Ban lifted for green card visa applicants with HIV

A stamp in Heidemarie Kremer’s passport reveals her health status as HIV-positive.

Because of the disease, Kremer — a native of Germany — has been barred from becoming a legal resident of the United States. She and her two children are fighting possible deportation, and their plans for the future are on hold.

But that soon may change.

This month, the federal government cleared the way for HIV-positive foreigners to visit the country and apply for green card visas, lifting a bar that has been in place for more than two decades.

Kremer, 46, a trained physician and HIV researcher who lives in Miami, said she was relieved that her case might be resolved when she returned to court in February. But she said she also felt a sense of responsibility.

“This is not the end of the story,” she said. “What about all the lives that the HIV travel and immigration ban ruined?”

Immigration lawyers in California and around the nation said the ban had caused families to be separated; foreigners to avoid being tested or to go without medication; and highly skilled workers to return to their home countries.

Since the announcement, Los Angeles immigration lawyer J Craig Fong and other lawyers said they had received a flurry of calls and e-mails from HIV-positive foreigners who now had renewed hope. The new rules, including the elimination of HIV testing for green-card visa applicants, take effect Jan. 4.

“To finally be in a position where I can tell people that they can come to the United States to visit their family or that they can get a green card visa and stay here with their partner is just incredible,” said Victoria Neilson, legal director for Immigration Equality, a national organization that advocated for lifting the ban.

But Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, said the decision to remove HIV as a bar was based on politics, not science. “It was clearly a politically motivated move,” Krikorian said, adding that the decision could have real consequences — more HIV cases and more costs. “It is extra healthcare spending that we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

An analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in the first year, an estimated 4,275 people infected with HIV could come into the U.S. at a cost of about $25,000 each.

The ban on infected foreigners began in 1987, when federal health officials added HIV to the list of communicable diseases that prevented people from entering the country. In 1993, Congress made it law.

“At the time, much less was known about HIV,” Neilson said. “People were really scared that HIV status was a death sentence.”

People could apply for waivers, but for most applicants that required proof that the foreigner had a family member in the U.S. legally. Because same-sex partners don’t qualify as family members under the law, the requirement was difficult for many to meet.

Last year, Congress changed the law, and this month, the CDC removed HIV from the list of diseases restricting foreigners’ entry.

Kremer was infected as a medical student in Germany. In 2001, she received a visa to come to the U.S. on an educational exchange program and later qualified for a visa for highly skilled workers. Her original waiver — granted by a sympathetic consular officer in Berlin — was automatically renewed.

But when Kremer applied last year for a green card visa, she was denied based on her HIV status, and she and her family were placed in removal proceedings. “I was fuming,” she said. “My whole future was built up to stay in the United States.”

Knowing the change in policy was coming, her lawyers pushed to get her case postponed until after the new year. Kremer, whose treatment is paid for by the German government, said she was thankful to have both medical coverage and immigration lawyers.

“I am concerned about other people who have been affected who aren’t fortunate enough to have attorneys who know how to navigate the system and keep people from being deported,” she said.

Another HIV-positive visa holder, who lives in Southern California, has also had access to an immigration lawyer but hasn’t been able to apply for legal residency.

Dave, who did not want his full name or occupation used because his HIV status is unknown to his employer, arrived from Canada a decade ago as a visitor. He soon found a job and was able to get an H1B visa for high-skilled workers. Now, he earns six figures and manages million-dollar projects.

Dave’s employer offered to sponsor him for a green card visa, but Dave couldn’t move forward because he knew how it would end — with a denial. His visa expires next year, and he had started looking for new job opportunities.

“Everything had a finite end to it,” he said. “You were working within certain boundaries. Now those boundaries have been removed.”

[Source: LA Times]

Green card visa deal for rich investors [source: Independent]

A bill signed into law last week by US President Barack Obama will allow wealthy Irish people to get green cards to live in the United States in second homes provided they invest in projects that will provide 10 jobs in a high unemployment area.

The little-known programme, known as EB-5 regional centre programme, is a highly beneficial permanent residence option for the wealthy individual, according to Ron Klasko, who is chairman of the EB-5 committee of the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association.

The programme requires an investment of at least $500,000 (€336,000) in a high unemployment or rural area in a commercial enterprise that will employ 10 full-time US workers. The investor has to be able to document that the funds are legal, but does not have to be involved in day-to-day management.

Under the law, the permanent home obtained by the Irish investor is conditional for two years and can be made permanent upon satisfying the US Customs and Immigration Service at the end of the two years that the investment proceeds have not been withdrawn, and that the jobs have been created.

“What are the chances of a wealthy Irish national being able to spend his retirement years in the US? Surprisingly the chances may be very good using a vehicle entitled Regional Centre EB-5,” Mr Klasko’s website says.

“Although many people, especially from Asia, have found the $500,000 price tag to be a small price to pay for the US green card visa, for the ability to retire in the US and for the ability to have their children educated in the US, the programme has received a lot less publicity in Ireland.”

His company, Klasko, Rulon, Stock and Seltzer, with offices in New York and Philadelphia specialising in immigration law, said the visa programme allows the Irish retiree to work or not work as he pleases, to live anywhere he wants to in the US, to travel in and out of the country as frequently as he wishes, and to get green card visa for his spouse and unmarried children under the age of 21.

He must invest a specified amount of money, $500,000 to $1m, in a US government-approved regional centre and the investment must be for a period of at least five years.

Read the full story at Independent

Obama Announces End of HIV Travel Ban [source: PBS]

Speaking at the White House signing ceremony for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS bill, Mr. Obama called the original legislation, “a decision rooted in fear rather than fact” and he challenged what he called the continuing “stigma” of HIV.

Lifting the ban, he said, is “a step that will encourage people to get tested and get treatment, it’s a step that will keep families together, and it’s a step that will save lives.”

History of the ban

The travel ban, in place since 1987, barred HIV-positive foreigners from obtaining permanent immigration status or entering the United States without special waivers. The United States is one of 12 nations, including Armenia, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, that still deny entry to HIV-infected people.

The ban’s longevity has been the result of “misinformation and AIDS-phobia,” says Rachel Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, a legal advocacy organization based in New York.

Public health experts have similarly argued that the ban was outdated, reflecting an era when the threat of AIDS was poorly understood. A July CDC report argued that advances in epidemiology, as well as treatment, rendered the ban unnecessary.

“We’ve learned a lot since 1987,” said CDC spokeswoman Christine Pearson.

The move to lift the restriction was initiated last year, when Congress voted to remove language from the original 1987 law singling out HIV as a threat to public health. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had earlier lobbied against the language to little effect.

That change opened the door for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to propose lifting the ban this past July. The move elicited more than 20,000 responses from the public, many of them positive, during a mandatory 45-day comment period.

Effects on travel and immigration

Over the course of the 20-year ban, some HIV-positive visitors were allowed to enter the United States, but only after demonstrating they had medication and health coverage, and successfully petitioning for the special waiver.

“All this was unevenly applied and often resulted in last-minute rejections,” Tiven says. “That’s why no major scientific conferences on AIDS have been held in the U.S. since 1987. It’s an embarrassment.”

Heidemarie Kremer, a trained physician and researcher who contracted HIV in 1988 while working as a medical student in Germany, has been in the United States since 2001 under a temporary visa for immigrants of “extraordinary ability.” Because of her infection, however, she had to continually reapply for special waivers.

Last March, when Kremer finally applied for a green card, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official told her that, though HIV rules would likely change by the end of the year, her waiver application would still be denied under the existing rules.

“That day, my whole life changed,” she said. “I kept thinking, what will happen to my kids?” she said. “What about my home and my friends?”

For now, Kremer can remain in the country until her court date later this fall, though her pro-bono legal team worries that she could still be deported, along with her children, back to Germany, despite Mr. Obama’s announcement.

“For Dr. Kremer and others like her, there is still much work to be done,” said Cristina Velez, a staff attorney with the HIV Law Project, which recruited Kremer’s legal team.

Kremer believes that the ban has stifled medical innovation, remarking that the reputation of the United States as a medical research powerhouse suffers when highly skilled, but HIV-positive, researchers cannot obtain short-term visas.

Some support for ban remains

While fear of an AIDS epidemic has subsided over the years, proponents of the ban continue to warn that allowing HIV-positive immigrants to settle in the United States could saddle public health agencies with excessive costs. The CDC estimates that lifting the ban would likely increase immigration by 4,300 people annually.

“With rising costs of health care being a heated political issue this year, a discussion of how this policy change may increase the burden on our health care system seems necessary,” according to a statement released in July by the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

Last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that lifting the ban might cost the federal government $83 million over the next eight years, primarily in public health expenditures.

Tiven counters that these figures do not take into account the added revenue that HIV-positive immigrants would contribute as fully employed taxpayers.

Ban’s human cost

For those personally affected by the ban, however, bureaucratic wrangling over budgets and visas elide the human impact of twenty years of uncertainty, fear and frustration.

British-born Andrew Sullivan, a prominent political blogger for The Atlantic, is both openly gay and HIV-positive. He has lived in Washington, D.C. since the mid-1980s.

Despite being legally married in Massachusetts, his American-born husband cannot sponsor him for a green card visa because of the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. With today’s announcement, he will finally be able to apply for papers on his own.

An outspoken critic of the president’s delay on the ban, Sullivan reacted to this morning’s announcement on his blog with enthusiasm and relief: “For me, it is the end of 16 years of profound insecurity. I will be able to see my family again in England and know that my HIV will not force me to choose between my husband and the country I have come to call my home. There is no price to be put on that.”

[source: PBS]

Slump Sinks Visa Program

A coveted visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier U.S. technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.

The program, known as H-1B, has been a mainstay of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, where many companies have come to depend on securing visas for computer programmers from India or engineers from China. Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of Sept. 25 — nearly six months after the U.S. government began accepting applications — only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

Usually, all visas are allocated within a month or two from April, when applications for the following fiscal year are first accepted. But this year, six months later, “you can still walk in with an application and you’re still highly likely to get approved,” said R. Srikrishna, senior vice president for business operations in North America for HCL Technologies Ltd., an Indian outsourcing company.

The sagging economy, which has pushed U.S. unemployment to 9.8%, has crimped expansion in the technology sector, traditionally the biggest user of the H-1B program. Julie Pearl, a corporate immigration lawyer in San Francisco, said that at least a third of her clients have cut their hiring of H-1B visa holders in half from a year ago.

“Most companies just aren’t hiring as many people in general,” Ms. Pearl said.

For Indian outsourcing companies, historically the largest recipients of H-1B visas, the economy as well as political pressures have prompted a cutback in applications. The recession has trimmed technology budgets at their U.S. clients; at the same time, Washington has scrutinized hiring from abroad more closely amid high unemployment at home.

Instead of bringing over Indian engineers, HCL has been hiring American employees who otherwise might have been let go by clients switching the work to HCL, Mr. Srikrishna said. Last year, HCL hired more than 1,000 employees from clients and received just 87 H-1B visas, he said.

Political pressures have come to bear among other applicants as well. Companies that receive federal bailout funds must prove they have tried to recruit American workers at prevailing wages and that foreigners aren’t replacing U.S. citizens. That regulation caused Bank of America Corp., among others, to rescind job offers to dozens of foreigners.

In addition, would-be immigrants from India and China are finding new career opportunities at home as those economies grow relatively quickly while the U.S. economy sags and its political climate appears less welcoming.

Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied H-1B visas, said that trend has been compounded by what he sees as rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. “The best and the brightest who would normally come here are saying, ‘Why do we need to go to a country where we are not welcome, where our quality of life would be less, and we would be at the bottom of the social ladder?’” Mr. Wadhwa said.

The cost and bureaucracy of applying for H-1B visas is another deterrent. Lawyers’ fees, filing fees and other expenses can easily reach $5,000 per applicant.

And immigration lawyers say some would-be employers are put off by a crackdown on fraud. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the H-1B program, has been dispatching inspectors on surprise company visits to verify that H-1B employees are performing the jobs on the terms specified. The fraud-detection unit in coming months is expected to inspect up to 20,000 companies with H-1Bs and other temporary worker visas.

“It’s an invasive procedure that is both stressful for the employer and the foreign national employee,” said Milwaukee lawyer Jerome Grzeca, whose employment-visa business is down 40% since last year.

The numbers represent a sharp turnaround for a program that many companies had complained was too stingy with its visas. Year after year, U.S. businesses braced for “visa roulette,” as applications to bring in highly skilled foreign workers far outstripped demand, forcing the government to hold a lottery to award them.

High-tech companies, such as Microsoft Corp., have been lobbying Congress for years to raise the cap. At the same time, some U.S. legislators have been calling for restrictions on the program, which they say displaces American workers.

Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote a letter this month to the new director of citizenship and immigration services, urging tighter controls on H-1B visas. In April, Mr. Grassley and Illinois Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin introduced legislation to require companies to pass more stringent labor-market tests that would ensure they make a bigger effort to hire U.S. workers.

Companies that use H-1B visas argue the market, rather than Congress, should dictate the number of visas issued. The fact that the 65,000-visa cap hasn’t been reached this year shows that the market will temper demand when necessary, said Jenifer Verdery, director of work-force policy at Intel Corp., who represents a coalition of companies that use the visas.

“Contrary to the claims of H-1B critics, if importing cheap labor were the goal of H-1B visa employers, these visas would have been gone on the first day applications were accepted last spring,” Ms. Verdery said. “In slow economic times, such as today, the demand decreases and the market takes over, which is as it should be.”

In 2008, 44% of approved H-1B visa petitions were for foreigners working as systems analysts or programmers. The second-largest category consisted of professionals working in universities. Indians account for about half of all H-1B visa holders.

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the U.S. work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft’s patent applications in the U.S. came from new inventions by visa and green card visa holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

Google Inc. also says that the H-1B program allowed it to tap top talent that was crucial to its development. India native Krishna Bharat, for example, joined the firm in 1999 through the H-1B program, and went on to earn several patents while at Google. He was credited by the company as being the key developer of its Google News service. Today, he holds the title of distinguished research scientist.

[Source: WSJ]

Congress passes green card visa bill for spouses of deceased U.S. citizens

Congress passed a bill Tuesday that would make widows and widowers of U.S. citizens eligible for green card visa even if their spouses died before their applications were approved.

The measure, part of the more than $40-billion Homeland Security appropriations bill, ends the “widow penalty,” which required couples to be married for two years before the surviving spouse would be eligible to apply for residency. Now, surviving spouses can apply for a green card visa for themselves and their children regardless of when the U.S. citizen died or how long they were married.

There are believed to be a few hundred cases affected nationwide, including that of Dahianna Heard, whose husband was fatally shot while working for a private security contractor in Iraq; Raquel Williams, whose husband died of sleep apnea and heart problems; and Ana Maria Moncayo-Gigax, whose husband was killed in a car crash while on duty with the U.S. Border Patrol. Many are fighting deportation, and others have already been deported.

“It was just something crying out to be fixed,” said Brent Renison, who has been fighting to get the law changed since 2004. “These cases should have been approved.”

Renison had fought the case in courts around the nation, including in Los Angeles, where a judge this year ordered the Department of Homeland Security to reopen the immigration cases of nearly two dozen people who were denied green cards because of the deaths of their spouses.

In June, the federal government announced that it would suspend deportation proceedings for two years so applicants could stay in the U.S. while resolving their legal status. But Renison said that didn’t go far enough and continued to push Congress to change the law.

The bill now goes to President Obama.

[Source: LA Times]

Other Ways to Get a Greencard Visa — Source: USCIS

Although most immigrants come to live permanently in the United States through a family member’s sponsorship, employment, or a job offer, there are many other ways to get a green card visa (permanent residence).

These special adjustment programs are limited to individuals meeting particular qualifications and/or applying during certain time frames.

For information about the categories below, see links to the left under “Other Ways to Get a Green Card.”

• Amerasian Child of a U.S. Citizen
• American Indian Born in Canada
• Armed Forces Member
• Cuban Native or Citizen
• Diversity Immigrant Visa Program
• Haitian Refugee
• Indochinese Parole Adjustment Act
• Informant (S Nonimmigrant)
• Lautenberg Parolee
• Legal Immigration Family Equity (LIFE) Act
• Person Born to Foreign Diplomat in United States
• Registry
• Section 13 (Diplomat)
• Special Immigrant Juvenile
• Victim of Criminal Activity (U Nonimmigrant)
• Victim of Trafficking (T Nonimmigrant)

For information about the special categories below, see under the “Family,” Working in the U.S.” and “Humanitarian” links to the right.

• Nicaraguan and Central American Relief Act (NACARA)
• Green Cards Through Special Categories of Jobs

Includes:

• Afghan/Iraqi Translator
• Broadcaster
• International Organization Employee
• Iraqi Who Assisted the U.S. Government
• NATO-6 Nonimmigrant
• Panama Canal Employee
• Physician National Interest Waiver
• Religious Worker
• Green Cards Through Special Categories of Family

Includes:

• Battered Spouse or Child (VAWA)
• K Nonimmigrant (includes fiancé(e))
• V Nonimmigrant
• Widow(er)

Source: USCIS

Judge: Immigrants’ Children ‘Age Out’ of Their Parents’ Green Card Applications at 21

A federal judge has ruled that adult children who turn 21 while waiting for family-sponsored green cards have to wait anew once they “age out” of their parents’ applications.

U.S. District Judge James Selna ruled in Los Angeles against a group of immigrants with green cards who sued the federal government, arguing a 2002 law means grown children should be allowed into the country when their parents file new paperwork on their behalf.

Friday’s final ruling means the plaintiffs’ children who became adults while waiting for processing must start the application process from the beginning.

See full story at CNS News

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