week.

But, while these hacks have served me quite well, I also believe that the system as a whole doesn’t make sense. I wish that the same effective freedom that I enjoy were available to people around the world, high-skilled and low-skilled. People will always be constrained by their personal limitations and the limitations of the world around them. But I believe that many of the limitations imposed by migration law are an unnecessary additional set that should be dispensed with.

PS: For simplicity, I have omitted discussion of many aspects of the OPT, including something called pre-completion OPT. For a more comprehensive overview, see the Wikipedia page [FULL DISCLOSURE: I significantly expanded and restructured the page in a series of edits in September 2013, while researching it in preparation for applying for it. I made another series of relatively minor edits shortly after the publication of this blog post, adding some material I discovered in the course of research for the blog post.]

PS2: This didn’t fit well in the main post, but might be of interest anyway: employers have historically been reluctant to hire people on OPT if the annual cycle for those people means they can’t have a H-1B petition in by then. A National Law Review article notes that it has been ruled legal (i.e., not afoul of anti-discrimination law) for employers to choose to forgo hiring workers on OPT for this reason:

In a Technical Assistance Letter (TAL), the Office of Special Counsel has stated that an employer can disqualify an applicant because of future OPT expiration without running afoul of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The INA’s anti-discrimination provisions apply only to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents who are not yet eligible to apply for naturalization or who have applied within six months of eligibility, asylees, and refugees. “Accordingly, F-1 visa holders are not protected from citizenship status discrimination,” the Office of Special Counsel states. Therefore, an employer who inquires as to whether the candidate requires sponsorship now or in the future is not participating in discriminatory practices.

This makes conditional sense: the private “discrimination” here isn’t discrimination as much as a government-forced constraint on hiring. My co-blogger Nathan has argued that private discrimination should be permitted even as governments get out of the way, but in this case (and many other cases) the private discrimination is a rational response necessitated by government policy.

Related reading

High-skilled hacks: why the US immigration system needs serious refactoring

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This post is the introduction to the series of “high-skilled hacks” posts, focused on immigration to the United States. The series explores various workarounds and caveats to immigration law that high-skilled immigrantworkers and their employers have discovered and engineered in order to further their own interests, at the expense of the original intent of immigration law. Through the series, I try to argue that, although these hacks are an improvement over an alternative where only the basic immigration system existed, freer migration for all would be simpler, fairer, more efficient, and more just.

Recently, I posted the following puzzle to the Open Borders Action Group:

In a comment on an OBAG post, Alex says of liberalizing high-skilled immigration to the United States: “Most folks in the policy debate want those reforms or something similar to them. They haven’t happened because high tech reform is intentionally bundled with the rest of the less popular elements of the comprehensive immigration reform package to “sweeten” the whole deal. If high-skilled reform becomes law separately, the rest of the portions of immigration reform become less likely to pass. Those who want the less popular items hold enough power to block individual pieces of the reform from becoming law on their own.

That’s the dominant theory that has failed to produce immigration reform just about every year since 2002.”

Does this accord with your impressions? Do you think people calculated correctly? As an open borders advocate, would you try to reduce the chances of a standalone high-skilled immigration passing in the hope that it could later be added to other, more comprehensive, bills, to sweeten the deal and increase the probability of their passage?

The comments were generally supportive of Alex’s view. I’ll have more to say this later (but check out the comments in the meantime) but in this post I want to consider an auxiliary puzzle: why haven’t high-skilled workers (in the technology sector, academia, and elsewhere), a generally influential population segment where even the natives who “compete” with the migrants tend to be more favorable to migration of their competitors than the general population, been more successful at getting their way? The answer is that they have been able to get their way, but in hackish fashion. They’ve basically taken an immigration system that isn’t designed to be helpful to them at all and made a bunch of changes to it here and there that somewhat approximate a migration regime that is, in practice, a lot more liberal than it looks on paper. Indeed, even a lot of criticism of existing skilled migration regimes generally accepts the broad premises of the status quo and only argues for special treatment of their favored groups. An example of this sort is Paul Graham’s recent article, that I recently critiqued. Yet another example may be high-skilled migration proponent Vivek Wadhwa, whose somewhat confused position at the Intelligence Squared Debate was critiqued by my co-blogger John. Relatedly, the advocacy efforts of FWD.us appear to have been at least partly responsible for the inclusion of H-1B liberalization suggestions in Obama’s November 2014 immigration executive action announcement.

The clever workarounds come at a price. The price is simplicity and fairness. Despite that, the system, with all its hacks, is probably vastly better for the high-skilled workers, the United States, and the world at large (through greater economic growth and more innovation), than the system as originally intended and designed.

Why have high-skilled immigrant workers and the groups that lobby for them been able to engineer so many hacks, and yet not fundamentally changed the system? To understand this, we need to understand the division of labor between different branches of government with respect to immigration law. Some types of changes to immigration law (the creation of new visa categories or the expansion or elimination of quotas for some capped visa categories) require legislative action by the US Congress. Any changes that need explicit legislative action are subject to legislative gridlock for the reasons Alex highlighted. On the other hand, there are other changes, including changes to the scope and time limits of existing visas, as well as enforcement details and the types of evidence that need to be provided, that are a matter of executive discretion. Some of these are decided at the very top, by the US President, but others can be decided at lower levels, by the DHS branches (USCIS, CBP, and ICE) working in conjunction. It is changes of the latter sort where interest groups are best able to move fast. For instance, as I’ll describe in my forthcoming post on Optional Practical Training, Bill Gates’ Congressional testimony suggesting that the length of the Optional Practical Training period be extended led directly to the creation of the OPT STEM extension through direct action at the executive level without the need for new legislation. As Gates himself observed:

This only requires action by the Executive Branch, and Congress and this Committee should strongly urge the Department of Homeland Security to take such action immediately.

In a similar vein, co-blogger Michelangelo has proposed that Obama work to expand the scope of NAFTA’s labor provisions (the TN visa):

Expansion of the TN status should be an attractive route and it is surprising that both successive Presidents and open border advocates have ignored it. The TN status is already part of the US code (Title 8 Section 214.6) and no further enabling legislation from Congress would be necessary. The President’s administration would not be creating a new status using executive order, it would merely be easing the administration process of a well established aspect of US immigration law.

Guest blogger Fabio Rojas has noted that there are many “publics” on any given issue, and on the issue of immigration, immigration lawyers and government agents form a public that is easier to influence at the margin than the general public. Fabio was focused on courts, but the same point applies to enforcement agencies:

This is why open borders advocates should directly target the legal public because of its special position in society. Courts are responsible for enforcing and interpreting the law. Contrary to popular opinion, judges do not apply the law in the same way that a baseball umpire calls “balls and strikes.” Instead, judges are influenced by what they learned in law school, in their time as practicing attorneys, and by political and social trends. That is why the open borders movement should target the legal public. If we can introduce a legal theory that supports open borders, then it will be easier for courts to uphold open borders policy and side with immigrants.

The “hacks” to expand the scope of immigration law are not limited to high-skilled workers. Similar hacks can be found in family immigration law, humanitarian statuses, low-skilled temporary work, and the regularization of people who entered unlawfully. But this series will focus on high-skilled hacks, which have the most “above-board” legal status, partly because of the greater political influence of high-skilled workers and partly because high-skilled immigration meets with less nativist opposition.

On this blog, we’ve been somewhat critical of the “high-skill only” focus of some immigration reform efforts (see for instance Nathan’s post). We’ve also been critical of high-skill-focused groups such as FWD.us. I think our criticism is generally valid. But I recently had a chance to look at the FWD.us video section, and I was somewhat favorably impressed at their use of high-skilled immigration as a way to open a conversation on migration policy. They don’t go as far as I’d like, but they offer important information and provoke interesting thoughts. In this series, I hope to go further and deeper, helping people both understand the current status of immigration law and the direction in which it should be changed.

PS: For those curious about the terminology in the title, code refactoring is a common practice in software engineering. A piece of software originally designed for a particular context, that gets successively rewritten to handle a number of special cases, can get very messy over time. Occasional refactoring to clean up the code can be helpful. The FWD.us homepage had a quote to a similar effect. As John Lee pointed out in a comment on the OBAG post, the “outdated” message has been used for quite a while, at least since the time of Harry Truman. My focus here, though, is not so much the “outdated” message as the “messy” message. There’s a lot of copy-and-paste code and clever workarounds in immigration law. Let’s think of a simpler way of accomplishing morally and practically appropriate goals: radically freeing migration.