Got Immigration? The World’s Best Damn Blog About U.S. Immigration

Last week, I wrote about President Obama’s plans to reform America’s immigration laws – what us immigration people call “CIR,” Comprehensive Immigration Reform – and about what I thought would NOT work in that context. Well, here’s what I think President Obama and his counterparts on Capitol Hill should be thinking about in terms of CIR.

There is much to be done. A nice start would be reallocating and increasing the annual quota of immigrant visa numbers for the employment-based categories. The current inexcusable EB backlog hurts America’s international competitiveness, and is fundamentally unfair to the skilled and unskilled workers waiting for permanent residence based on a job for which no qualified American workers exist.

Another important step would be eliminating a ridiculous distinction in the process of acquiring permanent residence – “adjusting” one’s status in the United States versus consular processing, or getting permanent residence abroad. Under current law, certain people are required to consular process, usually when a waiver is required for a ground of inadmissibility. This requirement prevents foreign nationals that might not ultimately acquire permanent residence from entering and living in the U.S. while their cases are being decided, but in many, many cases, this requirement separates families, sometimes for years. Yes, I know – the United States has a legitimate interest in having some people resolve their immigration status while abroad, but the results of this policy are often disasterous to families, separating parents from children, children from parents, husbands from wives, etc.

I’ve had a fantasy about devising some sort of immigration system that relies less on the individual facts of a case, and an adjudicator’s subjective interpretation of those facts, and more on verifiable objective criteria. I think any CIR should include a streamlining of the immigration process itself - less paperwork, fewer forms of documentation, and fewer interviews. If someone has a minor U.S. Citizen child, for example, that person should be able to obtain permanent residence immediately – end of inquiry. If there are any grounds of inadmissibility, that’s fine too – establish a set of well-defined grounds, where if any apply to an individual case, that person is simply out of luck. No more divisible criminal statutes, no more hardship waivers, no more psychological evaluations. I’m proposing an imperfect system as well, but one that will be easier to administer and that will benefit more people than it will hurt. In the end, I think that’s all any public policy can really do.

There are many other things I’d change about our current immigration laws, but I’ll save those for a different time – I’ve said enough for now. The bottom line is that CIR should be just that – COMPREHENSIVE – since our immigration laws need a radical and dramatic change in every way possible.

Well, my plan to post something at least once a weekday didn’t quite happen this past week. I will certainly do my best to make it happen this week, but life has a way of creeping up and thwarting even the loftiest of intentions. All I can say is that I will do my best from now on to not slack off again.

According to the Immigration Policy Center, President Obama and various members of Congress are meeting tomorrow to discus Comprehensive Immigration Reform, known affectionately to immigration practitioners as CIR. They want to start discussing how to fix the nation’s crapulent immigration system, a discussion that necessarily includes whether or not to legalize the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but it’s important that the discussion on what do with all of these people remain intelligent and rooted in reality. Deporting all of the undocumented immigrants in this country, for example, is utterly ridiculous. Immigration Courts simply don’t have the capacity to instantly deport 12 million people, even if all the other problems with this course of action vanished. Amnesty is also a pretty silly solution to this problem. Amnesty not only encourages more people to cross the border without inspection, but also allows a massive number of people to regularize their immigration status ahead of the countless others that have waited patiently through the family- or employment-based routes. The wait for a green card through a job offer, as I’ve stated in previous posts, is up to a decade. Many, many people wait that long, though, and sometimes longer, to do things right, and play by the rules. Is it then fair for someone that crossed the border without inspection to obtain a green card before this long-suffering soul? I don’t think so, and I hope that President Obama and his buddies in Congress don’t think so either.

That still leaves the question – what is the best policy with respect to these millions of undocumented people? I’ll save my thoughts on that for a future post. I have to have something to bring you back here for another visit, don’t I?

There’s been a lot of chatter lately among immigration attorneys about some BAD decision-making coming out of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.  A little background:

Persons applying for U.S. permanent residence that have certain “admissibility” issues – in other words, legal impediments to obtaining permanent resident status - have to apply for a waiver of the ground(s) of inadmissibility in question.  Some grounds of inadmissibility can be waived, others cannot; similarly, some can be waived while physically in the United States,  while others cannot.  People that fall into this latter category must apply for a waiver in their home country, a process that almost always takes months, if not years.

Mexican nationals that require an inadmissibility waiver – most often for prior periods of illegal presence in the United States – must apply for their waivers at the U.S. Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez, a gritty, dangerous dump of a city across the border from El Paso, Texas.  The law requires that applicants for a waiver of inadmissibility demonstrate “extreme hardship” to a qualifying U.S. citizen or permanent resident relative in the United States.  “Extreme hardship” is not just missing your husband that has to return to Mexico; it’s not just earning less money when the family’s breadwinner has to leave the U.S.; it’s something above and beyond the “normal” hardship associated with a relative having to leave the country, if such a thing as “normal” hardship can even be said to exist.  Good waiver cases often involve sick family members that can’t leave the United States, citizen or permanent resident relatives that have severe psychological problems as a result of their spouse or parent leaving the country, and families that become destitute as a result of a husband or wife returning to and being stuck in their native country.  The law does NOT require life-or-death situations in order to grant a waiver; simply hardship above and beyond a certain base level of hardship – a level established by precedent decisions and case law many years ago.

Well, leave it to USCIS to misinterpret and misapply the law, intentionally or not (and given how they usually work, my guess is the former).  Waiver petitions in Ciudad Juarez are being routinely denied now, even when the hardship factors are extreme.  One U.S. citizen spouse of a waiver applicant – that happened to work for the Federal government as well – was even told by a supervisor that Ciudad Juarez is now denying any case that does not have life-or-death issues.  Many attorneys speculate that this situation is due to a new international waivers center opening this year in Anaheim, California, specifically intended to handle the tremendous number of waiver applications coming out of Ciudad Juarez.  I should clarify that many waivers are not being denied outright, but being “referred for further processing due to lack of extreme hardship documentation” – another way of saying that these waiver applications are being forwarded to Anaheim for processing.  Why do that, you might ask?  The waiver section of the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez is swamped with literally thousands of these applications, and simply can’t handle them all (hence the opening of the Anaheim office).  I know that it’s difficult to adjudicate hundreds or thousands of these applications a year, but come on people – you have to operate within the law and give everyone a fair chance.  Telling meritorious applicants that they haven’t shown enough hardship and dumping the application on Anaheim isn’t fair to anyone concerned here – and needs to stop immediately.

I’m a practicing immigration attorney, and thought I’d be able to handle writing a blog and servicing my clients without much of a problem.  Damn…I was wrong.  It’s fine when there’s a lull in the workload, but when things get busy, sticking to my goal of a post a day gets a little challenging, to say the least.  I’ve slacked a bit the past few days (in all fairness, I’ve had family obligations as well), but I’m going to do my darndest to post at least one piece per weekday from now on.  Can I do it?  We shall soon see…

I had to go down to the Immigration Court today to file some documents. I guarantee that you’ve never been in a court quite like the L.A. Imimgration Court – unless, of course, you’ve actually been to the L.A. Immigration Court. It’s located in the middle of a bank building, between floors 14 and 18. Since the building in which the court is housed was never intended to be used as a court, there are often some major problems using the building.

First off, there are two lines to enter the building at peak hours, one for people going to the court and the other for court/government employees and non-court people. This usually works on the honor system – if you’re going to the court, for example, you shouldn’t say you work for X-company on the 21st floor, although many times when I’m late for a hearing I’ve been tempted to do just that. Second, there’s a great deal of crowding and confusion in the elevator lobbies on the 14th, 16th, and 17th floors – the floors containing the bulk of the courtrooms. People are funneled through a metal detector located between the elevator lobby and the hallway leading to the courtrooms, but there can be wall-to-wall people in the tiny elevator lobby sometimes, with no semblance of order whatsoever. Finally, and perhaps most annoying, there is often an appalling lack of seats inside each courtroom. Some hearings routinely have more than 20 respondents – which means that there are also 20 attorneys, as well as family members, interpreters, etc. A typical courtroom maybe sits about 30 people? Maybe more? I’ve never counted, although I’ve been bored enough to do so many times. The end result is that people wait in the hallways, standing or sitting, sometimes for more than an hour until a seat clears up inside the courtroom.

What I find perhaps most amusing/sad is that this is the LOS ANGELES Immigration Court. Not Boise, Idaho. Not Grand Rapids, South Dakota. Not Mobile, Alabama. I’m sure that all of those communities have immigrant populations, but in Los Angeles County – a county of almost 10 million people, 36.2% of whom were foreign-born as of the 2000 census – couldn’t the Department of Justice (the agency that runs the Immigration Court system) have planned better?

The State Department’s visa bulletin for July 2009 just came out today.  Guess what?  If you were born in India or China, and have an approved labor certification in the second preference category – meaning you have a masters degree or higher – you now have to wait nine years until you can get permanent residence in the United States.  At least there’s still a queue for the second preference, though; the third preference is completely unavailable for Fiscal Year 2009, and according to State Department official Charles Oppenheim, the wait in Fiscal Year 2010 will be about seven years.  How will we be able to attract the foreign workers we need if they’ll have to wait more than nine years in some cases for permanent residence?  These are not workers that will displace Americans; a labor certification, in fact, is proof that there are no qualified U.S. workers for the job in question.  These are workers that we need and that will strengthen American businesses and the economy as a whole.  Waiting all that time for a green card – in many cases outside the United States – does nothing to make America seem the land of great opportunity it’s always purported to be.  Here’s a link to the latest visa bulletin – see for yourself just how bad the waits are.

In order to really attract the best and brightest foreign workers to the United States, Congress needs to allocate more visa numbers for skilled foreign workers, especially those in the second preference that have extremely high levels of education.  These workers will simply go elsewhere if it’s too burdensome to immigrate to America – taking their skills, knowledge, and money-making ability with them.

Welcome to “Got Immigration?”! This blog is all about our nation’s crazy immigration system – from the point of view of a practicing immigration attorney. I’ve been in the trenches for close to five years now, and have seen first-hand how dysfunctional, nonsensical, and downright loony America’s immigration bureaucracy is. I hope that by sharing stories, articles, and my own point of view with you, I can increase the public’s immigration IQ, if only by a little, and maybe even muster support for some much-needed policy changes. Actually, I’d be happy if this blog just served as a means for me to vent…but why not aim high as well? I’ll write about immigration from my point of view, and we’ll see where this thing goes.