Greencard » Immigration

Help Fund a Project, and Get a Green Card

admin — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:37:25 +0000

With bank financing for new construction in short supply, real-estate developers are turning to a federal program that grants green cards to foreign nationals who invest at least $500,000 in a project.

The new attention has turned a once-obscure alternative source of funds into a viable route toward development. Use of the 20-year-old program nearly doubled last year, to 1,995 investor applicants in the fiscal year ended last September from 1,031 in the prior year.

In 2006, when the economy was still roaring, there were just 486 applicants, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The program is named EB-5 because it represents a fifth category of employment-based immigration.

Read the rest of the story on WSJ

Green Card Process Steps (socyberty.com)
How to Get Usa Visa Lottery (socyberty.com)

No Deadline for H1B Visa Applicants: USCIS

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:11:09 +0000

The US citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have started accepting the H1B Visa applications for the next fiscal year from Wednesday. An overall 65,000 applications are offered excluding 20,000 H1B visas for applicants of US masters’ or higher degree. In 2009, due to the downturn the filed applications were fewer and to meet the limit of 65,000 wanted to wait until December. Due to the reinforcement of outsourcing business, the limit is to be infringed in advance this year.
USCIS has not insisted any deadline for accepting H1B applications in 2010. A release from USCIS remarked: “Cases will be considered accepted on the date that it takes possession of a properly filed petition with the correct fee; not the date that the petition is postmarked.”

Source: Daily News 365

Greencard for child of a fiancée of a US citizen

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:44:46 +0000

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a child of a fiancée of a United States Citizen or K-2 visa holder can adjust his or her status to Greencard holder or Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) even though the child turns twenty-one while the application is pending.

The court’s ruling comes from the matter of Colmenares Carpio v. Holder which concluded that the applicant “must be under twenty-one when he or she seeks to enter the United States, not when his or her subsequent application adjustment of status is finally adjudicated.”

This result contravenes several decisions of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service or USCIS denying applications for adjustment of status based on a K-2 visa because the applicant was twenty-one years of age or older at the time of adjudication of the adjustment of status.

To recap, the K-2 visa holder must be under twenty-one at the time he or she “seeks to enter” the US when applying for adjustment of status.

Read the full story on abs-cbnnews

U.S. Immigration Law Presentation (slideshare.net)

Laschenova, Lawyer Renew Immigration Quest

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:49:29 +0000

Coaching in the U.S. for the past 10 years, Olympic gold medalist Natalia Laschenova said she will continue her quest to earn a green card despite the denial letter she recently received from immigration officials.

“I am not going anywhere,” Laschenova told IG.

In January, Laschenova’s employer, Integrity Gymnastics in Plain City, Ohio, received a notice from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that her petition for an employment-based immigrant visa was denied, reopened and denied again.

“For how many years we’ve been here and what we’ve done, it’s so stressful right now,” Laschenova said Saturday. “It’s not right. Everyone knows it’s not right.”

Laschenova said she is hopeful that Gus Shihab, the immigration attorney who last week offered to handle her case pro bono, can succeed in appealing it. An Atlanta law firm handled Laschenova’s original case.

“Basically, we’re lucky at least once in these 10 years,” Laschenova said of her new association with Shihab, of Shihab & Associates in Columbus, Ohio. “He started working very, very quickly.”

Read the full story on intlgymnast.com/

Immigration laws quash many dreams

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:10:19 +0000

UNDER CURRENT U.S. immigration law, there are three primary ways to gain legal entry into the country other than for a limited stay as a tourist.

• The first is through the annual “green card diversity lottery,” held each year by the Department of Homeland Security, for citizens of countries that have “low rates of immigration” to the United States. Millions of people from specified countries around the world apply to take part in the lottery, but only 50,000 green cards are made available through the process. Each participant in the lottery is issued a number, the government draws about 150,000 numbers, and the people with those numbers then are allowed to apply for one of the 50,000 slots.

• The second way to gain legal entry is to be a spouse, sibling, child or parent of an American citizen or the spouse or minor child of someone who holds a green card and is willing to sponsor your entrance into the United States.

• The third is through an employer, who must complete a lengthy application process that requires proof that the has a unique skill necessary to the business.

THERE ARE other provisions of immigration law that allow people who are seeking asylum to gain legal entry into the country, but being granted asylum is an extraordinarily difficult process.

An additional number of other immigrants are admitted each year under temporary work permits and student visas, however those visas generally do not permit conversion to immigrant status, and they require the holder to leave after a specified length of stay.

And then there is the “S” visa. Essentially a free pass, the visa is awarded only to those who work for law enforcement and must be applied for by law-enforcement officials. The Mayas say immigration officials promised them the “S” visa, but then reneged.

According to immigration officials, only 250 “S” visas are available each year, and fewer than 60 were awarded in 2009.

CONGRESS last year set immigration visa limits at 700,000 for employment and family preferences, excluding refugees and those entering the country on temporary work or student visas.

In 2008, the total number of immigrants admitted to the country (excluding refugees and those on temporary non-tourist visas) tallied just under 750,000.

Source: Daily Free Man

Rules for visa perplex family

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:07:15 +0000

Sarah Farnan used to dream of working the Shamu show at Sea World.

Now she just wants a way to stay in the United States, at least until her college graduation.

A Bright Futures scholar in her junior year at the University of South Florida, Sarah could be deported back to England when she turns 21 this summer.

Her parents, who own a Pinellas County pressure washing business, thought Sarah could remain with them as long as she was their dependent.
“My understanding was that she is my dependent until she finishes school,” said Peter Farnan, 51. “It turns out I was wrong.”

Their plight, and others like it, have advocacy groups pushing to reform the E-2 visa program, which rewards foreign business owners for investing and creating jobs in the United States.

They estimate there are more than 100,000 such businesses, with yearly revenue of $50 billion and a work force of 700,000 despite the visa’s limitations.

Among them: An E-2 holder cannot get a homestead exemption or a job in a different business and has no path to permanent residency.

“This is not an immigration visa,” said Sonja B. Stefanadis, a caseworker for U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis who is trying to help the Farnans. “You’re supposed to just finish up and go home.”

Read the full story at Tampa Bay

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

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:
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Visit our website: Green Card Through Marriage.

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