From: Joachim Feise (jfeise@ics.uci.edu)
Date: Tue May 02 2000 - 11:28:55 PDT
http://www.newsalert.com/bin/clipstry?StoryId=Coq0bqbWbrennmduW
I wonder if the people who signed this Open Letter, including Linus Torvalds,
Steve Wozniak, and Esther Dyson (and Rohit) actually read the letter.
The letter is essentially a variation on an IEEE-USA proposal from last year,
with the same basic flaws (BTW, I had a long discussion with Paul Donnelly,
who was peddling the IEEE-USA proposal last year, on that issue).
Although the approach to issue conditional Greencards is not bad, the way
to do that as outlined in the letter is deeply flawed. The letter proposes
to issue new conditional GCs to new H1 applicants, thereby ignoring the
1 million applicants with pending GC applications, many of whom have their
applications pending for more than 6 years.
There are several 100,000 people who have watched the H1s run out, and who
are in the US either under an "Employment Authorization" issued by INS, or,
like me, changed to a different status, or who had to leave the country.
All these people would get shortchanged. This brings back memories of the
last amnesty, where people who followed the law got screwed and illegal
immigrants came out ahead.
The *only* way to overcome the Greencard backlog is to get additional
funding for INS that does *not* end up in border enforcement. As a stop-gap
solution, issuing conditional Greencard for the people *already in the
pipeline* should be considered.
-Joe
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