New York Times
By Julia Preston
October 1, 2015
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. Immigrants who were affected 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 also a new setback for President 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.
“This
revision seriously undermines the stability and predictability of our
immigration system,” Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Michael Honda, both
California Democrats,
said in a statement.
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.
Many
immigrants caught in the boomerang are on temporary H-1B visas. That
program has been under fire from Americans who say foreign workers with
the visas displaced them
from jobs. But immigrants seeking green cards have been working for
some time in specialized fields like science, medicine and technology.
They have passed a hurdle requiring their employers to show the Labor
Department that no Americans were available for
their jobs.
“We
have been here years, we have kids here, we bought houses,” said Vikram
Desai, 33, an electrical engineer from India who has worked on
temporary visas for 13 years.
“We
consider ourselves future Americans, not temporary workers,” said Mr.
Desai, a leader of Immigration Voice, a legal immigrants’ organization.
But
they have been mired in green card backlogs. With a cap of 140,000
employment-based green cards each year, the number of applicants has
long exceeded the limit. No
country can have more than 7 percent of the visas, so immigrants from
India and China must wait for a decade or more.
On
Sept. 9, the State Department notified them they would be able to
advance early to the next step: filing a formal application. They
scrambled to have medical tests
and hired lawyers and document translators, paying thousands of dollars
in fees. Many postponed travel; some changed plans to marry or move.
“People
made life-altering decisions,” said Aman Kapoor, the founder of
Immigration Voice, a national nonprofit group. Only a fraction of at
least 50,000 immigrants who
expected to move forward will now be able to do so.
They
are keenly disappointed because they will not receive new benefits that
would have come after their applications were filed, while they waited
for their green cards.
In that period, immigrants can obtain work permits that allow them to
change jobs and employers, freeing them from H-1B constraints tying them
to the same employer. In some states, their children can attend college
at discounted resident rates. They can travel
out of the United States more easily.
Sadhak
Sengupta, a medical research scientist from India, said that when he
heard the first State Department announcement, “my heart was overjoyed.”
Now Dr. Sengupta may
have to close down his research at the Roger Williams Medical Center in
Providence, R.I., where he is part of a team developing a treatment for
brain cancer using immunology.
Dr.
Sengupta, also a professor at Boston University School of Medicine,
came to the United States in 2002. Working on H-1B visas, he began the green card process in 2010.
His team’s research advances have attracted patients from around the
world to the medical center, Dr. Sengupta said. He had plans to start
his own biomedical company.
But
this year, the federal government unexpectedly failed to renew his H-1B visa. With no green card application, he is scrambling to avoid leaving
the United States in
December.
“I
am so disappointed, I don’t have words to describe,” Dr. Sengupta said.
“Instead of hiring workers here, shall I bundle up my research for a
cure for brain tumors and
take it back to India? Is that what America wants?”
Lawyers
said the episode had shaken immigrants’ confidence in the system. “It’s
no wonder people have so little faith in the government,” said Gregory
Chen, director of
advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, “when they
can’t even count their visas.”
Immigrants
sent thousands of bouquets to Homeland Security headquarters in
Washington on Thursday as a mild-mannered protest of their treatment.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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