When I was an immigrant visa officer in Islamabad, I interviewed thousands of individuals excited to start new lives in the United States. But I also saw a significant number of applicants who had little interest in a permanent move but were nevertheless applying for immigrant visas. Perhaps the most common case was a grandmother who wanted to spend a year in the United States to help care for her grandchildren before returning to her family in Pakistan.
Our visa system takes a binary approach to immigration: you’re either an immigrant or a non-immigrant. Since visitor visas are limited to six months, a grandmother who applied for a standard B1/B2 visitor visa and truthfully told a consular officer she expected to stay a year would likely be denied for not intending to follow the conditions of her visa.
As a result, I regularly heard from applicants that visa advisers—consultants who sell advice to help applicants navigate the U.S. visa process – would counsel family members, if eligible, to apply for immigrant visas instead, even though they lacked immigrant intent. That would not only allow them to come and go and stay as long as they like, but it would improve their chances for approval; consular officers hold discretion over who is and is not eligible for a nonimmigrant visa, but hold little if any discretion over immigrant visa issuance. As a result, for many parents and grandparents of U.S. citizens, the immigrant visa process is more lengthy but its outcome more assured.
In short, our system incentivizes many parents and grandparents to apply to immigrate to the United States when that’s not what they really want or need.
The United States is not the only country where foreigners may wish to live for a year or two but not permanently. Rather than encourage people to apply for immigrant visas they do not need, several other countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have all adopted hybrid visa categories melding aspects of both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas exactly for these parent and grandparent applicants.
The United States should do the same.
Creating a hybrid visa category for parents and grandparents would help ease the immigration backlog and reduce some of the political tensions around immigration by allowing extended visits without putting the visitor on a path to citizenship and social welfare benefits. These hybrid visas would fill a gap in our current system and better align travel intent with visa purpose by providing a classification for individuals planning to stay for longer periods but not permanently move.
Parents and grandparents of U.S. citizens are currently one of the most popular immigrant visa categories, representing nearly 15 percent of all immigrant visas issued. In fiscal year 2019, the United States issued 63,442 IR5 visas for these applicants – parents of U.S. citizens at least 21 years of age. Changing the system would require congressional legislation, but it would not be the first time the United States created a hybrid visa category; in 1970, Congress passed Public Law 91-225 to create the hybrid “K” fiancé/fiancée visa class to facilitate faster nonimmigrant visa processing. (Learning from this experience, it would be important to incentivize applicants to submit either immigrant or hybrid applications, not both.)
A “Super Visa”
When designing such a program, our neighbors to the north can provide a good example. Canada pioneered what they call a “super visa” nearly a decade ago, offering a nonimmigrant visa for the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens and permanent residents allowing multiple entries over a 10-year period with stays lasting up to two years at a time. The Canadian super visa seeks to serve the growing number of people who wish to visit family for extended periods, particularly given the cost and difficulty associated with traveling during Covid-19, but who plan to return home to their countries of origin rather than seek Canadian residency or citizenship. The super visa allows this limited group of applicants to go through a shorter nonimmigrant visa process requiring they procure a letter of support from family members demonstrating sufficient income. Befitting their nonimmigrant status, super visa holders do not receive employment rights and are required to purchase private medical insurance from a Canadian company during their stay, protections designed to safeguard Canadian public finances.
Other nations have followed suit, including Australia, which created a Sponsored Parent (Temporary) visa class in 2019. The government’s short description summarizes the reasons for its creation: “The visa provides parents with a new pathway to temporarily reunite with their children in Australia, while ensuring that taxpayers are not required to cover additional costs.” New Zealand also created such a program, a special nonimmigrant Parent and Grandparent Visitor Visa.
While even the slightest change to the immigration system shifts incentives and can reverberate widely, the United States has a lot to gain by adopting this approach.
First, while travel patterns may shift in the wake of Covid-19, pent-up demand will undoubtedly stress processing times on top of the current backlog. U.S. embassies and consulates are still re-opening for routine visa appointments. Given the nature of the petition-based immigration system, greater time, energy, and scrutiny is involved compared to the nonimmigrant process. That is why creating a new hybrid visa category to draw some immigrant visa demand to a new hybrid nonimmigrant category should lower processing times.
Second, a hybrid visa helps protect social benefits by limiting the number of individuals eligible. There is currently no cap on the number of parents and grandparents who wish to become U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Elderly parents and grandparents eventually earn social benefits in the United States no matter what age they immigrate regardless of whether they paid into the system (with some restrictions). For example, Medicare eligibility starts after five years of lawful residency. The United States could copy the Canadians and Australians and require hybrid visa holders to purchase U.S. medical insurance and thereby contribute to their cost of healthcare. These visa holders would also not become eligible for social benefits, helping to reassure taxpayers they can support higher levels of visa approvals and family reunification without risking unfunded financial commitments.
Finally, a hybrid visa fills a gap between immigrant and nonimmigrant travel, for example, by allowing loved ones extended visits to help with the birth of a child, support a sick relative, or provide childcare to facilitate a son or daughter working outside the home. One of the first lessons taught to consular officers adjudicating visa cases is that to approve a visa, the purpose of the applicant’s travel must align with the intent of their visa category. (Individuals may hold multiple visas; for example, a tourist may retain a visitor visa but must travel on a student visa to enroll at a U.S. university.) When I adjudicated immigrant visas in Islamabad, we would often see applicants stuck between visa classes, especially parents and grandparents who had one child in the United States but others in their home country, with whom they would also want to spend extended time. There was simply no way in our system to align the purpose of their travel to one of our visa categories.
Post-Covid Backlog
A hybrid visa for family members would be responsive to immigration concerns of both Democrats and Republicans. Immigration doves will commend the way it eases family reunification and provides visitors greater flexibility. Immigration hawks will appreciate that it would save the U.S. government time, money, and effort by not having to police six-month stays, processing fewer visa extensions, and reducing employee overtime as more applicants opt for the less onerous nonimmigrant visa process. It would help address the looming visa backlog – which is likely to get even worse as Covid restrictions ease -- and by incentivizing a shift toward nonimmigrant applications. Last but not least, it will save the U.S. taxpayer money in long-run social welfare benefit payments.
In such a partisan time, Congress has held up even common-sense immigration initiatives for an oft-discussed but perpetually fleeting comprehensive immigration reform package. That could still be a path forward, but there’s no need to wait; a hybrid visa could be set up sooner as part of our country’s post-Covid-19 response measures.
While many aspects of immigration policy are controversial, establishing a hybrid visa should not be. It’s time to end our binary approach to immigration and give parents and grandparents of U.S. citizens an easier way to spend time in the United States to see and support their families without having to immigrate permanently. It’s a creative approach that offers inducements to both sides of our immigration debate and could defuse some of the tensions around immigration that have made more comprehensive progress so difficult.
"easy" - Google News
December 10, 2020 at 12:33AM
https://ift.tt/3oCCE35
Opinion | An Easy Way to Take Pressure Off the Immigration System - Politico
"easy" - Google News
https://ift.tt/38z63U6
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Opinion | An Easy Way to Take Pressure Off the Immigration System - Politico"
Post a Comment