TEMPORARY WORK VISAS 

The last set of changes to legal immigration gates we’ll consider focuses on specific temporary work visas. Members of the immigration reform group that CommonSense American organized at the request of the Co-Chairs of Congress’s Commonsense Coalition suggested particular attention to these visas in part because of the unprecedented demographic changes the country is experiencing. Employment-based temporary visas are seen as the primary means of addressing the 40 million more workers that we’ll need in the next decade if we are to avoid a significantly slowing economy and substantial cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare. We focus on reforms to three of the most important temporary work visas in the current system.

As noted at the beginning of this section, unlike undocumented workers, those who come here through a temporary work visa program, or their employers, have complied with requirements designed to ensure that the workers have a net positive effect on our country. All three programs we review use the three-layer system to screen out criminals described above. Each program has its own features to ensure that foreign workers’ impacts on the US economy and native workers are positive. Still, people with a range of views on immigration agree that work visa programs are outdated and could use improvement in many ways.