Summary of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009

This summary highlights key provisions of the CIR ASAP Act and will be supplemented in the coming weeks as the IPC conducts deeper analysis of the proposals contained in the Act.

Visa Reforms

Title III. Visa Reforms

Family and employment backlog reduction: The bill contains several measures designed to reduce long backlogs in family and employment immigrant and nonimmigrant visa processing:

• Permits the “recapture” of unused employment-based visas and family-sponsored visas from fiscal years 1992-2008 and allows future unused visa numbers to roll over to next fiscal year.
• Exempts immediate relatives from the annual cap on the number of immigrant visas, and increases the number of visas which may be issued per country per year.
• Permits qualified workers eligible for an employment based petition to receive work authorization until a visa becomes available.
• Exempts from skilled worker numerical cap U.S. educated foreign nationals who receive science, technology, engineering and math degrees and other critical workforce graduates.
• Exempts foreign nurses from current numerical limitations and provides new programs to fund and develop domestic nursing supply and encourage training of other domestic health care professionals.

Promotion of Family Unity: The bill includes various measures designed to keep U.S. families together:

• Reclassifies spouses and children of lawful permanent residents as immediate relatives.
• Ensures that immediate relatives may continue to pursue their immigration petitions even if the U.S. citizen or LPR who petitioned for them dies.
• Provides the government with greater discretionary authority to waive unlawful presence bars to reunite families if there are U.S. citizen children involved.
• Provides relief for orphans and widows of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants by allowing them to retain eligibility for waivers and other considerations that would have been available to them at the time of the petitioner’s death.
• Permits immigration judges greater discretion in determining eligibility requirements for long-term lawful permanent residents seeking cancellation of removal.
• Includes protections for refugees, parolees or asylees by prohibiting the removal of any individual who fled his or her homeland for fear of persecution before the age of twelve and was subsequently admitted into the United States as a parolee or refugee or was granted asylum in the United States.
• Permits an immigration judge to decline to order the removal of the parent of a U.S. citizen child if the judge determines that removal would not be in the child's best interests.
• Revises the eligibility requirements for sponsorship of immigrants by reducing the level of support required from 125% of poverty level to 100% of poverty level.

Preventing future illegal immigration: The bill creates the Prevent Unauthorized Migration Visa (PUM Visa) that seeks to provide for safe, humanitarian migration during the three-year transition period before the enactment of recommendations made by the new Labor Commission.

• Creates 100,000 PUM visas annually, for 3 years, to persons from those countries which represent at least 5% of the total unauthorized migration population within the United States for the past five years and will be distributed on a percentage basis through a lottery system.
• Individuals may apply to the lottery if they are not present in the United States at time of filing, do not have other family or employment based means to immigrate, submit to criminal background checks, and have completed less than a 4 year college degree program.
• Individuals awarded visas will be admitted to the United States as conditional residents and may petition for LPR status after 3 years.