‘Kennedy/ McCain’ Visas

By Debbie McGoldrick

“DO you know if any stipulations exist regarding nationality of people applying for a possible Kennedy/McCain visa? If a person is born in Scotland, Wales or England but they have at least one parent who is Irish — where do they stand? Or, alternatively, if the person was born in England, Scotland or Wales with both parents Irish.

“If a person currently holds an 18-month employer sponsored visa, are they eligible to apply for a Kennedy/McCain? If so how does it affect their current status?”

REGARDING the “Kennedy/McCain visa,” such a document is far from a done deal. Read the news pages of this week’s issue for an update on how the immigration debate in Washington, D.C. is progressing, and specifically the introduction last week of a new “chairman’s mark” bill authored by the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter.

Compared to the bill sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy and John McCain last year, the Specter proposals are far more limited with regards to a guest worker program. The point is, it’s anybody’s guess as to how this is all going to pan out, and making future plans based on a Kennedy/McCain visa is not a wise idea.

As that bill is written, there are no stipulations based on nationality for visa eligibility. There are two types of new visas proposed in the Kennedy/McCain bill — an H-5A “essential worker” class which would create 400,000 temporary work visas a year, and the H-5B, which would give the undocumented here prior to the bill’s introduction last May a chance at legal status.

Place of birth has traditionally been a difficult issue for those born in the U.K. to Irish parents, or worse, those born in the U.K. but raised fully in Ireland. The Irish parent link has usually not helped, unless it can be proven that the parent did not have a full-time residence in the U.K. at the time of the child’s birth. But that gets into a complicated area known as chargeability which is a separate column in and of itself.

The Irish who were born in Britain were eligible to apply for the Morrison green card program in the early 1990s, but they were shut out of contention for the 48,000 visas reserved exclusively for those born in the Irish Republic. Instead they had to compete for the remaining 72,000 Morrisons along with natives of the 33 other countries deemed to be “adversely affected” by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Present day, only natives of the Republic and Northern Ireland are eligible to apply for the annual DV-1 diversity visa program, but that’s hardly worth writing home about. There are only 50,000 DV-1s allocated each year, and Irish applicants are lucky to get a couple of hundred, given that some six million entries from around the world are received.

Persons who are currently here on a temporary work visa could theoretically apply for a Kennedy/McCain H-5A visa. It’s permissible for any class of visa holder to switch to another, provided that all the conditions for the new visa can be met.

In terms of the proposed H-5A, those conditions are as follows — evidence of a job offer in the U.S., and approved criminal and security background checks. The H-5A visa holder would not be obligated to remain with the same employer — a right not usually granted in the existing non-immigrant worker categories — but would have to remain employed for the duration of the visa.

But again, it’s early days with regards to all of the above. Keep reading the newspapers, and make those calls to Capitol Hill pols urging comprehensive reform.