Pork, Ghee...its Time To Roll....

Pork , Ghee and others ...

I agree with you'll .. lets form a lobby and draft a letter to a Senator.

But first we need to know how many people are on-board with this idea. I see 1225 views but only 20 replies (that too many of them are by the same folks.. ghee , pork , orca etc).

I would urge the silent viewers (people like me) at least post some sort of message to this thread , so that we know that this a direction we need to take.

Just having 5 to 10 people draft a letter to a senator , won't even get past the intern who checks the mail.

Just my 2 cents ...
 
Hi.

i support you guys. I am from Illionois and i contacted Senator Durbin. His office was very instrumental in getting my family's EAD and AP quickly.

Good Luck to all of us !!!
 
heres 2 more cents...

rajiv khanna has already taken the initiative of assembling a petition for NSC, and has collected several signatures as well. instead of starting right away on our own, and possibly parallelling or duplicating those efforts, why not take the matter with mr. khanna first, to see if the petition thus assembled could not be taken a notch higher, and, instead of being sent only to the director of NSC, could also be sent to congressmen overseeing immigration law and pracitices in the country?

an advantage with this option is that it fulfills the very first requirement for an endeavor like the one we are contemplating: it provides it focal point. and with somebody of the stature and experience of rajiv khanna providing the lead and coordination.

mr. khanna has posted a request on his website calling for volunteers from among his websites' user community to help in working to improve the current immigration scene. here its link: Call for volunteers in improving immigration laws
 
You guys are way too clever for your own good:p :p

What do you think pressure from congress will accomplish? It is congress that is responsible for this mess. They are entrusted with working out the appropriation of the government's revenues. They have, very deliberately, channelled processing fees paid to the INS by applicants like us here to fund enforcement functions, and not processing functions. Having created the problem, they are attempting now to milk the situation like a gang of carpetbaggers by introducing 'premium processing'. To rub salt in our wounds, they constantly impose their pet processing priorities on the service from time to time thus forcing INS to reshuffle constantly the few resources that are available for I-485 adjudication functions.

There are two takes on this; that the INS is an organization of people that just while away their time at work and thus make folks like us wait interminably. Alternately one can think that the INS adjudicators perform, sometimes not very efficiently, their jobs like any average government employee out there.

I believe the reality resembles the latter more. There are too few adjudicators to do the job efficiently, and those there are, are constantly being reshuffled because of changing regulations and procedures, again as a result of congress's wishes.

Somehow, there seems to be the impression among the posters here that the employees of the service are the villains and the elected officials are the knights that will come to our rescue. This is far from the truth. No doubt, INS has its share of bungling bureaucrats, but they have been entrusted with an ill-defined job and have not been provided the resources to do it.

Let us say the strategy works - that a powerful congressman intervenes to speed up the processing of our cases. Is that going to come as a result of increased efficiency and throughput? I think not; it is more likely to come at a cost to other waiters like us because of yet another reshuffling of the adjudicators by the NSC management to accommodate the congressman's desire. On balance, the aggregate cost is only going to be higher than the benefit as the additional training requirements will decrease throughput and reduce efficiency.

If enough senators/congressmen are approached with the proposed missive, there maybe one good unintended consequence though - that of shining a light on funding shenanigans of congress and thus shaming them into remedying the situation by removing the cross-subsidization of enforcement functions (and of other government departments) at the expense of processing.
 
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rsihna ji - did you get a chance to draft

some sort of letter so we can start correcting.


We can decide on what we will do with the letter in the course of collecting petitions.

sanskrt, we can definitely look into options once the ball starts rolling.

Pork, Yes, may be requrest to Mr. Khanna. It is not a bad option.
We need volume and a petition letter that reflects our grievances.


Others - please write your opinions. Even you have seen some movements last week, it doesn't hurt to make the petition ready.
NSC has been working one week a month and sleeps for three weeks, that is the pattern we have been seeing since last December. I see this as a terrible slow down.
 
Sankrityayan

you are correct. politics is certainly to blame that the congress did not find it worth their while to engender any legislative or administrative activity to help streamline and/or expedite the immigration process of EB legal immigrants (in fact, would be in the interest of u.s. employers not to speed this process up). and, on the other hand, they did find it worth their while to even consider something like this: "05/16/2003: 5-Year Illegal Residents Legalization Bill, H.R. 440" ( http://www.immigration-law.com/ -> Breaking News), being introduced by fourteen members of the u.s. house of representatives, led by congressman Luis V. Gutierrez.

you'd think that some of us have been here longer than five years; were not fence-jumpers to begin with and have been legal from day one; have been law-abiding, productive and taxpaying members of the community from day one...

the alternative is, of course, we sit on our collective ass and do nothing. on the other hand, we might undertake some efforts, and still achieve nothing. i'd rather go with the latter course of action; if the situation does not improve, do you not agree that it should not be due to the lack of trying?
 
I agree that people should bring this imbecility to light, certainly a far preferable option than to sit on our collective ass. I do not agree, however, that we should be asking congress (or some individual congressman) to intervene on behalf of some of us folks' here to get a few NSC cases processed mostly at the expense of other applications at NSC (I am afraid this is only way intervention will work).

What congress is doing currently is to subsidize the border protection costs of this rich nation with application processing money collected from aspiring immigrants from some of the poorest countries in the world. This has left little for the actual processing of the applications and put the system in utter disrepair.

It is mainly an appropriations problem, of congress' creation, and hence congress' to fix. Accordingly, the thrust of the missive should be to beseech congress to provide the necessary funding to INS to do its job (more than enough is collected from the EB applicants), and perhaps to put EB immigration at the top of the list in light of the obvious beneficial impact to the economy.

On a separate note, as most of the folks on these forums know, lobbying congress is a matter of money. The employer and industry groups that lobby hard have H-1 type issues as their central focus. They know that it does not benefit them to have the I-485 process speeded up (quite the contrary, actually). The AILA type organizations do not have an incentive in speeding up / simplifying the process either (again, quite the contrary).

So there you have it; The only solution is an effective well-funded lobbying effort that will influence policy and appropriations in a strategic manner to pressure congress to prioritize EB based immigration. The only people who benefit from such an initiative would be immigrants like us. It is therefore logical that the planning and funding impetus should also come from us. This, I suspect however, we will all be loathe to provide, even if someone like Mr. Khanna agrees to drive the initiative on the hill.

Whatever the final form, I wish the effort well and hope that it will succeed in restoring some sanity to this system.
 
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Absolutely.......

Action any day is better than inaction. It is always good to make an attempt to push things rather than sit down and blame the system.

I support this effort by some possitive thinking members.

Sankrityanan, please think possitive.

Regards,
 
Why is it negative to suggest that what we are after can be detrimental to others among us? Does the proposal, as it stands currently (apply pressure on INS via congress) serve the greatest good of the greatest number?

Anyway, I have to admit that positive thinking is the first casualty of this chinese torture. Seeing the many ways in which the lives of many here are made subject to the slightest whims of a faceless bureaucracy, it is hard to comprehend why we even subject ourselves, apparent voluntarily, to it. The only rational answer, I guess, is that things are worse back home:(

Hardly any consolation:eek:
 
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sankrityayan

there are two groups of thought in approaching elected officials to get one's individual case expedited or even approved. I come from the school of thought of being proactive AFTER I've waited the requisite 480 days without any news. I believe it is my duty to contact any Tom , Dick or Harry to find out what happened to my application and if for my efforts, I do get adjudicated, then I deserve that reward.

I don't think I'm stepping on anyone's toes or preempting anyone else's case. In fact I strongly encourage others in my situation to do the same. I also believe that if pressure from a higher authority forces an adjudicating officer to stay back an extra half hour instead of leaving after only 4 hours of work to play golf or whatever, then I've really accomplished something. I don't have the money, resources etc. to lobby in Capitol Hill but if I do find out that some elected official looked up and expedited my case, then I'd definitely make a modest contribution to his/her political party because that's the least I can do.
 
Here is an analogy:

Let us say a group of us are waiting in the INS office in a queue. There is only one counter manned by one officer and no information is available on how long we would be required to wait in the queue.

In this scenario-

I am sure you would not take to it too kindly if a few in the queue decided to lobby their cases through some people in power and were to suddenly get called by the guy serving the queue to a separate counter leaving the original counter unattended for the length of time it took the officer to take care of the special group?

On the other hand, it would be really beneficial to the cause of the people waiting in the queue if somehow they could convince the INS office to open a second counter.

What I have said in my previous posts is that I would support this second approach and would be leery of the first. I also do not have any issues with somebody requesting the intervention of a superior when he/she is left behind for some reason, in relation to the movement of the queue.
 
I am sure you would not take to it too kindly if a few in the queue decided to lobby their cases through some people in power and were to suddenly get called by the guy serving the queue to a separate counter leaving the original counter unattended for the length of time it took the officer to take care of the special group?

i do not recall any of the participants of this thread suggest we attempt to incur the favor of the powers that be only in order to help our own cases leapfrog over others'. i have been going by the supposition that we would like to see their attention drawn to the lacunae in the general status quo of EB immigration. if any positive changes were to come about as a result of such a course of action (and it is a sizeable 'if'), then it would translate into good for the greater number of people - not just limited to those whose actions brought it about.
 
I totally agree with pork in the sense that if one reads my comments in other threads, one would notice that i've been arguing about more and more people contacting "higher powers" on their own because I'm sure there's lots of powerful people besides the ones who sit on immigration sub committees who have no idea how slow and unfair this process is. The more attention we bring to our plight be it collectively or individually, it helps everyone in the long run.
 
Good exchange of thoughts and ideas.

I can see the discussion is veering towards 'do something now, than just sit and do nothing.'
And I think everybody is agreeing (to some extent) ---
that we should not sit another six months and hope something would drastically change; It can get too late to even raise this question later when NSC starts thinking it is their norm to take two and a half year to adjudicate cases and we all know that NSC loves to be slower than TSC.
We have seen NSC adjudication time changed from 12 months 16 months to 18 months now and almost hitting 24 months now.

If we do something now it may (may; no guarantee) help, I liked what deputydawg said: 'it helps everyone in the long run.'
 
Just to reiterate the thrust of my comments thus far.. We should be putting pressure on congress, not by congress on INS.

I-485 processing delays are a subject Congress has debated in the past and, rather hypocritically, put on record (as part of AC-21 deliberations, I believe) their belief that INS should quickly bring the processing time for I-485 applications to within six months (I think this also forms the basis of the 180 day AC-21 portability rule). They have never funded this mandate though. It is pointless to expect improvements to the INS' processes by simply reforming the agency yet again (the republicans have hid behind this premise for too long now).

So it is not as if Congress is unaware of the problem. It chose to paper over the issue by paying lip service and shedding crocodile tears. The vast majority of lacunae that afflict the system can quite simply be solved by properly funding the INS.
 
Where do we stand now ?

what should you do next in the next few days?
Please vote here. If we want to go by my agenda, it is outlined earlier, if any other ideas..... please write..

Pork what do you think about the next step?
 
Ghee and all,

Let's proceed with what we all planned and discussing all these days, i mean sending a petition/letter to NSC by the congressmen.

I vote for this.
 
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