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More Koreans Choose Investment Option for U.S. Greencards

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:40:33 +0000

An increasing number of Koreans are immigrating to the U.S. through an investment program as the U.S. has loosened immigration restrictions in order to boost its economy hit hard by the global economic crisis.

In 1990 the U.S. government began granting permanent residency, or greencards, to immigrants who invest over US$1 million in the country, and in 1993 it introduced an immigrant investment program dubbed “Regional Center EB-5 Program” which offers greencards to those who invest at least US$500,000. The number of agencies which file applications for the immigration program on behalf of clients tripled to around 60 to 70 last year from 23 worldwide in 2008.

Immigration through investment is a popular option especially among parents seeking to have their children educated in the U.S., as the parents and all children aged 21 or under are able to receive greencards. Various benefits come with permanent residency, such as lower tuition fees for U.S. residents. Between 2006 and 2008, 1,454 Koreans obtained greencards via the program, the highest number among 67 countries that participated.

Read the full story on Chosun

The greencard interview

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:07:23 +0000

The following is part of an article written by MAYA KARA and BRUCE MAILMAN Special to the Saipan Tribune:

The following is the advice we give to our clients who have an upcoming interview:

If you were both free to marry (not married to someone else at the time), neither of you have a criminal record, and your marriage is real, you have nothing to worry about. In our experience, the greatest concern of USCIS with respect to marriage-based applications is fraud. If you married your husband or wife to get immigration benefits, the chances are, that will come out, sooner or later. Remember even if you get a greencard, or even if you proceed to citizenship, it can be revoked later if it comes out that you were involved in a sham marriage.

Marriages for the purpose of gaining an immigration benefit are of two types: bilateral fraud and unilateral fraud. Bilateral fraud is when one party pays or promises a benefit to another to marry and apply for a greencard. This type of fraud relatively easy to uncover: the parties usually do not actually live together; they do not know much about each other; their stories are inconsistent, the citizen spouse will often withdraw the petition when he or she is informed by the USCIS officer that marriage fraud is a criminal act and that jail is a possibility. Unilateral fraud is much more subtle. Unilateral fraud is when the U.S. citizen enters into the marriage in good faith and the alien spouse has a hidden agenda: immigration benefit. In this type of fraud the parties typically live together as husband and wife, at least until such time that the alien spouse obtains an unconditional greencard. This type of fraud is more difficult but not impossible to uncover.

According to the Field Adjudicator’s manual, which is available online at www.uscis.gov., the following are factors that adjudicators look at in evaluating the validity of a marriage:

-Large disparity in age;

-No common language;

-Vast difference in cultural and ethnic background;

-Family and friends don’t know about the marriage;

-Marriage arranged by third party;

-Marriage took place immediately before beneficiary’s status in the U.S. (or in the CNMI) terminated;

-Not living together since marriage;

-Alien spouse is friend of family of U.S. citizen spouse (i.e. marriage may have been done as a “favor”);

-U.S. citizen spouse has had prior alien spouses for whom he/she filed petitions for greencards.

Not any one of these factors is likely to result in a denial, but the more of these factors that are present, the more evidence will be required to avoid a denial. We have had clients approved who had one or more of the above indicators, but we needed to work harder and come up with more evidence than is usual. We have had several couples whose courtship was entirely via electronic media: e-mail, social networking, text messaging or telephone. In one instance, we printed out hundreds of email messages in a foreign language and had them certified and translated. We had a couple who met via an online dating service and didn’t meet until their marriage ceremony. But they had videos of an elaborate wedding in another country that took several days and involved hundreds of relatives. They also had a second wedding on Saipan, also involving a large family. They also had very convincing demeanor and lots of joint documents.

As for the questions you might be asked, the following are some general subject areas about which you should be able to give answers: how and where did you first meet; who introduced you; where did you go on your first date; if you don’t speak the same language, how did you communicate; how often did you see each other during your courtship; where did you go; did you meet each other’s family members; who asked whom to marry; where did you get married; who attended your wedding and your relationship to each person; where do you live and who do you live with; be ready to describe your residence in detail, both inside and out; be ready to describe your neighborhood including who your neighbors are.

In addition to being able to answer questions, your demeanor is critical. Demeanor is all of the subtle non-verbal signals that pass between people when they are interacting. How you interact with your husband and with the interviewer are both important. You need to not be too nervous; you need to answer directly and clearly; you need to look at your spouse; you need to look at the interviewer. There are a lot of cross-cultural issues that come into play. One hopes that the interviewer is trained to make allowances for behaviors of persons of a different cultural background.

Joint documents are also important. Over the course of marriage, a couple acquires a lot of joint documents. You are expected to produce such documents for the interview. Some possible joint documents are: home ownership, rental agreement or rental receipts in both your names; utilities accounts in both names; joint bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards; joint car ownership and auto insurance; life insurance, retirement benefits, health insurance where one spouse designates the other as a beneficiary; joint tax returns. Again, if it is a new marriage you will not have too many of these documents. You will need to work harder at convincing the interviewer that your marriage is real. This is where notes, letters, photos and so forth come in. If the marriage is established, you will have more of these documents and less difficulty in proving the validity of the marriage. If you have children, the presumption will be that you are together to make a life, not to scam a greencard, and the interview should be very short and uneventful.

Immigration reform again coming into national focus

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:31:20 +0000

Patricia Hernandez has the unenviable job of cleaning up the mess left by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.
“Whatever they break, we fix it,” she said, sitting on a dormitory couch during her morning break. “Change light bulbs, fix furniture, fix toilets, unclog toilets, replace toilets.”
Hernandez, 48, is not complaining, just describing. She is proud of the job she has held for 18 years and the financial security it brings. She loves that her brother is a cook at a nearby campus cafeteria and that her daughter works as a pharmacy technician a few blocks away.
She loves it because 40 years ago, she was living in a Mexican orphanage. Twenty-five years ago, she was living in a car in Southern California and struggling to find work because she was an illegal immigrant.
“Like everybody else, I jumped the border,” she said. Then, about 23 years ago, she got lucky.
For Hernandez and thousands of other Bay Area residents 1987 marked the end of a life of hiding and the beginning of life as an American.
It was the year the Immigration Reform and Control Act, approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan, went into effect. In a matter of months, Hernandez went from being undocumented to having a greencard, and years later she was able to obtain citizenship. She sighs today as she imagines how life would be different without it.
…
The legalized immigrants have joined the ranks of other Americans, raising children and welcoming grandchildren, and the once-a-decade national census does not differentiate them from their neighbors. Some stuck with their pre-amnesty occupations or moved up the career ladder. Some have retired or will soon. More than half — about 1.6 million — lived in California when they won their greencards, but researchers believe thousands eventually dispersed to other states that offered new opportunities.
…
Road to a better life
For Rosalinda Rodriguez, though, and many like her, amnesty was a road to a better life. Rodriguez remembers her visit in 1987 to the Franklin Street immigration office in downtown Oakland, where she brought utility bills and other paperwork — anything she had that would prove to interviewers she had been living in the United States since the 1970s.
In the Bay Area, the law’s potential beneficiaries were cautious, arriving over a yearlong period in a trickle, not a rush, according to newspaper reports from the time. The deadline to apply was May 1988.
The requirements were simple: To get a greencard, immigrants had to be living in the United States since before 1982 and have the documents to prove it. They would also have to pay a $185-per-person fee.
Rodriguez’s visit, she knows now, would change her life, transforming the Mexican immigrant from someone who was fearful and working in the shadows of the East Bay economy to a union hotel worker and grandmother confident to speak up for herself.
“They treat people differently when they know they can take advantage of you,” said Rodriguez, who has cleaned rooms at the downtown Marriott hotel for nearly 20 years. “In my job now, I can speak up. I can speak without fear.”
Rodriguez later bought a home in West Oakland. Life for her family in this recession is not easy, she said, but it is far less stressful than if she had no authorization to be living here.
“We’ve tried to progress,” she said. “If you don’t have papers, you can’t qualify for a loan, and everybody dreams of having their own house.”
By the end of the first phase of the amnesty program, 15,564 immigrants had won their greencards through the Oakland office, 22,580 from the San Francisco office and 23,185 from the San Jose office, according to government records. The Bay Area numbers were higher than many parts of the country but a fraction compared to Southern California, where more than 583,000 people obtained their legal residency through the Los Angeles/Long Beach immigration office alone. The majority of California’s amnesty recipients were originally from Mexico, though Asian immigrants and other Latinos were also prevalent.
Once the first phase was completed, undocumented agricultural workers had their own chance of becoming legal residents. That program was more generous, saying farm workers needed only to have been performing seasonal farm work in the United States for 90 days, not five years, and it was also more vulnerable to fraud as opportunists charged hundreds of dollars to forge letters of support from farmers. The deadline to apply was Nov. 1988.

Read the full story on Inside Bay Area

Green Card Through Marriage

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:33:54 +0000

You do not have to use a lawyer to apply for a green card through marriage. Easygration offers you a better option!

Congratulations on getting married!

As part of this exciting time-of-life, you are probably also looking for an affordable, simple and quick option for filing your green card application.

Did you know that you do not have to use a lawyer to file the application? Many couples choose to complete the application process by themselves and avoid the huge fees that lawyers charge (which range from $1,000 to $5,000).

Easygration offers you an even better option than paying these fees or spending lots of time learning all the legal jargon and studying the different forms. Since we are not lawyers, but experts on green card through marriage, we do not charge hefty legal fees, and since we review every case and only take green card cases that do not require a lawyer, you can feel rest assured that you are in good hands.

We prepare the forms for you and you do the rest:
✓All required forms to successfully apply for a Green Card through marriage.
✓Forms for work authorization, so the alien spouse can work in the USA while waiting for the green card to be processed.
✓Forms for travel authorization (advance parole), so the alien spouse can travel outside the USA while waiting for the green card to be processed.
✓Detailed instructions on how to file the green card application.

Contact Easygration for your green card through marriage application.

Note: Easygration is not a law firm.

For more information:
http://www.easygration.com
Visit our website: Green Card Through Marriage.

China narrows technology gap with US

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:38:59 +0000

America remains the world’s science and technology leader by minting a record number of patents and having “prolific inventors” in Silicon Valley and university and company labs, but China is gaining ground, the National Science Board said Friday in its congressionally mandated biennial report on science and engineering.
“The report is not just about where we stand, it’s about where we are headed,” National Science Foundation director Arden Bement said at the White House while rolling out the report.

The 2010 report declared 2007 was the year China caught up to the US in the number of researchers and doctoral degrees it handed out in natural sciences and engineering. The US awarded 22,500 doctorates in natural sciences and engineering in 2007, but more than half of them were awarded to foreign nationals from countries like India, China and Russia.

Past experience suggests that most new Ph.D.s will stay in the US. Despite the long wait to get a Greencard, sluggish US economy and hype about reverse brain drain, the report shows that 60 per cent of temporary visa holders who earned doctorates in science in engineering in 1997 were still working in the US — and had no intention of leaving.

“While the US is the largest R&D performing nation — representing one-third of total world investment — Asia has narrowed the gap due to the sustained annual increases by China,” said Jose-Marie Griffiths, a member of the National Science Board.

Read the full story on DNA India

Immigrants watching health care debate

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:02:37 +0000

Immigrants are concerned about two policies as the House and Senate try to reach a compromise on health care reform. But even advocates for immigrants acknowledge that any attempt to ease restrictions could spark emotional opposition.

One concern focuses on whether illegal immigrants would be allowed to buy health insurance on private markets, called exchanges, which are envisioned in the legislation. The House bill would let them, the Senate bill would not.

The other concern is that both versions of the legislation maintain a five-year waiting period for legal permanent residents to participate in Medicaid for the poor. Advocates contend that these greencard holders should be allowed in Medicaid immediately, as Congress agreed last year for a program for pregnant women and children.

Read this entire story in the Monday, January 18, 2010 print edition of The Baxter Bulletin.

Immigrants take vows to stay here

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:37:05 +0000

Federal agents used old-fashioned detective work to prove that a professional couple from Ghana was trying to dodge immigration laws when they dissolved their marriage and wed U.S. citizens.

According to court documents, immigration agents placed the couple’s Blacklick house under surveillance, interviewed their next-door neighbors and sorted through trash bags taken from their curbside refuse container.

The agents collected enough evidence to establish that Kwadwo Asante and Lilian Asante were living as husband and wife but had entered sham marriages with others in hopes of gaining permanent residency in the United States.

Both pleaded guilty and were sentenced yesterday to two years on probation. An immigration judge is expected to deport them.

The tactics used by agents in the case aren’t typical, said a Columbus immigration lawyer, but they illustrate the extremes to which officials will go to investigate the validity of marriages between citizen and noncitizens.

“The truth is, if the government suspects that a marriage isn’t bona fide, they’ll investigate mightily,” said Kenneth J. Robinson.

Federal law is clear: Any individual who “knowingly enters into a marriage for the purpose of evading any immigration law” faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The notion that marriage to a citizen is a simple path to a green card granting permanent residency is a common misconception, said Dennis Muchnicki, a Dublin-based immigration lawyer. “People think the process is easy, but it’s no walk in the park,” he said.

The couple must file forms with immigration officials asking the government to formally recognize the relationship and grant the noncitizen permanent residency.

The process can take five to seven months, requires exhaustive documentation and includes an interview with an immigration official who separates the couple and asks personal questions, such as where they put their dirty clothes and which side of the bed each sleeps on.

The filing fees for a greencard cost $1,365. Couples who hire a lawyer to assist them with the process can expect to pay an additional $1,000 to $2,000, Robinson said.

The process isn’t open to all noncitizens. Those who scramble across the border without passing through inspection checkpoints aren’t eligible to gain residency through marriage.

Those who enter the U.S. through customs with fraudulent documents can seek residency through marriage, but the bureaucratic hurdles are significant.

“The majority of those who gain residency benefits through marriage entered the country lawfully,” Robinson said.

Most often, they came to the United States with temporary work or student visas. That was the path taken by the Asantes. Lilian Asante came to attend law school at Ohio State University. Kwadwo Asante was attending Case Western Reserve University’s MBA program.

“When people come here legally from the proverbial Third World countries with a student visa and realize everything this country has to offer, a lot of them don’t want to go back,” said Daniel A. Brown, an assistant U.S. attorney in Columbus.

And some are willing to pay to find a fraudulent spouse, he said.

In December, 11 central Ohio residents were indicted for their involvement in sham marriages arranged for about $17,000 each. Federal prosecutors determined that none of the couples lived together after they were married.

Brown said sham-marriage prosecutions are rare in central Ohio, but he suspects that many escape the scrutiny of investigators.

When couples approach Robinson about helping them with the greencard process, he puts them through the same kind of questioning they’ll get from an immigration official.

“For every 10 I take, I probably turn away two,” he said.

But he assumes that most find another lawyer willing to help them. “I don’t envy the government’s job.”

Source: The Columbus Dispatch