Massive IV campaign for Administrative fixes
Dear Members,
Immigration Voice is starting a massive campaign to get administrative relief for our community. We have had several fruitful meeting with the administration in 2007, some of these meetings were scheduled in September, November and then in December. In these meetings, we were able to convince the administration about the implication and hardship due to current broken system. Since Congress has not been able to address our issues in 2006-07, we were successful in creating a case for administrative fixes that would give much needed interim relief to EB community. These meetings helped us start a conversation on possible administrative fixes like 3 year EAD-AP, clearly defining “same or similar” if AC-21 is invoked, and we are hearing favorable feedback.
Due to lack of action on legislative front our community’s patience is running out and we want some relief urgently to get out of probationary status. We are thus starting this nationwide campaign that will help our advocacy efforts and get administration to act quickly. There are several components to this campaign.
1) Support from lawmaker offices: We urge all our members to meet their lawmaker offices and get them to write to The President in support of administrative fixes and urging for an immediate administrative relief. The template of the letter is attached. Letters from lawmaker offices to administration get far more attention as compared to anybody else writing the same letter. The template of the letter is posted below. Please request lawmakers to give you a copy of the letter or lawmakers could copy IV on their letter to The President.
2) Support from employers: We urge all members to approach their employer and have them send a letter to The President expressing support for our administrative fixes and appealing for an immediate relief. The template of the letter is attached below. Please request your employer to give you copy iof the letter so that you could provide IV with the copy of the letter.
3) Plea from our community: We urge all our members to write personalized letters to The President directly and convey their plight. If you would like to write your own personalized letter, please do so with your own story. Make sure to stick to the administrative fixes we have listed in the letter template and how these fixes could help you and your family. Please put your name and address in your letter. Anonymous letters will not be delivered and will be discarded. We request that you create 2 copies of your letter. One copy should be posted to The President and the second copy should be sent to Immigration Voice mailbox address at –
Immigration Voice
P O Box 1372
Arcadia, CA 91077-1372
The deadline for receiving all the letters is 9th February 2008. Our plan is to collect thousands of letters that we will also receive in IV mailbox and deliver them, along with the letters from employers and lawmakers across the country, during our meeting with the administration. We believe that this will make a necessary impact to strengthen our case and gather the necessary political will required for administrative fixes. We will also try to get media coverage for this campaign and draw national attention.
Please inform all your friends stuck in greencard retrogression and have them participate in this effort. Please post information about this campaign and link to this thread to as many sites, blogs you can so that we can get extraordinary scale of participation. The success of this effort will depend on the collective sincerity of the entire EB community to get letters from lawmakers, employers and members of the community. Immigration voice is counting on each and every member and it is in up to each member to make this campaign a success and help us to improve our and our families’ lives.
Letter Template:
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Mr. President:
I write today to urge you to fix America’s broken legal employment-based immigration system. Currently, more than 500,000 skilled individuals who contribute to the American economy through their hard work in high technology, scientific research, medicine and other fields find themselves trapped in a process that is hopelessly backlogged. If nothing is done, hundreds of thousands of immigrants will wait years or even decades in a process that was never intended to take so long. While comprehensive change will require legislative action, your administration can implement administrative remedies to improve America’s competitiveness, eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies, and improve the quality of life for these legal, highly-skilled immigrants.
Attracting and retaining the best and brightest minds from around the world is in America’s best interest. In February 2006, your Domestic Policy Council issued a report on the American Competitiveness Initiative that recognized the importance of employment-based immigration. The report stated:
“The President also recognizes that enabling the world's most talented and hardest-working individuals to put their skills to work for America will increase our entrepreneurship and our international competitiveness, and will net many high-paying jobs for all Americans. The United States benefits from our ability to attract and retain needed immigrant and non-immigrant students and workers, and it is important that America remains competitive in attracting talented foreign nationals.”
You can advance your stated objective by making common-sense administrative reforms to fix a system that is clearly broken.
Implementing much-needed reforms will also free government resources to focus on pressing national security matters. For example, current rules require the Department of Homeland Security to renew the Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) of hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants each year as those immigrants wait for green cards and permanent residency in the U.S. Rather than renew these EADs annually, the government could renew these documents every three years, freeing countless hours that could be better spent serving the Department’s mission.
The greatest impact of the broken green card process is borne by the legal immigrants and their families. The more than half million highly-skilled legal immigrants already working productively in the United States find themselves trapped in a system that is taking years longer than intended. During this wait for a green card, these immigrants remain trapped in a legal maze, unable to change jobs – even within the same employer – without starting the arduous immigration process over again, and subject to waits that grow longer and longer.
We implore you to exercise your authority to implement administratively these much-needed reforms.
• Recapture administratively the unused visas for permanent residency to fulfill the congressional mandate of 140,000 green cards per year.
• Revise the administrative definition of “same or similar” to allow slight additional job flexibility for legal immigrants awaiting adjudication of adjustment of status (I-485) petitions.
• Allow filing of Adjustment of Status (Form I-485) when a visa number is not available.
• Implement the existing interim rule to allow issuance of multi-year Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) and Advance Parole.
• Allow visa revalidation in the United States.
• Reinstate premium processing of Immigrant Petitions.
I urge you to implement these administrative remedies without delay. Action is urgently needed to fulfill your stated goal of attracting and retaining highly-skilled legal immigrants from around the world, eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency, and improving the lives of future Americans already living and working legally in the United States.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Respectfully,
Immigration Voice is starting a massive campaign to get administrative relief for our community. We have had several fruitful meeting with the administration in 2007, some of these meetings were scheduled in September, November and then in December. In these meetings, we were able to convince the administration about the implication and hardship due to current broken system. Since Congress has not been able to address our issues in 2006-07, we were successful in creating a case for administrative fixes that would give much needed interim relief to EB community. These meetings helped us start a conversation on possible administrative fixes like 3 year EAD-AP, clearly defining “same or similar” if AC-21 is invoked, and we are hearing favorable feedback.
Due to lack of action on legislative front our community’s patience is running out and we want some relief urgently to get out of probationary status. We are thus starting this nationwide campaign that will help our advocacy efforts and get administration to act quickly. There are several components to this campaign.
1) Support from lawmaker offices: We urge all our members to meet their lawmaker offices and get them to write to The President in support of administrative fixes and urging for an immediate administrative relief. The template of the letter is attached. Letters from lawmaker offices to administration get far more attention as compared to anybody else writing the same letter. The template of the letter is posted below. Please request lawmakers to give you a copy of the letter or lawmakers could copy IV on their letter to The President.
2) Support from employers: We urge all members to approach their employer and have them send a letter to The President expressing support for our administrative fixes and appealing for an immediate relief. The template of the letter is attached below. Please request your employer to give you copy iof the letter so that you could provide IV with the copy of the letter.
3) Plea from our community: We urge all our members to write personalized letters to The President directly and convey their plight. If you would like to write your own personalized letter, please do so with your own story. Make sure to stick to the administrative fixes we have listed in the letter template and how these fixes could help you and your family. Please put your name and address in your letter. Anonymous letters will not be delivered and will be discarded. We request that you create 2 copies of your letter. One copy should be posted to The President and the second copy should be sent to Immigration Voice mailbox address at –
Immigration Voice
P O Box 1372
Arcadia, CA 91077-1372
The deadline for receiving all the letters is 9th February 2008. Our plan is to collect thousands of letters that we will also receive in IV mailbox and deliver them, along with the letters from employers and lawmakers across the country, during our meeting with the administration. We believe that this will make a necessary impact to strengthen our case and gather the necessary political will required for administrative fixes. We will also try to get media coverage for this campaign and draw national attention.
Please inform all your friends stuck in greencard retrogression and have them participate in this effort. Please post information about this campaign and link to this thread to as many sites, blogs you can so that we can get extraordinary scale of participation. The success of this effort will depend on the collective sincerity of the entire EB community to get letters from lawmakers, employers and members of the community. Immigration voice is counting on each and every member and it is in up to each member to make this campaign a success and help us to improve our and our families’ lives.
Letter Template:
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Mr. President:
I write today to urge you to fix America’s broken legal employment-based immigration system. Currently, more than 500,000 skilled individuals who contribute to the American economy through their hard work in high technology, scientific research, medicine and other fields find themselves trapped in a process that is hopelessly backlogged. If nothing is done, hundreds of thousands of immigrants will wait years or even decades in a process that was never intended to take so long. While comprehensive change will require legislative action, your administration can implement administrative remedies to improve America’s competitiveness, eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies, and improve the quality of life for these legal, highly-skilled immigrants.
Attracting and retaining the best and brightest minds from around the world is in America’s best interest. In February 2006, your Domestic Policy Council issued a report on the American Competitiveness Initiative that recognized the importance of employment-based immigration. The report stated:
“The President also recognizes that enabling the world's most talented and hardest-working individuals to put their skills to work for America will increase our entrepreneurship and our international competitiveness, and will net many high-paying jobs for all Americans. The United States benefits from our ability to attract and retain needed immigrant and non-immigrant students and workers, and it is important that America remains competitive in attracting talented foreign nationals.”
You can advance your stated objective by making common-sense administrative reforms to fix a system that is clearly broken.
Implementing much-needed reforms will also free government resources to focus on pressing national security matters. For example, current rules require the Department of Homeland Security to renew the Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) of hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants each year as those immigrants wait for green cards and permanent residency in the U.S. Rather than renew these EADs annually, the government could renew these documents every three years, freeing countless hours that could be better spent serving the Department’s mission.
The greatest impact of the broken green card process is borne by the legal immigrants and their families. The more than half million highly-skilled legal immigrants already working productively in the United States find themselves trapped in a system that is taking years longer than intended. During this wait for a green card, these immigrants remain trapped in a legal maze, unable to change jobs – even within the same employer – without starting the arduous immigration process over again, and subject to waits that grow longer and longer.
We implore you to exercise your authority to implement administratively these much-needed reforms.
• Recapture administratively the unused visas for permanent residency to fulfill the congressional mandate of 140,000 green cards per year.
• Revise the administrative definition of “same or similar” to allow slight additional job flexibility for legal immigrants awaiting adjudication of adjustment of status (I-485) petitions.
• Allow filing of Adjustment of Status (Form I-485) when a visa number is not available.
• Implement the existing interim rule to allow issuance of multi-year Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) and Advance Parole.
• Allow visa revalidation in the United States.
• Reinstate premium processing of Immigrant Petitions.
I urge you to implement these administrative remedies without delay. Action is urgently needed to fulfill your stated goal of attracting and retaining highly-skilled legal immigrants from around the world, eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency, and improving the lives of future Americans already living and working legally in the United States.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Respectfully,
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