House Subcommittee on Immigration Approves Three New Bills

05 Aug 2008

Last week, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration reviewed a series of proposed immigration-related legislation and approved the following three bills to go to the full House Judiciary Committee for review.

The first bill, H.R. 6020, was sponsored by Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and would amend the Immigration and Naturalization Act to enable soldiers who served in the military in the support of contingency operations to be eligible for naturalization. The bill passed the subcommittee by a vote of 6-3.

The second bill, H.R. 5882, also sponsored by Lofgren, proposes to recapture employment- and family-based immigrant visas that were unused due to bureaucratic delays so that these visas are not lost again in the future. This bill passed by a vote of 8-1.

The final bill, H.R. 5924, sponsored by Representative Robert Wexler (D-FL) proposes to make available 20,000 employment-based visas each year for three years for nurses wishing to provide allied healthcare in the United States. This bill passed the subcommittee by a vote of 7-2.