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Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for locking us in, and I think we will complete our comments well on time for the vote.
I am very pleased to be joined by my colleague Senator Collins as we introduce a bill called the Religious Workforce Protection Act. Our third cosponsor, Senator Risch, is chairing a Foreign Relations Committee hearing right now but wanted me to comment that he is also a cosponsor of the bill.
This bill deals with a problem that I first saw in my parish, that, at the time, when I was talking to folks in my church about it, seemed like a small local problem, but it turns out it is a big national problem.
My church, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, in Richmond, VA, was founded as an immigrant church. It was heavily for Italian- and German-American Catholics, right after World War I, who felt sort of looked askance upon because of the war, and they wanted to have their own parish that could be a haven for them. Now, a hundred-plus years later, my church is still an immigrant church, but it is about a third Congolese.
But in addition to the fact that many of our churches of all denominations--synagogues and temples and gurdwaras and mosques--in the country serve new American populations, it is also the case that many of our religious workers in the United States are also immigrants.
Two of the last three priests in my parish were immigrants, one from India and one from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and I began to hear about a problem with the way our immigration laws work for religious workers.
There is a visa called an R-1 visa that allows, upon the petitioning of a church or a mosque or a synagogue, for a religious worker to come and work for a congregation for a period of 5 years.
The R-1 visa lasts for 5 years. Often, during the course of that 5 years, the faith congregation decides, ``Here is somebody who is really great; we would like to keep him''--or her--and they apply for an EB-4 visa, which is a more extended visa. And the idea would be you would apply, and the application process would finish before your R-1 visa expires.
Well, it turns out we have huge backlogs in processing these EB-4 visas. So many religious workers get to the end of their 5-year term, and their EB-4 is pending--likely to be approved but not yet approved-- and they have to depart the country. They are required to go back home and stay for at least a year before they come back.
There can also be some challenges for religious workers. If, say, one starts working at St. Elizabeth's parish and gets moved to St. Paul's Parish just a mile or two away, they have to restart the process because it is a new employer even though they are essentially doing the same thing.
So Senator Collins and I--and she will describe her own story that she sees in her native Maine with the same topic. We started to talk about this, and it turns out this is an issue in Catholic parishes, but it is an issue much more broadly.
So what we have done is introduced a bill we call the Religious Workforce Protection Act. It would allow someone in this R-1 category to file the application for the EB-4, and if the 5-year R-1 period ends before the EB-4 has been granted, this bill would give discretion--not a mandate but discretion--to the Secretary of Homeland Security to grant an extension of the R-1 visa for a worker who has applied for the EB-4 and who fully qualifies, has no disqualifying factor that would suggest that they would not be eligible for the EB-4.
It also allows a little more flexibility so that a religious worker can move from one parish to the next or get a promotion from associate pastor to pastor without restarting the application process as long as they maintain continuous work as a religious worker, as the R-1 program was designed for.
We think this is going to be a good fix for many of our religious communities.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, the Hindu American Foundation, the Immigration Committee of Agudath Israel of America, and the Episcopal Church of America have all weighed in because so many different faith congregations are seeing this same challenge--the backlog in processing applications for R-1 religious workers to be able to convert their status to EB-4.
We think it is a basic, commonsensical provision, and giving the DHS Secretary on a case-by-case basis the ability to review and then extend someone's R-1 status while their EB-4 is processing seems like a way to solve this problem for so many faith congregations all around the United States.
With that, I am very, very pleased to be joined in this by my colleague from Maine, and I would like to yield to Senator Collins.
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