Lobbying in January 02/01/08

HOW SOON CAN WE GET THE NOD FROM THE CONGRESS AND SENATE?

Most of all are on the same boat and I am hoping someone has an answer for me. I recently graduated from a US nursing school. I have an F-1 visa and I am on OPT right now. I have a job and my work permit expires at the end of the year. Under the current visa circumstances, is there any way to adjust status in the US?
Anybody?

Thanks for your efforts.

thanks for the fight man

Thanks HLG for your efforts. Are you lobbying particularly for the 61k visas amdt. specifically? or are there any other solutions on the horizon too? Anticipating your next post as always.

… m’ glad that you’re doing all the best you can along with your partners in trying to push yourselves inside Congress/house and for us to be heard.. Let’s continue to pray and be optimistic to the best we can. Always hope, it’s still God’s will that will still prevail.. Keep up the good work. God bless HLG !!!

well for my own opinion..RN’s dependednt shouldnt be included in the visa number that will be going to released..only RN’s alone will be the priority and IT IS A MUST

HLG … Please tell us the the real score and don’t give us false hope, So that we can apply to other coutry while waiting for the lifting of retogression.

I just don’t get it why people in the house failed to approve the bill. I hope they reconsider the bill before all the healthworkers find the option of working in other countries.
I am still optimistic that they will approve the bill this year. This year is my last chance or else all the effort and the money I invested in taking the NCLEX, IELTS, CGFNS exam will be useless.
as we all know getting a job and an immigrant visa to the USA is a big invested. Hope they will give as chance to work and earn money for our family.
Thanks for all the hardwork. Good luck HLG.

Hi, is it possible to pass a bill solely for the purpose of increasing visas in countries undergoing retrogression ( health care workers ), and not just attach the proposal to bills concerning illegal immigration? Coz as I see it, there were a lot of questions raised in congress on the bill where our proposal was attached to. Please shed some light on this and sorry for my ignorance. God bless

Why HLG/CRIS are very silent now a days! Nothing is going to happen ,the silence itself means!! NO VISA in the near future. Guys!! forget US dreams, try for somewhere else! Im sorry guyz.

Dont waste your time. And thats how i see it.

Hi HLG/Cris,

Admit it you are just good in funding drive…are you not ashamed of yourselves…you just to earn money for a living…the future of our children is being compromised…just tell us honestly if this visa recapturing will happen in 2009 0r 2010?

Adressing several comments:

1. Neither HLG nor any law firm or staffing co. associated with the lobbying effort earns any money on the lobbying. All the funds go to the lobbyists. All members of the CTIHS are given a full accounting of every dollar.

2. The 61K is still in play, although there is a chance of a more liberalized healthcare visa bill, which is similar but not identical to the 61K bill. This is still being debated by those in DC.

3. I’m not sure where the idea that Nancy P. signed off on our bill came from, but it wasn’t from HLG.

4. Thanks to all those who have posted kind words.

5. Rest assured that any silence in January was just because we didn’t have any news to report.

gbert,

just wait, be patient

be ashamed of yourself

Lobbying for legislation change needs lots of money. It is also not a sure thing but nevertheless, we should be thankful that there are groups (HLG and others) that are doing this for the Healthcare sector. Yes, it is also for their interests since it is their business but it is also for our gain. If they succeed, we also benefit from it.
Just recently, the Philippine government has hired a lobbying group to lobby for a bill for Filipino WW2 veterans. Maybe we Filipino/Filipina nurses/PTs can ask our government to include a bill for us. The remittances from abroad is a big factor on our economy.

To HLG,
Thanks for your ongoing efforts and my prayers are with you. Your success is also ours.

To the rest of us here,
I know it has been a very frustrating wait and possibly it would be not sooner for retrogression to be lifted. It is hard but there is really nothing we can do but pray, hope and ride this out. Let us have more patience and faith in God. Enjoy your life while waiting.

God bless us ALL!!!

To HLG,
Thank you for your efforts. A more liberal bill would be better for all us nurses waiting for since so long but beggers cant be choosers.

I have a question for you GBERT !

How much of your own moeny did you give to HLG ?

As I suspect, not even a penny…

so you should be grateful that HLG does something for all of us here. And if you’re not happy with what they do, then suggest something better to do and give yourself the means to do it.

It is very easy to complain about everything but apparently so hard for you to say “thank you for all your efforts”

GBERT does not represent the majority of the readers here, and I believe the majority here is more than thankful to HLG and understand the troubles on our way to this great country are not the fault of HLG.

To GBERT,
As if HLG owes you a lot! As if HLG is your “employee” and your the “employer, mind if I ask, did you contribute to the lobbying efforts? I know and most of us here are in the waiting game, and i bet youre in the Philippines, you still have the luxury to wait coz youre with your family and in your home country, but how about those who are already here, and are in limbo, still waiting for their visas, do you hear them whine?..Lets be thankful that there are people like HLG who work for our cause..Sooner or later for all the waits we made..were moving forward…the issue will not go away..America needs to face this…Foreign workers are a big help to the US Economy..Immigrants are the Backbone of America..Pls be patient.

To gbert,
If your PD is June 2005 then you should have your GC by now for sure. If you dont then that means there was some issue with your file. Dont see why you expect anyone else to be ashamed. I am just thankful that there is someone lobbying for us as most of us are in our home countries and can do nothing to further our cause unlike the ones on IV who have state charters and rallys.

emman_ptrp & gbert,

If your priority dates are REALLY june 2005, then either YOU didn’t do something to get your Green Card or you should consider firing lawyer…

most chances that not only you missed the last visa recap, but you probably will not be included in the next, your lawyer probably did not put you in the Schedule A category…
Any how, you’ve got some SERIOUS thinking about how YOU filed for your green card.

take this as a friendly advice…

Clement

Hang in there everyone! Things will happen for us.

Anybody heard of David Ware, immigration attorney in Louisiana?

US owes us nothing as we are not it’s citizens, HLG owes me nothing as I am not its client. When you choose to risk your career on the immigration laws and policies of another nation, then you have to accept the delays and the challenges that come your way. We have chosen this route and have to accept the trials and hopefully in the end the rewards too. So lets not act like great victims of injustice and damsels in distress. We are here by our free will and no use blaming anyone else about it.

To emman_ptrp & gbert,
if you have a PD of June 2005, then there is something wrong with your case, I am sure USCIS has no personal vendetta against you. Talk to your lawyer.

Johny,
No one in the US forced you to CHOOSE to immigrate to the US.

I believe you knew what the rules were from the beginning: fee to pay, visa cap, no promise on time frame and even all the waiting to start other from the beginning if your sponsor decides to cancel his sponsorship to your visa.

The RULES haven’t changed, and actually HLG is TRYING to change them for OUR BENEFIT.

You knew the rules before entering the “game”, so now play by it and don’t complain, and maybe, only maybe we all shall be lucky enough and HLG will manage to obtain NEW RULES for us so we can all move forward in OUR CHOICES of life.

Sincerely,

Clement

Dear friends,
Let us try to participate in this campaign. Nothing wrong in trying.
I request all members present here in this blog to send letters.

Thanks

Dear Immigration Voice Members,

2007 was a good year for all of us at Immigration Voice (IV). We at the Immigration Voice leadership team whole-heartedly thank all of you who contributed to our initiatives and helped us get a good outcome after the July Bulletin fiasco. Your help in the San Jose and Washington DC rallies really brought us good attention and helped us gain traction in Washington DC.

However, our work is not over and a lot more needs to be done to resolve our issues.

Looking ahead in 2008:

Legislative changes are going to be difficult this year due to the general election in November. We are going to do out best to accomplish reform legislatively and there is a precedent of good bills passing during a presidential election year. AC21 laws were passed in October 2000, one month before the Presidential election.

What can be done in absence of legislative reform and activity in Congress:

In the absence of legislative reform, there are some things that can be done without legislation and without an act of congress that would provide interim relief to all of us. These changes are the administrative changes that can be done by the current administration thru changes in the federal regulations based on Immigration laws. Immigration Voice made some headway in this sector by meeting with administration officials, including the White House staff and the DHS staff in September, November and then in December of last year. These meetings helped us start a conversation on possible administrative fixes like

(1) 3 years EAD and AP.

(2) Reinstating in-country visa re-stamping.

(3) Reinstating premium processing of 140 filing.

(4) Allowing filing 485 when visa number is not available.

(5) Clearly defining “same or similar” job description in portability cases when AC-21 is invoked.

(6) Recapture the unused visas for permanent residency to fulfill the congressional intent of granting of 140,000 green cards per year.

What you can do to help us accomplish this administrative reform:

We are organizing a massive letter campaign asking every participant to send a letter to President Bush urging him to provide some immediate relief. The deadline for the letter campaign is March 1st. Please do send in your letters ASAP. Such letters create a very favorable opinion of our case in key circles of the administration and help us pave the way for reform.

Templates for the letter to the President and directions regarding this action item can be found by clicking here (Or copy-paste this URL http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/showthread.php?t=16506 )

There is absolutely nothing to fear or worry about:

There are a few people who have concerns that sending a letter to any branch of the government, such as to President Bush or to members of Congress, would jeopardize their immigration process or would invite future trouble of some kind. Such fears are absolutely baseless and there is nothing to worry. To organize and petition the government for reform is one of the most American things you can do. Think about it, if there were such retaliation from the Government for participating, organizing, protesting peacefully or speaking out then all of the leadership of Immigration Voice would have already stopped working on this issue long time ago. So please do not hesitate in sending this letter. It’s for your own benefit and your own interim reliefs while you are waiting for your permanent residency to come through.

Thanks,

Immigration Voice

(www.immigrationvoice.org)

approve on the suggestion.i dont want to say anything without solid basis and Im still skeptical about certain issues but since the 140k visas were mentioned a friend working in a hospital in Cali told me word is that 140k visas might be issued in November,I know it does sound ridiculous considering the presidential elections.I know we are only anticipating the recap of 61k unused visas(God willing).

To gbert:

if your PD is June05,I dont think there was some sort of problem with regards to the filing of your petition.I know of someone who’s PD falls on the same year as yours (2005) and still waiting for P4.NVC sent a letter to her atty/employer that says since there were large volume of petitions filed and only a limited number of visas,she will have to wait until her PD becomes current…If you already have your NVC case number you can probably check the status of your file,well,if you want to know what’s up whether it stays in the NVC or has been forwarded to the consulate.but rest assured your probably just waiting for your PD to become current.and the only thing we can hope now is for the PDs to move and for the EB3 to become C once again in the coming visa bulletin.

Godspeed!

Thanks for the updates.
My PD is Feb. 2006 and my IV interview call was in July 2007 ( when there was a changed IV rules for only 15 days. On the same day , my documents along with my daughter’s were found complete and we were told that we both would be issued visas. My spouse’s two foreign documents were to be received ( as they take a long time after getting the visa call ) , his visa sanction was kept pending. He went to that foreign land spending a lot of money for getting that document. I spent a lot of money on uniform and other necessary items and resigned from the job to leave within 15 days after receiving the passport as the orientation prog. was scheduled by the employer within a month period. When I did not receive my passport and my daughter’s for many days , I went to US embassy. To my surprise I was told that I am again affected by retrogression due to pending documents of my husband. I am a person who spent my own money for CGFNS, IELTS, NCLEX ( given the test in US by spending a lot of money) and for visa fees ( for 3 family members) as I was not through any agency except for an appointment ( through US staffing Co.). After that I spent money for Medical exam. and vaccinations and for keeping ready the required documents for the interview. I am unable to get convinced for my not getting the visa sanctioned for me and my daughter. How can we get the PCC , etc that too from abroad when there is no news of getting the retrogression lifted , or soon after getting the IV call within a few days period ? I feel that I am now living in uncertainity as there is no positive news from anywhere.

Is there any way to find a solution for this?

Thanks

Prabha

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080209/ap_on_go_pr_wh/immigration_backlogs

Citizenship on hold for many immigrants
WASHINGTON – President Bush is asking Congress to spend money to help businesses root out illegal workers but he did not request additional funds to help legal immigrants become American citizens more quickly.

In his budget proposal issued this week, Bush asked for $100 million to expand E-Verify, the system employers use to check whether they are hiring documented workers. He didn’t ask Congress to allocate money to chip away at millions of citizenship and other immigration applications that flooded the government last summer, before an increase in the agency’s filing fees.

Instead, Citizenship and Immigration Services will rely on $468 million in fees to pay for reducing the backlog by 2010. Those funds are a portion of the total fees that came in with the applications this summer.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the summer’s fee increases will give the agency the money it needs to get back on track.

“People always argue well you ought to fund this, you ought to fund that. That’s great, but the pie is only as big as it is and no one ever comes up with this slice they want to give back in return for this,” Chertoff said.

A total 7.7 million applications for various immigration benefits poured into Citizenship and Immigration Services in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2007. That’s 1.4 million more than the previous fiscal year.

“The backlogs are pretty much back where they were when they started and the agency is back to doing what it used to do, which is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Right now they are taking resources from permanent residence to do citizenship,” said Crystal Williams, associate director for programs at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The immigration agency increased fees in July largely to raise about $1.5 billion to pay for modernizing computer equipment, hiring and training more workers, improving field offices and other spending.

Becoming a citizen now costs $595, up from $330. The price to get a green card is $1,010, up from $395. Applicants for both pay another $80 each for digital fingerprinting, a $10 increase.

Congress gave the immigration agency $100 million a year over five years through 2006 to reduce the immigration backlogs. Agency Director Emilio Gonzalez announced in September 2006 the backlog had fallen to about 139,0000 cases. About 1 million applications in the backlog that were incomplete, from people still awaiting visas or whose FBI name check was delayed, were not counted.

The administration deserves credit for securing the $500 million from Congress for the backlog, said Doris Meissner, former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner under President Clinton.

“They broke through the idea that this should just be purely financed by the applicant fees themselves,” said Meissner, a senior fellow with Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “But it was finite.”

Since 1988, the work of Citizenship and Immigration Services and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has been largely paid for by revenue from application fees. Congress has provided money for specific projects over the years, but generally those have been limited to a few years. Sometimes fee money has been diverted for things like detention centers.

The result has been an agency constantly shifting resources to respond to the latest crisis, critics say.

“Every time the system breaks down, they are incentivizing people to say, ‘Screw the system, I’ll just overstay my visa.’” said James Jay Carifano, a research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

Immigration officials say they will be able to chip away at the backlogs as 1,500 new workers are hired and trained. Things should be back where they were before the application spike by 2010, the agency’s spokeswoman Chris Rhatigan said.

Williams thinks that’s an optimistic prediction. The 7.7 million applications the agency received last year amount to about three years of work, she said.

___

On the Net:

Citizenship and Immigration Services: http://www.uscis.gov

American Immigration Lawyers Association: http://www.aila.org

Migration Policy Institute: http://www.migrationpolicy.org

Heritage Foundation: http://www.heritage.org

Off topic:

For foreign nurses with pending CA license due to lack of US SSN, have you ever contacted the California Board of Registered Nursing asking what to do?

In the past, licenses were given even without SSN. Whoever changed that rule should be exposed and be known to the world.

Why is it needed in CA for license issuance when other states are more lenient(because they are smart enough to know what catch-22 means)?

I think CA state needs wiser people in command and not problem makers.

Another question, why does CGFNS only give a 5 year validity for the visascreen? Are they being realistic? Lucky if one can even get a visa within 5 years. With how things are moving, visas can take as long as 10 years. Visascreen shouldn’t have expiry. Or if it should have, they should have been more realistic like a 25 year validity…

I guess everyone is in it for the money and left themselves with a bit of dignity(they could have made it to last for only a year, but in an attempt to hide their obvious appetite for money, they just put 5 years). Now the USCIS AND DHS in general are following them(increase in fees, etc.).

I hope someday, God’s justice will be enforced and everyone will reap their just reward…

Dear MPV,
that agency is misguiding you. There is no premium processing available for I- 140 petitions now. USCIS has stopped premium processing for I- 140 petitions from 2nd June 2007. Hope this helps.

It seems a lot of US trained nurse has no way to work after OPT training. It’s should be easier to pass if there is something, like US graduate master has own CAP for H-1B, US graduate nursing has own Visa number from Schedule A.

It doesn’t make sense if get US trained nurses out of work on one hand and recruit a lot of foreign trained nurses on other hand.

Good luck!