Speech #1100064965

If you speak English or French. if you have some education. if you have special skills Canada can utilize. you get more points and you compete with others who apply. So they attempt in this fashion to serve the national interest. A move toward more skill based immigration is what Canada has done. and they are very happy with it. Australia does it. New Zealand does It. Other countries operate their immigration system in this fashion. They still provide immigration slots for refugees. as they always have. and if the United States moved to this system. we would still have humanitarian based immigration as well. We would not end those programs. We were told that moving the United States to a Canadian or Australian immigration system might happen in this new bill. I was very interested in it because I urged my colleagues last year to have a point system or a merit based system in the bill. Nothing was even discussed about it last year and there was no hint of it in the bill that was offered then. So when I was told it was being considered this year. that presented some hope. Unfortunately. the meritbased system that actually made it into the bill does not commence in any effective way at the passage of the bill. instead it will not increase the percentage of immigrants who come to America based on skills until 9 years after passage of the bill. In 2006. employmentbased or skillbased immigration made up 22 percent of our immigrant flow. In 2006. we only had 12 percent. So. recently. skill based immigration has made up 12 percent to 22 percent of annual immigration. As I stated before. Canada has 60 percent and Australia has 62 percent skill based immigration. Under the Senate bill. skillbased or meritbased immigration will make up about 18 percent of the total immigration levels for the first 5 years. That is not even as high as we had in 2005. Then. for the years 6 through 8 after the bill passes. merit immigration will drop to 11 percent of the total annual immigration level. lower than the 12 percent we had in 2006. Even when the percentage finally increases after the ninth or tenth year. it only rises to as high as 36 percent based on skilled immigration. which is a little more than half of what the Canadian system now has. I dont think that is a strong enough move. and it is a strong disappointment to me that this is the case. Mr.