US Immigration News

Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Party's whip in the House of Representatives ('the House') has said that there will be no vote on a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the House this year.

Representative McCarthy, from California told immigration reform activists at a meeting in Bakersfield, California, that there were not enough days left in the legislative calendar for the House to vote on the immigration reform bill that has already been passed by the Senate. Mr McCarthy said that he was 'committed' to immigration reform in 2014.

Two Republican members of the House of Representatives have endorsed a comprehensive immigration reform act that would radically overhaul the US immigration system. The Act is broadly speaking the same as a bill of the same name already passed by the Senate. The Senate's version of The Act was drafted by a bipartisan group of eight senators known as the Gang of Eight.

The latest figures show that 35,472 Indians working in the US with H-1B visas were issued with US permanent resident visas (better known as green cards) in 2012. This is the highest ever number in a single year and six times higher than the figure for 2011 when only around 6,000 Indian H-1B holders got green cards.

H-1B visas are temporary work visas which can be granted to foreign graduates (or people with skills and experience amounting to 'graduate equivalence') to work in 'a specialty occupation' in the US. Many H-1B holders work in IT.

The Indian IT outsourcing giant Infosys has agreed to pay $34m in settlement of a case brought against it by the US Department of State, US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Homeland Security.

Infosys faced allegations that it had abused the US visa system by employing Indian workers on US contracts who had travelled to the US on B-1 business visas rather than on H-1B visas or L-1 visas. The US government says that this was an abuse of the visa system.

The speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, has said that he is 'hopeful' that 'the House' will pass immigration reform this year. He told journalists on October 23rd 2013, 'I think immigration is an important subject that needs to be addressed and I'm hopeful [that it will be]'.

The bitter rows between Republicans and Democrats over the US federal government budget and the debt ceiling have ended any hope of comprehensive immigration reform this year, according to a leading Republican member of the House of Representatives.

Representative Raul Labrador, a Republican from Idaho, told US journalists 'after the way the President acted over the last two or three weeks where he would refuse to talk to the speaker of the House [of Representatives], they're not going to get immigration reform. That's done'.