Editor’s Note: This Charles Kuck sponsored article is published as part of Kuck Baxter’s annual sponsorship for Global Atlanta.
Charles Kuck
Thousands of immigrants received the green light from the at the end of February Biden Administration to resume their applications Georgia live and work.
However, resumption of work visa processing for immigrant or family members is heavily backward and inefficient and incompetent measures at the federal level are still preventing Georgia from accepting the migrant labor it needs.
President Biden’s proclamation 10014, which banned certain immigrants from the United States for COVID-19 reasons, was overturned on February 24th.
The lifting of the ban theoretically allows candidates for various qualified job-related green cards and parents or siblings of US citizens to begin or continue their applications for permanent residence.
But the reality is very different.
Immigrant applicants who had been waiting for their labor law or family-related immigration talks, or who had won a green card lottery in 2021, should have started the interview the moment the ban was lifted on February 24th.
However, few people were interviewed or visas issued. Many contributions canceled the interviews for March altogether.
If the Biden government wants to resume legal entry of multiple types of visas, why are they making it so difficult?
Part of this has to do with the State Department’s failure to provide COVID workplace accommodation for consular workers to return to work, even when most of the other parts of the government are working. It is rumored that consular services may not resume until all State Department staff are vaccinated.
While the ban is now gone, the reality on the ground is that it still exists.
This reality is most damaging to the thousands of Diversity Lottery winners in 2021, whose visas must be issued by September 30th before they expire. None have been issued since the beginning of the fiscal year, October 1st. Now the State Department has only six months to issue all 55,000 of these visas.
Worse, according to the priorities set in the previous administration, the diversity lottery winners are at the end of the line for processing visas. Equally bad is that not all of the approved family- or work-related visas will be used in fiscal 2020, costing hundreds of thousands of families the long-awaited right of entry into the United States.
This incompetence and inaction has wreaked havoc over decades as thousands of immigrants travel to Georgia. Our state is one of the top 10 destinations for immigrants to the United States. We are not California or TexasBut there are thousands of employees, future workers, mothers and fathers of citizens who are late to come here – not now from the former president Trump card, but now from President Biden.
Job-related green card applicants like EB-1 (Senior Manager at large Georgia corporations Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia), EB-2 (people with a Masters degree) and EB-3 (software engineers, journalists and other specialists) are waiting in the air, exactly when Georgian companies need them.
These skilled immigrants don’t take jobs American;; They bring jobs here. Your prospective employers have already shown that there are no qualified U.S. workers to do their jobs, so there is no reason to keep them out.
The State Department had used Proclamation 10014 to block visas, and accordingly our law firm sued five times to force their issuance. Despite the withdrawal of the proclamation and the court order regarding the visa procedure, delays persist.
We also just learned that U.S. consulates around the world are down 460,000 cases as of March 3rd. This is a seven-fold increase over the number of arrears at that time last year. And these are just people waiting for an interview, not the ones already in the pipeline.
Many – around 200,000 – are stuck Juarez city, Mexicowait up to three years for their visas to be approved. This includes a lot of people trying to get to Georgia.
Hundreds of our own customers are stuck in this line. And we’re just a law firm. Thousands of families and employers in Georgia are affected.
We believe this visa backlog is a willful failure and a violation of the law by consular and foreign ministry officials.
Georgia doesn’t need this huge backlog – we need legal immigration to strengthen our economy.
contact us under (404) 816-8611 or Immigration.net or follow me on Twitter at the @ckuck.