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Sweetveerudu Comedian Username: Sweetveerudu Post Number: 1166 Registered: 05-2014 Posted From: 173.173.114.166 Rating: N/A |
Visa miscount dashed skilled immigrants’ hopes NEW YORK TIMES true In early September, the State Department gave exciting news to tens of thousands of highly skilled legal immigrants in the United States who had been stuck for years in visa backlogs, waiting for green cards. On Oct. 1, they would take a big step forward along the path to their documents, a department bulletin said. Then, just as suddenly and with no explanation, the department reversed course Sept. 25, sending most of the immigrants — including many people from India and China with advanced degrees and professional careers in the United States — back to where they had been in slow-moving visa lines, dashing their hopes and disrupting their lives. The problem was that immigration officials realized belatedly that they did not have enough green card visas, which are limited by yearly quotas, for all the immigrants they had allowed to apply for them, Obama administration officials said. “It was a devastating blow for the workers and their families with skills we are trying to retain in the United States,” said Lynden Melmed, a lawyer at Berry, Appleman & Leiden in Washington, who was formerly general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security agency that administers immigration with the State Department. Affected immigrants filed a federal lawsuit in Seattle, accusing the administration of “arbitrary and capricious action” that cost them millions of dollars. The bait-and-switch was a new setback for President Barack Obama’s efforts to make fixes to immigration through executive actions he announced last November. His actions to protect immigrants in the country illegally have been held up by federal courts. New guidelines to speed up green card applications for highly skilled workers were another part of his programs. The turnabout resulted, officials said, from communication failures between the State Department and Homeland Security. After the State Department published its monthly visa bulletin on Sept. 9 under the new guidelines allowing many thousands of immigrants to apply early for green cards, officials did further hurried calculations and saw that under annual limits, not enough visas were immediately available. Officials at the Homeland Security and State Departments and the White House said they could not comment on the matter because it was under litigation. |