Critics are split on whether the U.S. House of Representatives did the right thing days after voting to pass a bill granting green cards to immigrants with advanced degrees in science in technology fields.
The House voted 245-139 Friday to pass the bill, titled the STEM Jobs Act, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and math fields. The bill, if approved by the Senate and President Obama, would grant green cards to thousands of foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges with science and tech degrees.
Twenty-seven Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the bill, originally sponsored by U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, which would up the number of green cards available to STEM graduates by up to 55,000 per year.
However, the bill is very likely to face defeat in the Democratic-controlled Senate, as Democrats have opposed the STEM Jobs Act on the grounds that it would take visa chances away from immigrants involved in the "diversity lottery," which grants permanent residency visas to countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
Republicans have claimed that the visa lottery has the potential for fraud, while Democrats say that the GOP have inserted this provision in as a way to make the Democratic party look bad by forcing them to withdraw support of the bill.
"I want Republicans to know that Democrats support STEM visas. [But] we don't need to kill other legal immigration programs to create a STEM program," Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois) said during a floor speech on Thursday. "Republicans are more interested in killing the Diversity Visa Program than in creating a program for STEM graduates."
Some analysts believe that while the bill is imperfect, it is a step in the right direction in terms of putting immigration reform on the table at Capitol Hill.
"This is a step in the right direction for a few reasons," said Belinda Moreira of Policy Mic. "Immigration reform needs to be discussed, and this is a stepping-stone in the right direction. This bill will allow families to be together during this stressful process, which can take years to complete. This bill is also proof that the GOP may be willing to have more comprehensive talks about what needs to happen with the current immigration situation."
However, Moreira also criticized the bill's planned elimination of visas from the lottery, saying that the bill, as written would "target a particular group of immigrants to stay and prosper, while denying another group the chance to escape nations" which are poor and war-torn."
"This isn't a matter of only Latino voters, it is a major issue that affects the entire nation. Bills like these are only Band-Aids that only cover up the issue, they do not heal them," she writes.
Political columnist Jan Ting has called for both Democrats and Republicans to support the bill, while stating that the diversity lottery was discriminatory and steered visas to politically favored races and nationalities.
"Democrats are holding the STEM Jobs Act hostage until they get what they want, which is a big amnesty for all the millions of aliens who have entered the U.S. in violation of our immigration laws," Ting writes. "They don't like to use the word "amnesty", and prefer the vague, ambiguous, and meaningless phrase "comprehensive immigration reform."
Lawrence Downes of the New York Times, however, believes that this version of the bill is a bad idea and only a repackaging of the same bill that failed to pass in the House in September.
Downes further blasted Rep. Smith, calling the propositions for reunification of families under Smith's bill "meager terms" and saying that he could have negotiated with Democrats on a better bill, especially regarding the reunification.
"He didn't, and this is what we're left with: an old strategy, repackaged," Downes wrote. "If the Republicans are going to offer real immigration reform, they will have to do better than this."
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