The Hindu Business Line : US vows to speed up processing of green card applications

IN a message that could be somewhat reassuring to thousands of Indian nationals who are awaiting their "green card" or wondering what happened to their applications, a senior official of the Bush administration has said that efforts are under way to speed up the family-based immigrant application process.

"We're actually looking at the I-130 process which impacts specifically the family-based immigrants...there are upwards of 1.8 million pending applications for family-based immigrants here under what's known as the I-130 category," remarked Mr Prakash Khatri who is the first Ombudsman in the Citizenship and Immigration Services of the Department of Homeland Security.

At the Washington Foreign Press Centre, Mr Khatri said that on the subject of immediate relatives such as parents, spouses or children there is no limit on the number of immigrants that can come into the US even as there is a statutory limit set by Congress on the number of immigrants that can come into the country on an annual basis. With respect to "immediate relatives", Mr Khatri stressed that the USCIS is using the "most up-to-date technology to quickly and securely process all of these applications" and a lot of review on the processes is currently under way "...we are focussing on that," he said.

Stressing that the policy of this Republican administration is clearly to welcome immigrants and "not to put up walls" or "artificial barriers", the senior administration official maintained that processing times of applications could be reduced substantially; and that for the "green card" application, the processing time varies from as little as four months to as much as three or four years.

It was pointed out that in a pilot programme carried out at Dallas the particular process was actually cut down to a mere 75 days for the first green card. Mr Khatri also addressed another aspect that is of concern to Indian nationals who have applied for a green card and are currently residing in the US — something known as "Advance Parole" for them to be able to travel out of the US. "This particular programme is one that is of great interest to my office and we are working on a number of fixes to that", the senior USCIS official remarked.

"There are a number of different possibilities on Parole. Obviously some will require regulatory change," Mr Khatri said going on to point out two different cases of people who will need to use the advance parole. "In some cases people have a dying parent or a dying relative overseas and they need to go immediately. This should not be a situation where a person cannot leave the US because the Immigration Service was unable to process and advance parole," he said. The second category would be business travellers.

"...maybe we should combine the application so that when they actually file their green card application it is an automatic application for Advance Parole, so you don't have to do a separate application which then takes months to process," Mr Khatri remarked.