President Bush mandated that by September of this year, cases in DHS’s immigration backlog should be processed in six months or less, a deadline the agency is optimistic it can meet.But a spider web of agencies — including the Department of Labor, the Department of State and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — are also involved in evaluating and approving legal immigration applications.
With passions at an all-time high about illegal immigration, this is kind of unfortunate. Employees and employers who are trying to play by the rules are running into roadblocks.
(This) also has consequences for some American corporations. Overland Park, Kan.-based engineering firm Black & Veatch Corp. says it has lost skilled foreign workers because their employment-based immigration applications took so long to clear.
The process can get quite complex.
Hiring a permanent foreign worker means first getting approval from the Department of Labor, which has to certify that the company tried to fill the position with a qualified American worker. Then, the employer turns in a petition for an alien worker with a division of Homeland Security called U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS.
The employee files a separate application for permanent residency. But not everyone can immediately apply. As of July 2006, most foreign workers must wait nearly five years from the time the employer began the sponsorship process to file their paperwork, according to the Department of State web site.
Here's hoping that the government gets it's act together to the benefit of all involved.
And this also reinforces my personal view that (regardless of politics) a sincere beaurocracy is still a beaurocracy.
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