Dear Editor:
Have you ever wondered how does a relative of a US citizen or Legal Permanent Resident feel, when a new law is approved to allow illegal aliens to become legal residents, even when they entered the country recently, while the relatives who are in the Preference categories, must continue to wait for years for their cases to be current?
As a practitioner of Immigration law, I have seen that too many times already and that is why I feel powerless and dismayed to see how in Congress there are currently five proposals, which aim to provide some kind of legal status for the almost 8 million illegal aliens in America, while families with petitions, are not able to find short term relief and are being broken apart for the long wait.
Even with the creation in 2000 of a law that reduced substantially the wait for family preferences, by providing their relatives with a Non Immigrant Visa to wait for their residence in America, The ones who benefited the most as usual, were the illegal population, with Section 245I.
According to the actual law in Sections 201, 202 and 203, Congress assigns a total of 226,000 visas per year to relatives of US citizens and residents and another 140,000 based on employment related petitions, with a top 7% per country limit.
By duplicating the quota every year, 500,000 new legal aliens would enter the country. Wouldn't be easier to allow all relatives of US citizens to obtain immediate relative status and for Permanent Residents to reduce their categories in half, thus creating an immediate opportunity for new legal residents to enter the work force, without going through all kinds of considerations, as it happens with the illegal aliens? One of the major problems with the family preferences petitions is the long wait for spouses of Legal Permanent residents. By reducing the wait to a half, and allowing them to enter the US with an approved application on a V visa in a year and half, more legal residents will be available for work in America And it will discourage families from entering illegal to avoid the long wait. Another criteria that it should be used on the new laws currently pending in Congress is that if the illegal population is going to be allowed to obtain legal status, those who entered legally and overstayed should be given preference, over those who did not.
It is time for Congress and the Executive Branch to come together to bring families in a more expeditious and rational matter.
Roque Leonel Rodriguez, Esq.
Dominican Republic
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