Summary
Signaling a growing emphasis on the employment and recruitment of skilled workers, this Act ameliorated the decades-long wait times faced by thousands of employment-based applicants for permanent residency. The high caliber of individuals seeking citizenship outweighed the open discrimination of the unequal quotas applied to Asian and newly independent countries and lent support to this reform which removed numeric caps for highly skilled immigrants enacted with the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Such privileging of highly skilled, and educated, immigrants fostered the phenomenon known as “brain drain” from developing countries.
Source
US House of Representatives Office of the Law Revision Counsel
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any alien who (1) is registered on a consular waiting list pursuant to section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1153) under priority date earlier than March 31, 1954, and (2) is eligible for a quota immigrant status under the provisions of section 203(a)(4) of the said Act (8 U.S.C. 1153) on a basis of a petition filed with the Attorney General prior to January 1, 1962, and the spouse and children of such alien, shall be held to be nonquota immigrants and if otherwise admissible under the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, shall be issued nonquota immigrant visas…
“SEC. 3. Section 204(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1154) is hereby amended by adding the following at the end thereof: “The Attorney General shall forward to the Congress a report on each approved petition for immigrant status under section 203(a) (1) stating the basis for his approval and such facts as were by him deemed to be pertinent in establishing the beneficiary’s qualifications for the preferential status and for the petitioner’s urgent need for his services. Such reports shall be submitted to the Congress on the first and fifteenth day of each calendar month in which the Congress is in session.”
