U.S. citizens' relatives could stay while seeking legal status

by Daniel Gonz?lez - Jan. 6, 2012 11:13 PM
The Republic | azcentral.com

Illegal immigrants closely related to U.S. citizens would no longer have to leave the country to try to obtain legal status under a proposed change in immigration policy announced Friday by President Barack Obama's administration.

The change, which would greatly reduce the amount of time U.S. citizens are separated from undocumented family members seeking legal status, is the latest attempt by the Obama administration to use its authority to implement some immigration reforms without congressional approval.

Immigrant advocates praised the proposed change as a practical and long-overdue step that would help preserve family unity by speeding up reunification.

But critics attacked the change as one more example of the administration backing off from enforcing immigration laws.

Some analysts also said the proposed policy change was likely an election-year ploy meant to bolster the president's standing among Latino voters unhappy with the record numbers of immigrants deported under his administration.

Currently, immigrants who are married to citizens and wish to apply for legal status must first go back to their own country if they entered the U.S. illegally.

Leaving, however, triggers an automatic five- or 10-year ban on returning, depending on how long they had resided in the country illegally.

The ban is intended to discourage illegal immigration.

Once outside the country, illegal immigrants can ask the government to waive the ban, provided they can prove their separation would cause extreme hardship to their U.S. citizen spouse or parent.

On Friday, Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, proposed a change that would allow illegal immigrants to ask for a waiver from inside the United States.

If successful, the immigrant would be given a provisional waiver and then be required to return to his country to apply for a legal residency visa, or green card, to come back to the United States.

The proposal, published in the Federal Register, does not require congressional action to become final.

The agency will accept public comment about the proposed change, with a goal of implementing it this year, Mayorkas said.

He said the proposed change is intended to alleviate hardship caused to citizens when they are separated from illegal-immigrant relatives, who often wait for a year or longer for the waivers to be processed.

"We are proposing a process change to better serve the current law's goal, a change that will reduce the time of separation and thereby alleviate the extreme hardship to the United States citizen," Mayorkas said.

He said the high standard for obtaining a waiver would not change. To be granted a waiver, illegal immigrants would still have to prove that their separation would harm their citizen spouses or parents.

Such waivers typically are granted only in cases in which the citizen has a severe medical condition, he said.

Last year, about 23,000 illegal immigrants applied for waivers from the 10-year ban and about 17,000 were granted, Mayorkas said.

The change, however, would likely spur a larger number of waiver applications because the requirement to leave the country has been a deterrent to applying, he said.

Pros and cons

Immigrants advocates cheered the proposed change, with reservations.

Gerald Burns, a Chandler immigration lawyer who chairs the local chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the change would have a wide affect in Arizona, where many undocumented immigrants are married to U.S. citizens.

"I think it's significant, especially here in a border state," he said. "Thousands and thousands of families would be affected."

Eli Kantor, an immigration lawyer in Beverly Hills, Calif., said he is worried that illegal immigrants without strong hardship cases might rush to apply for the waivers and then be subject to deportation if they lose.

He also fears the proposed change was politically motivated to gain support from Latinos as the presidential election heats up.

Burns, however, said he believes the Obama administration is addressing a long-standing issue that will make the immigration system more humane.

"It's something that people have clamored for for years," Burns said. "We are seeing the collateral damage of the families, children and spouses being devastated and broken apart from that separation. That's got to be the reason. I'm sure there are people out there who say it's political, but family separation is real, it's not political."

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based immigration-enforcement group, said the proposed change would undermine laws aimed at discouraging illegal immigration by effectively nullifying the 10-year ban on returning to the U.S.

He also called the change the latest attempt by the Obama administration to weaken immigration enforcement.

Last year, the Obama administration announced policy changes to focus on deporting immigrants who commit serious crimes instead of those whose only offense is being in the country illegally.

Immigration officials are currently reviewing thousands of deportation cases and closing the files of illegal immigrants who have not committed serious crimes.

Critics say that policy is de facto amnesty.

Given that policy, Mehlman expects the government to make it easier for illegal immigrants to be approved for hardship waivers.

"In the political context of the way this administration is operating, this is just one more step in their effort to basically say we are going to disregard the fact that people violate immigration laws unless they have gone on to commit some other crime here in the United States," Mehlman said.

Challenging issue

Immigration will be a challenging issue for Obama in the November election.

Under his administration, the government has deported record numbers of illegal immigrants, the vast majority of them from Mexico and Central America.

Obama failed to live up to his campaign promise to get Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to legal status for illegal immigrants living in the United States.

A December survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., indicated that a majority of Latinos disapprove of the deportations. Still, the same survey said that Obama enjoys a wide lead among Latino voters when matched against potential Republican presidential candidates.

Louis DeSipio, a political-science professor at the University of California-Irvine, said allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. while they apply for hardship waivers could boost Obama's standing with Latinos.

"It gives the administration, or the candidate Obama, a message to share with Latino communities when he campaigns," DeSipio said. "I don't think his message will be solely one of immigration but will fit immigration into a larger story about how the Democrats will offer more to Latinos than Republicans. And I think that total message will actually work pretty well in Latino communities. But this is just a piece of that story."

Source: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/01/06/20120106shift-in-illegal-migrant-policy.html

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