Nationality and Immigration Act of 1965 in USA

Subject: IR

Context:

Last month US government decided to temporarily stop issuing H-1B and H-4 visas  along with a slew of restrictions on legal immigration

Concept:

• In recent years, about 70 per cent of H1-1B visas have gone to Indian nationals.
• The burden of the suspension will fall mainly on US high-tech firms, and on Indian IT services firms that rely on temporary skilled migration for a part of their US operations.

Origin of Indians’ migration to USA

• Indians began to migrate to US in significant numbers only in the late 1960s after the passage of the Nationality and Immigration Act of 1965 by USA.
• The new law replaced the national origin quotas with distribution of visas with preferences based on family relationships and skills subject to caps for individual countries.
• Prior to that, there were restrictions on the immigration of Indians and of most other Asians. There were national origin quotas in immigration laws that favored countries of Northwestern Europe.