New wait could be as long as 5 years.
By Raif Karerat
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A last-minute change by the federal government means that tens of thousands of immigrants will continue to face lengthy waits before they can apply to become permanent U.S. residents.
Many foreign nationals spent time and money preparing their applications only to learn that they couldn’t start filing on Thursday after all because of a “gross government miscalculation,” said Victor Nieblas Pradis, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The about-face affects people seeking certain employment-based or family-sponsored visas, particularly those from India and China already legally working in the U.S. Many have advanced degrees and work in high-tech industries such as computer software and medicine, reported the Columbus Dispatch.
The delays range from three months to five years, and affected foreign nationals and their families wouldn’t have gotten their hopes up if the State Department hadn’t said on Sept. 9 that it was streamlining the green-card process, said Ken Robinson, a Columbus immigration lawyer.
Last week, 15 immigrants from across the country filed a class-action lawsuit in Seattle demanding a federal judge reinstate the previously set filing dates.
“This case is about what happens when thousands of law-abiding, highly skilled immigrants spend millions of dollars preparing to apply for green cards in reasonable reliance on an agency’s binding policy statement, only to find out at the last minute that a hapless federal bureaucracy has abruptly, inexplicably and arbitrarily reneged on its promise,” the lawsuit states, per The Dispatch.
Meanwhile, Pew released a report that stated immigrants and their descendants will drive most U.S. population growth in the coming 50 years, as they have for the past half-century.
Among the projected 441 million Americans in 2065, 78 million will be immigrants and 81 million will be people born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.
About one-in-three Americans would be an immigrant or have immigrant parents, compared to the current ratio of one-in-four.
According to Pew, the projected changes in population makeup could have implications in a grand scale — changing the face of the electorate, raising the education levels among the foreign-born population, and altering the nation’s birth patterns.