Immigration Bills

H.R. 477, the Nuclear Family Priority Act, would eliminate the family-based green card categories that are directly responsible for endless chains of family migration. The current annual limits on green cards are 78,000 for parents, 65,000 for adult brothers and sisters, 23,400 for married sons and daughters and 23,400 for unmarried adult sons and daughters. H.R.

H.R. 692, Nuclear Family Priority Act, would eliminate current green card categories for adult brothers and sisters, married and unmarried adult sons and daughters, and create a special non-working visa for parents. By not providing an increase in any other category, overall immigration would decrease by more than 111,800 per year (1.118 million a decade). The numbers would also be indirectly reduced by this bill because there would be fewer spouses or parents of U.S. citizens that would be brought into the country by immigrants.

The bill would eliminate the extended family visa categories (e.g., married sons and daughters of citizens, etc.), thus ending “chain migration” as recommended by the bi-partisan Barbara Jordan Commission in 1997. Chain migration is the process where seemingly endless “chains” of foreign nationals are allowed to immigrate to the United States, since our laws allow citizens and lawful permanent residents to bring in their non-nuclear, adult family members. It is the primary mechanism that has caused legal immigration in this country to quadruple since the 1960s.

S. 703 would expand chain migration by expanding the definition of "immediate relative" for purposes of exemptions from the numerical cap. It would include children of U.S. citizens' parents accompanying or following them to join the parent.

H.R. 938, the Nuclear Family Priority Act, would end chain migration by restricting allocation of family-sponsored immigrant visas so that only spouses or children of a lawful permanent resident (LPR) alien can obtain such visas. Furthermore, it would reduce the number of family-sponsored immigrant visas available per fiscal year to 88,000 minus the number of aliens who were paroled into the United States for humanitarian reasons in the second preceding fiscal year.