As was previously pointed
out on this site (see our blog entries, Amnesty
Will Overload the Current Immigration System, 2/04/14 and The
Nation is ready, The Congress is ready, The President is ready, BUT is DHS
Ready for Comprehensive Immigration Reform?, 3/14/13) , any Comprehensive Immigration
Reform which includes a widespread amnesty provision, will undoubtedly have a
major detrimental impact on the processing of legal immigration cases by U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The following article,
published today in the New York Times, demonstrates how DACA, a very small
administrative amnesty program for the children of illegal aliens, has already
more than doubled waiting times for Americans, who are following all the rules,
and are legitimately trying to be reunited with their foreign husbands or wives
and minor children.
As this article clearly
illustrates, immigration benefits for Illegal Aliens to remain in the U.S. are given a higher priority than legal spouses of
US Citizens; this includes the spouses of Americans who are actively serving in
our Armed Forces. While we
whole-heartedly concur with the Times position on this issue, it is ironic to
note that the Times headline refers to Dream Act persons in their headline as
"Immigrants" rather than "Illegal immigrants".
Ben Ferro
benferro@insideins.com
_____________________________________________________________
Program
Benefiting Some Immigrants Extends Visa Wait for Others
Many thousands of Americans
seeking green cards for foreign spouses or other immediate relatives have been
separated from them for a year or more because of swelling bureaucratic delays
at a federal immigration agency in recent months.
The long waits came when
the agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, shifted attention and
resources to a program President Obama started in 2012 to give deportation
deferrals to young undocumented immigrants, according to administration
officials and official data.
The trouble that American
citizens have faced gaining permanent resident visas for their families raises
questions about the agency’s priorities and its readiness to handle what could
become a far bigger task. After Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said on Thursday that the House was not likely to
act on an immigration overhaul this year, immigrant advocates are turning up
their pressure on Mr. Obama to expand the deferral program to include many more
of the 11.7 million immigrants in the country illegally.
Waiting for a Visa Mr.
Bachert’s wife, Debra, and their two children in a Skype session. She stayed in
her native Australia to wait for a green card.
Andrew Bachert is one
citizen caught in the slowdown. After he moved back to this country in August
for work, he thought he and his wife, who is Australian, would be settled by
now in a new home in New York State , shoveling snow and adjusting to the winter chill.
Instead his wife, Debra Bachert, is stranded, along with the couple’s two
teenagers and two dogs, in a hastily rented house in Adelaide , where the temperature rose in January to 115
degrees.
At loose ends, Mr. Bachert,
48, spent Halloween and Thanksgiving without his wife and children, and he
opened his Christmas presents for them himself — on a Skype call so at least
they could see what he had gotten for them.
“I’m sitting over here on
my own, and it’s unbearably hard,” Mr. Bachert said. At the current pace, Mrs.
Bachert will probably not travel to the United States before August.
Until recently, an American
could obtain a green card for a spouse, child or parent — probably the easiest
document in the immigration system — in five months or less. But over the past
year, waits for approvals of those resident visas stretched to 15 months, and
more than 500,000 applications became stuck in the pipeline, playing havoc with
international moves and children’s schools and keeping families apart.
“U.S. citizens petitioning for green cards for immediate
relatives are a high, if not the highest, priority in the way Congress set up
the immigration system,” said Gregory Chen, director of advocacy for the
American Immigration Lawyers Association, the national bar association. “This
is a problem that needs to be fixed quickly.”
Many Americans are awaiting
visas for spouses they recently wed, including Mukul Varma, 31, a naturalized
citizen who works as a software consultant near Chicago . On a trip to India to visit relatives, he fell in love with Neetika
Gupta, 26, also a software engineer. They married in India in May.
“To be honest with you,”
Mr. Varma said, “because I was a U.S. citizen I thought it would not be an issue to get a
visa for my wife. I didn’t put any thought into it.”
In mid-January Mr. Varma
flew back to India to see his bride for the first time in nine months. He applied for her
green card soon after the wedding, and since then it has not advanced. Their
plans to start their life together in this country are in disarray.
“First it was surprise,”
Mr. Varma said. “Then dismay. Then it just becomes very discouraging. You feel
helpless. You feel as if you did things the right way and you are penalized for
it.”
Christopher S. Bentley, a
Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman, said the agency had seen “a
temporary increase in processing times” for the citizens’ green card
applications because of the deferrals program and “the standard ebb and flow”
of visas.
Last year, officials said,
the agency detected the problem and tried to speed up the green cards by
spreading them out to three processing centers. In November, the agency
reported it had reduced waits to 10 months, calling that a “significant step
forward.” Officials said they hoped to reduce waits to five months, but not
before this summer.
Because there are no annual
limits on green cards for citizens’ immediate relatives, there are no systemic
backlogs. But initial approvals are centralized at the immigration agency in
the United
States .
After that step, generally the longest, the visas must also pass through the
State Department and foreign consulates. The law prohibits foreigners who want
to become residents from entering as tourists while their documents are in
process.
After Mr. Obama announced
the deferral program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, in 2012,
he gave Citizenship and Immigration Services only two months to get it running.
Agency officials scrambled. As of last week, 521,815 youths had received
deferrals, with the agency handling more than 2,000 applications a day.
The agency drew rare praise
from immigrants and advocates for the efficiency of the program, which is highly
popular among Latinos. It has been widely regarded as a successful dress
rehearsal for a larger legalization.
But soon after the
deferrals were underway, Americans with green card applications felt the
impact.
“You end up seeing a steep
decline in approvals for people like me who followed the law,” said Forrest
Nabors, 47, a political science professor at the University of Alaska in Anchorage , who filed in July for a green card for his wife,
Zdenka, who is Czech.
An immigration service
center near Kansas
City assigned
to handle both the green card applications and many of the deferrals was
rapidly overwhelmed, officials said. But although the agency is financed by
fees and does not depend on congressional appropriations, no new employees were
brought on at that center, because of “unanticipated hiring difficulties,”
officials said, without elaborating.
For some families,
prolonged separations have been especially hard on children. Jessica Veltstra,
32, applied in March for a green card for her husband of eight years, Andre,
41, who is Dutch. But he is still in the Netherlands , and she is rooming with relatives in New Jersey , unable to make plans.
Their older daughter, who
is 4, refuses to speak to her father on the phone in Dutch, her first language,
and bursts out crying when she sees a photo of him.
“My husband has done
nothing wrong,” Ms. Veltstra said. “But they can do whatever they want because
they have your spouse basically hostage.”
Mr. Bachert was so certain
he would see his family soon when he left Australia last summer that his children, both American
citizens, did not go to the airport to see him off. He had little doubt his
wife would qualify: They have been married for 17 years, and she had a green
card once before, when Mr. Bachert, who works with electric utilities, had an
earlier job in the United States . But the document expired, and she could not renew
it when they were living in Australia .
Some lawyers urged Mrs.
Bachert to come as a tourist to join her husband. After deliberating for two
sleepless weeks, she said, she decided she would rather bide her time apart
than lie to American customs officials about her intentions to remain in the United States .
Mr. Bachert, who will
eventually work in upstate New York
but is camped out in a temporary apartment near his company’s headquarters in Hartford , said his lowest moment had been a frantic predawn
phone call from his wife. Their son was in a hospital heading for emergency
surgery after shattering his forearm and wrist in a bicycle fall. Two months
later, Mr. Bachert shuddered to recall the episode, although his son’s bones
have healed. “No parent,” he said, “should be separated from their family in
periods such as that.”
Reprinted article
written by Julia Preston, The New York
Times
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