Relief for family-based immigrants to the U.S.
By Sridhar Krishnaswami
WASHINGTON, JULY 21. In a message that could come as a
relief for thousands of petitioners, including Indian nationals
residing in India or in the United States, the U.S.
administration is making efforts to speed up the
family-based immigrant application process. According to a
senior official, the U.S. administration is also looking at the
issue of "advance parole" to see if changes can be made to
the system to lessen the burden on the immigrant
applicants.
"We're actually looking at the I-130 process which impacts
specifically the family-based immigrants ... there are
upwards of 1.8 million pending applications for family-based
immigrants here under what's known as the I-130
category," said Prakash Khatri, the First Ombudsman in the
Citizenship and Immigration Services of the Department of
Homeland Security.
At the Washington Foreign Press Centre, Mr. Khatri said
that on the subject of immediate relatives such as parents,
spouses or children, there was no limit on the number of
immigrants that could come into the U.S. on an annual
basis. On "immediate relatives," Mr. Khatri said the USCIS
was using the "most up-to-date technology to quickly and
securely process all of these applications" and a lot of
review on the processes was under way. "... we are
focussing on that," he said in response to a question from
The Hindu.
Saying the policy was clearly to welcome immigrants and
"not to put up walls" or "artificial barriers," Mr. Khatri said
the processing time of applications could be reduced
substantially; and that for the "green card" application the
processing time varied from as little as four months to as
much as three or four years. In a pilot programme carried
out at Dallas the particular process was actually cut down
to a mere 75 days for the first green card, he pointed out.
Mr. Khatri also addressed another aspect of concern to
Indian nationals who have applied for a green card and are
presently residing in the U.S. — something known as
"advance parole" to be able to travel out of the U.S. "This
particular programme is one that is of great interest to my
office and we are working on a number of fixes to that," he
said.
"There are a number of different possibilities on parole.
Obviously some will require regulatory change," Mr. Khatri
said, pointing out two different cases of people who would
need to use the advance parole. In emergency cases, he
said, there should not "be a situation where a person
cannot leave the U.S. because the Immigration Service was
unable to process and advance parole." The second
category would be business travellers.
