Immigration Bills

To prohibit taxpayer funds from being used to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, and for other purposes.

A bill to authorize appropriations for border infrastructure construction, to provide conditional resident status to certain aliens, and to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to include grounds of inadmissibility and deportability for alien members of criminal gangs and cartels, and for other purposes.

H.R. 5398, the Immigration for a Competitive America Act, would move some family-based green card categories to employment-based categories and lead to the quadrupling of H-1B guest-worker visas. The legislation would also mandate E-Verify and strengthen criminal penalties for employers, but would allow foreign workers to claim tax credits for their children.

H.R. 6429, the STEM Jobs Act of 2012, would cancel the visa lottery program and transfer the 55,000 yearly visas that would have been granted through the visa lottery into two new priority categories (doctorate and masters degree) under 203(b). For the first two fiscal years of the program, unused visas for which petitions or applications for labor certification have been filed will be added to the total visas for the next fiscal year. Following the first two years, remaining unused visas do not transfer to the next fiscal year.

H.R. 3938, the Enforcement First Immigration Reform Act, would: 1) reduce rewards for illegal immigration by prohibiting Social Security for illegal aliens, 2) reduce chain migration by eliminating the Family 4th Preference category which allots 65,000 visas each year to the siblings of adult U.S.