Good news for some American families
by digby
The jobs numbers are good, but there also good reason to contain the jubiliation for the time being, at least according to Jared Bernstein, who’s not a hostile emo-prog the last I heard.
But this is genuinely very welcome news worth celebrating:
Obama to ease path to green card: This will get comparatively little attention in today’s crush of news. But it’s still a very big deal:
Obama administration officials announced on Friday that they will propose a fix to a notorious snag in immigration law that will spare hundreds of thousands of American citizens from prolonged separations from immigrant spouses and children.
It’s hard to believe that we’ve had this Kafkaesque system in place for so long in the first place, but it’s good news that they’re dealing with it:
The change that immigration officials are offering would benefit United States citizens who are married to or have children who are illegal immigrants. It would correct a bureaucratic Catch-22 that those Americans now confront when their spouses or children apply to become legal permanent residents.
Although the tweak that officials of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services are proposing appears small, immigration lawyers and advocates for immigrants say it will make a great difference for countless Americans. Thousands will no longer be separated from loved ones, they said, and the change could encourage Americans to come forward to apply to bring illegal immigrant family members into the legal system.
Illegal immigrants who are married to or are children of American citizens are generally allowed under the law to become legal residents with a visa known as a green card. But the law requires most immigrants who are here illegally to return to their home countries in order to receive their legal visas.
The catch is that once the immigrants leave the United States, they are automatically barred from returning to this country for at least three years, and often for a decade, even if they are fully eligible to become legal residents…
Now, Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes to allow the immigrants to obtain a provisional waiver in the United States, before they leave for their countries to pick up their visas. Having the waiver in hand will allow them to depart knowing that they will almost certainly be able to return, officials said. The agency is also seeking to sharply streamline the process to cut down the wait times for visas to a few weeks at most.
I know someone who went through this and it was unbelievably difficult and painful. It took her husband nearly six years to wade through the process. It was awful. I’m sure people will still fall through the cracks, but eliminating Catch-22s like this will help a lot of American families.