Greencard » Mexico

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

United States Association of Immigrants Launches New Social Web Site

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:18:19 +0000

The United States Association of Immigrants at myUSAi.org today announced a new social immigration portal for those who share a passion for immigrating to the USA and integrating into American culture. It includes secure Facebook Connect technology allowing users to import their existing Facebook identity for seamless access by millions of existing Facebook members worldwide.

Visitors can access a Discussion Forum for immigrants and prospective immigrants moderated by Michael C. Cruse, Esq., a member of the Pennsylvania Bar and American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). He is also the editor of the sixth edition of Win the Greencard Lottery! the COMPLETE Do-It-Yourself Guide (ISBN 9780981693828). Co-author J. Stephen Wilson is an immigration writer with the Albuquerque Immigration Examiner, founder of myGreencard.com, and President of the United States Association of Immigrants.

read the full story at PR Web

The I-485 Inventory Numbers Require Attention

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:19:09 +0000

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released the most recent inventory numbers of employment-based green card applications on its newly-designed website1 in late September of 2009. These statistics are released in a comprehensive manner, categorized by country of chargeability and preference category. Although visa backlog has been a known problem for many years, these well-organized statistics still provide a clear picture as to exactly where the congestions are and where eacha visa applicant stands in the multilayered queues for immigration.

How is the visa pie dived up?

A quick review of the congressional allocation of employment visa numbers will be helpful for the analysis of these I-485 inventory numbers. Section 201(d)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allocates an annual minimum of 140,000 visa numbers for employment-based immigrant visas. Although there are 140,000 employment visas available for worldwide usage, each country may not take more than 7% or 25,620 of the annual visa quota.2 Furthermore, each of the five employment visa preference category is subject to the following limits:3

First (Priority Worker): 28.6% of the worldwide quota, or 40,040, plus unused numbers from the fourth and fifth preferences.

Second (Advanced degree professionals or exceptional ability aliens): 28.6% of the worldwide quota, or 40,040, plus unused numbers from first preference.

Third (Skill Workers, Professionals and Other Workers): 28.6% of the worldwide quota, or 40,040, plus any numbers not used by the first and second preferences. “Other Workers” may only receive up to 10,000 of the visa numbers.4

Fourth (Certain Special Immigrants): 7.1% of the worldwide quota or 9,940.

Fifth (Employment Creation): 7.1% of the worldwide quota.

What is the big picture like?

Generally speaking, there are no big surprises regarding the big picture. There are altogether 233,816 I-485 adjustment applications as of August 25, 2009 pending adjudication before the USCIS, of which 4,050 belong to Eb-1, 74,932 to Eb-2, and151,231 to Eb-3. In terms of geographical distribution, 26,170 cases come from China, 111,296 from India, 12,481 from the Philippines, 8,415 from Mexico, and 74,914 from the rest of the world. Visa numbers remind very tight for the most popular preference categories including Eb-2 second preference and Eb-3 third preference. As expected, the countries which have triggered the per-country cap in recent years are suffering a multi-year backlog of visa numbers. These countries – China (Mainland), India, Mexico, and the Philippines – all have their own I-485 inventory tables. While all countries are struggling in the Eb-3 preference category, China and India are also having a huge backlog in the second preference category. The “other countries” are also looking at a multi-year wait in the third preference category, with a dismal priority date of June 1, 2002 in the October 2009 Visa Bulletin.5 The Eb-1 Priority Worker category remains current for all countries.

Putting the numbers in perspective

There are different ways that these inventory numbers can be useful and analyzed. The following are some interesting observations:

These I-485 inventory numbers represent only the immigrant cases that are filed within the U.S. only. The USCIS indicates that about 15% of the immigrant visas are processed through overseas consular processing. Hence, the actual numbers of applicants for an immigrant visa are actually higher.
There are still 6,170 I-485 applications pending from April 2001, plus another 500+ cases from 2000 and the first three months of 2001. Many of these cases were likely filed under or in anticipation of the INA Section 245(i)6 provision. However, the impact of these cases has dissipated over the years. The most current Visa Bulletin shows that only India’s Eb-3 category has a cutoff date in April of 2001.
The notion that Eb-2 cases are faster than their Eb-3 counterparts still holds true for now but may begin to change soon. While all countries are backlogged under Eb-3, all but two countries are current in Eb-2. China and India have respectively 18,365 and 39,972 I-485 applications pending in the Eb-2 category due to visa backlog. (See Illustration 1 below) In fact, China has three times more Eb-2 cases than Eb-3 cases. The worldwide I-485 inventory table with all pending cases7 shows the number of pending Eb-2 cases was trailing Eb-3 until 2008; the year 2008 has 4,235 pending Eb-2 cases vs. 540 pending Eb-3 cases. Similar trend is also present in the India table, where the number of pending Eb-2 cases first surpassed Eb-3 in the year 2005.8
The number of pending “other workers” cases is proportionately low, with only 1,520 pending I-485s worldwide. One can draw the conclusion that the majority of intending (employment-based) immigrants are skilled workers and professionals.

[read the full story at ilw]

About The Author

Paul Szeto, Esq. is a former INS assistant district counsel in New York City. A winner of the AILF’s Edward L. Dubroff Memorial Award for outstanding writing in the field of Immigration and Nationality Law in 1994, Paul is now in private practice in Edison, New Jersey, focusing on Immigration and Nationality Law. Paul Szeto can be reached at info@szetolaw.com.