Hundreds of pro-immigration activists gathered recently near the White House to send President Obama a message:

“We are here to collect on the promises he made to us,” said a female activist.

That promise was sweeping pro-immigration reform. The rally was equal parts political theater, voter outrage and dance party.

“Hey, hey, Obama, don’t deport my mama!,” chanted the protesters.

Such appeals against deporting mamas are not helping this mother. She says when she called police during a domestic violence dispute, she was arrested.  She now faces deportation.

“I am fighting not to be separated from my daughter and for justice for the millions of immigrants in this country,” she said.

Police detained Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois and other activists during the protest.  Gutierrez supports immigration reforms, including an end to deporting undocumented, immigrant college students.  These protestors say more than 1 million immigrants have been deported since Mr. Obama’s election.

Speaking to Hispanic activists recently, the president blamed Republicans for failing to enact immigration reforms.

“Let’s be honest, I need a dance partner here and the floor is empty,” said President Obama.

Political analysts say Mr. Obama needs Hispanic voters to win re-election in 2012.  But a recent Gallup Poll shows his approval rating among Hispanics has slipped.

At the rally, the anger was palpable.

“The United States is deporting veterans and that is not American,” said Vietnam war veteran Manuel Valenzuela.

Business leaders testifying on Capitol Hill also seek immigration reform.  But their interests are more narrow. They seek quick visa approval for high tech foreign employees. They say the United States is losing top workers because the immigration process is so cumbersome.

Microsoft attorney Brad Smith says other countries have friendlier immigration policies toward top talent.

“The world economy has changed,” said Smith. “It used to be that people would move in search of the right jobs.  Now jobs move in search of the right people.”

NASDAQ CEO Robert Greifeld says high-skilled immigrants in the U.S. create jobs.

“Among the Fortune 500 companies, we found at least 14 NASDAQ companies with foreign-born founders,” said Greifeld. “These companies have created over $522 billion in market capitalization and employ over 500,000 workers.”

With a sluggish economy, and a still unresolved debate over raising the debt ceiling, there’s much uncertainty in Washington.  But one thing is sure:  those waiting for comprehensive immigration reform are going to wait a little bit longer.

Source: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/Obama-Takes-Heat-from-Pro-Immigration-Groups-126290333.html

Living in the Southie projects on the taxpayer dime, Auntie Zeituni is expected to show a little more appreciation, given how we’re letting her live in what is beyond a shadow of doubt the greatest country in the whole wide world.

“They told me as long as I wasn’t gone more than 12 months, everything would be OK,’’ Bridie said.

Source: http://www.workpermit.com/news/2010-10-12/us/us-h-1b-visas-still-available-october-2010.htm

Congressman Jared Polis proposed the new visa, with the aim to make it easier for entrepreneur immigrants. Without immigration companies such as Yahoo and Google would not exist. The idea will be part of a proposed overhaul of the U.S. immigration system.

“Every day the American economy is losing ground, not to mention high-tech jobs and technologies, to India and China because foreign-born entrepreneurs cannot secure a visa to stay in the US,” he stated.

If implemented, the new start-up visa proposal would mean that many more Immigrants will qualify for America’s EB-5 visa scheme. Introduced in 1990 to help attract foreign capital, the EB-5 visa allows 10,000 foreign entrepreneurs to come to the U.S. However, applicants must invest at least $1 million and create at least 10 full-time jobs.

Polis hopes to add a new class to the EB-5 visa that would allow entrepreneurs to attain a visa if they can attract $250,000 from a U.S. venture capital firm or $100,000 from an angel investor. The new company would have to show that it could generate $1 million in revenue and create at least 5 to 10 jobs.

A 2007 study, America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, undertaken by Duke University and University of California at Berkley found that 25 percent of engineering and technology companies started in the United States between 1995 and 2005 had at least one founder who immigrated to the country.

According to the study, these companies generated $52 billion in sales in 2005 and employ nearly 450,000 U.S. workers.

Source: http://www.workpermit.com/news/2010-01-05/us/possible-new-entrepreneuer-visa-for-us.htm

Source: http://www.gmpromagazine.com/ice-sets-record-number-illegal-aliens-removed-from-us.aspx

As of September 10, 2010, USCIS has received approximately 37,400 H-1B cap subject petitions and approximately 13,700 petitions qualifying for the advanced degree cap exemption.

FY 2011 H-1B Cap Count

USCIS has informed that it will continue to accept both cap-subject petitions and advanced degree petitions until a sufficient number of H-1B petitions have been received to reach the statutory limits.

Contact VisaPro immediately to assist you with the H-1B filing using the fast, easy and economical online visa processing.

Source: http://www.visapro.com/Immigration-News/?a=1491&z=21

Wait times have also continued to inch upward. The average time these pending cases have been waiting in the Immigration Courts of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is now 443 days.

Full details — by state, nationality, Immigration Court and hearing locations — can be viewed in TRAC’s backlog application, now updated with data through March 2010.

Selected Highlights

Wait Times by State
Wait times continue to be longest in California with 627 days, up from 619 days four months ago. Massachusetts average wait times inched up from 612 days to 616 days over the same time period. Nebraska moved up to third place, with an average time of 513 days pending cases have been waiting in the Omaha Immigration Court — up from 498 days four months ago.

Wait Times by Nationality
Among nationalities, and limiting comparisons to the 50 countries with the most individuals in queue, Armenians with cases pending before the Immigration Courts currently had the longest wait times of 938 days — more than twice the national average of 443 days. Other nationalities within the top five in terms of the length their cases had been pending were Indonesia (731 days), Lebanon (688 days), Albania (830 days), and Iran (594 days).

Highest Growth Rates in Pending Cases
Among individual Immigration Courts, and considering only those with at least 1,000 pending cases, the court with the fastest buildup during the first six months of FY 2010 was the San Antonio Immigration Court where pending cases jumped by 45 percent. The Las Vegas court ranked second, with a growth spurt of 38 percent during this year. Chicago (up 32 percent), El Paso (up 28 percent), and Portland (up 27 percent) made up the remaining top five locations experiencing the highest growth rates in case backlogs. Phoenix just missed out being included in these ranks with a growth rate of 26 percent.

Courts With Declining Case Backlogs
Some courts, however, saw a decline in their number of pending cases during FY 2010. Again considering only courts with at least 1,000 pending cases at the end of last year, the court with the sharpest decline was in Oakdale, Louisiana. That court saw its backlog reduced by 35 percent. This was followed by the Orlando, Florida court where the pending caseload dropped by 10 percent during the last six months. The Hartford, Connecticut court also saw a drop of 5 percent. Atlanta saw its backlog of pending cases reduced by 2.4 percent because of the transfer of some of its caseload to the new Stewart Immigration Court in Lumpkin, Georgia which opened in January 2010. Courts in Buffalo, New York and Guaynabo, San Juan, each saw pending caseloads decline by 1.8 percent.

Available Immigration Judges versus Arriving Cases
The backlogs of pending cases are driven by numerous factors. Chief among them is the number of available judges in the country or in a particular locality relative to how many cases the courts receive, the complexity of the cases and the time required to resolve them. Caseloads may be going up in one region or part of the country, and going down in another due to changes in the enforcement strategies of the Department of Homeland Security. Last year saw the influx of new proceedings and other matters received by the Immigration Courts reach an all time high.

While pending case backlogs continued to rise during the first six months of FY 2010, the number of new proceedings filed in the Immigration Courts has fallen slightly from the levels experienced during FY 2009. New proceedings received by the Immigration Court were down 2 percent during the first six months of 2010 (156,403) as compared with the same six month period in 2009 (159,358).

Another factor that may be involved in the growing number of backlogged cases is the increased time required to decide some of them because of new requirements imposed by Court of Appeals and Supreme Court decisions.

What accounts then for the continued rise in case backlogs? Clearly a piece of the puzzle is that the number of Immigration Judges declined by two judges over this same period. Further, hiring has not kept pace with judge turnover for an extended period of time, leaving one out of every six judge positions vacant (see TRAC’s March 2010 report).

Looking ahead, the Executive Office for Immigration Review just swore in four new Immigration Judges May 14. While not yet announced, a fifth new Immigration Judge was also recently appointed. But EOIR still has a very long way to go to fill existing judge vacancies. These include vacancies that have remained unfilled for more than four years.

Source: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/232/

Stern rounds up internal documents that reveal the strategy, including a June 30 memo from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief John Morton that announced the agency will focus on deporting criminals and other illegal immigrants who pose a threat to society.

Morton’s latest proposed move would prohibit police from using traffic stops to find and hand over illegal immigrants to ICE, unless the immigrant had committed another crime. (This placement of immigration enforcement authority in the hands of local police was at the crux of Arizona’s controversial immigration law.)

ICE’s union has protested Morton’s leadership, calling his policies “misguided and reckless.”

Morton’s response: “Congress provides enough money to deport a little less than 400,000 people and in an era of limited resources, who should those 400,000 be?”

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100910/us_yblog_upshot/obama-administration-pushes-small-immigration-reforms

Now, after rising through the ranks, first in Texas and then in Washington, he has been named regional field director for Florida, in charge of apprehensions and removals of illegal immigrants for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That puts him in charge of 585 officers and special agents and more than 500 other contract employees in Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He oversees seven detention facilities and 1,900 “detention beds.”

Moore, a 49-year-old father of five, arrives in an election year in which immigration is a hot-button issue marked by emotional debate. Florida is home to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, many of whom work in key state industries such as agriculture, construction and hospitality.

Moore says neither he nor his officers make policy; they simply carry it out. But they are increasingly busy doing so.

Although most people detained and deported by ICE are undocumented workers without serious criminal records, the agency’s emphasis is changing, Moore said. In an Aug. 20 memo, John Morton, national ICE director, affirmed that the agency is putting a priority on the capture of undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes.

“In fiscal year 2008-2009, we arrested and removed 136,000 convicted criminal aliens,” Moore said of ICE officers nationwide. “This year, we have one month left in the fiscal year and we’re at 170,000.”

More than 4,000 of those were captured in Florida.

The term “convicted criminal alien” is key for Moore. He emphasizes that ICE officers under his command do not conduct “sweeps,” casting nets and picking up anyone in a specific locale solely because they are in the country illegally.

Violent gangs a priority

ICE places a priority on pursuing illegal immigrants guilty of violent crimes: homicide, kidnapping, rape and other sex offenses, and serious drug crimes. Those “Level I” criminals can include members of violent gangs.

Next the agency moves to “Level II” offenses, including burglary, low-level drug offenses or people guilty of repeated misdemeanors. Some of those criminals may have been deported previously.

“The largest impact ICE can have on national security and public safety is to ensure that those convicted criminal aliens do not return back to the streets of our communities,” Moore said.

To find those individuals, he said, ICE officers use “intelligence-driven analysis and the development of leads about where they might be residing, where they might be working,” not sweeps. “In a world with limited resources, we want to be smart, effective and we want to be responsible in how we apply those resources to make our streets safe.”

Moore said ICE has improved its deportation numbers by including local and state police authorities in immigration enforcement, which has become controversial.

The 287(g) program includes training for local officers who work in jails and authorizes them to investigate the immigration status of people incarcerated, identify those in the country illegally and detain them for possible removal by ICE.

That program, which is active in Collier and Duval counties, has come under attack by immigrant rights activists, who say it fosters racial profiling by local law enforcement.

A report issued this year by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, also criticized 287(g). The program is supposed to target serious criminals, the report said, but fewer than 10 percent of those detained through 287(g) fell into that category.

ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas said that even before the report was issued, the agency had changed the 287(g) program to respond to criticism. New guidelines emphasize the need to target offenders who are “a threat to public safety” and tighten ICE oversight of local law enforcement, she said.

Moore also praised the Secure Communities program, which operates in all 67 Florida counties and allows local officials to tap into Department of Homeland Security and FBI fingerprint databases to identify possible criminal aliens. Because many illegal immigrants use assumed names, local law enforcement agencies often have no way of knowing their real identities or the possible criminal records of people held in their jails.

“It’s been tremendous in terms of ease and the increased number of convicted criminal aliens that we are able to identify,” Moore said.

But that program also has come under attack for leading to the detention of many illegal immigrants not guilty of serious crimes and clogging the immigration courts.

Rights advocates object

Immigrant rights activists say some counties, including St. Lucie, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough, use Secure Communities technology to detain immigrants convicted of no crimes or low-level offenses, including misdemeanors.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, based in Washington, said the program “serves as a smokescreen for racial profiling.”

“ICE’s own records show that the vast majority of people deported due to (Secure Communities) are not criminals or were picked up for lower-level offenses,” the organization said.

ICE disputes those claims.

“Racial profiling is simply not something that will be tolerated, and any indication of racial profiling will be treated with the utmost scrutiny and fully investigated,” Navas said. “If any proof of racial profiling is uncovered, that specific officer or department could have their agreement rescinded.”

The 287(g) training includes “course work on multicultural communication and the avoidance of racial profiling,” Navas said.

Criminal deportees rising

In the Florida region, most of the people who were deported or who left voluntarily after being detained through Secure Communities – 1,881 of 3,520 – had been convicted of Level I or Level II crimes, according to agency records.

ICE officials also say the percentage of people deported from the Florida sector who are convicted criminals has risen sharply in recent years, from about 22 percent in 2008 to 36 percent in 2010.

The crackdown on serious criminals, Moore said, doesn’t mean that others in the country illegally who are encountered by ICE officers will be ignored.

“We didn’t say we were going to ignore any particular population,” he said. “We want to make sure that the immigration system has integrity, that we don’t turn our heads away from people gaming the system, who came in here fraudulently. We want to send a strong message that we are not going to allow that. …

“Nobody gets a free pass.

Each of these is discussed here in more detail, including a brief summary of what the EB-5 green card visa is, and how you can expedite it being granted to you by making what is generally referred to as an immigration investment.

The EB-5 Green Card Visa

The green card visa grants you permanent residency in the USA, allowing you to live and work anywhere within the 50 states that you choose. If you want to apply for citizenship of the USA, then you will be able to make that application five years after being granted the green card visa. Normally this visa can take ten or more years to obtain, but there is a way of reducing this time period.

The EB-5 Immigration Investment

You can bypass many of the qualifying requirements for the green card visa by making what is known as an EB-5 investment, or Immigration Investment as it is popularly known. By investing $500,000 into a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approved Regional Center, of which there are currently almost 100 in the USA, you could be granted a green card visa within 6-9 months.

The objective of the program is to generate jobs in the regions concerned, and generally revitalize what have been identified as regions within the USA requiring development and regeneration. By helping financially with the redevelopment of these regions your reward is permanent residency anywhere in the USA.

Qualifications

The visa is not automatically granted, however, and there are some qualifications which is where the problems can arise and why you need expert advice in your choice of USCIS regional center. First, your investment must generate at least 10 jobs in the region.

One problem is that you have a say neither in what jobs are created, nor in how they are maintained so that they last for the required two years until your green card is made permanent. Your investment is theoretically just that – an investment in what is intrinsically a private company.

Why You Need Expert Advice

Because there is so much money involved, and each regional center has its own specific considerations, those that claim to advise you may have a personal interest in specific regional centers and will therefore have an incentive to persuade you to invest in these centers. However, because of the job creation aspect of your choice of center, you should make sure that the program in which you invest has a good record of creating jobs – without which your life in the United States could be short lived.

The competition for investors is intense, because not only are the investment amounts considerable, but the regional centers themselves are under pressure to secure the investment they need to complete their projects. Each center has specific development projects that they are working to complete, and both they and the advisors that they have working for them are under the same pressures to attract your money. It is therefore often difficult for you to receive impartial advice, particularly if you are new to the USA and desperately seeking residency.

The sales pitches made by each center may not accurately reflect the availability of jobs for example, although they could be made with the best of intentions because jobs can frequently be generated once investment reaches a certain level. However, exaggerated claims of potential returns on your investment help nobody. However, some regional centers have already made payments to their investors, and with the right advice you should be able to choose the best or most appropriate regional center for you.

Personal Questions

Some questions you might ask yourself before making your investment are:

* Is the regional center liable to be able to create 10 jobs from your investment?

* Are these jobs liable to last for at least two years?

* How many others have invested in that center?

* How long until the full regional investment needed is achieved?

* Is the value of your investment liable to rise or fall?

* Will you have any say in the management of the investment?

* What will happen to your application if the jobs fail?

* Do those advising you seem credible?

In making your decision as to the program with which your EB-5 immigration investment should be entrusted, and in what advice you should take, pay particular attention to the last of these questions. If you are advised only of the positive aspects of your application, with the negatives or potential problems ignored or played down, then be careful.

You should preferably have all of the above questions answered to your satisfaction, and a reliable and independent advisor will have no problem in responding to any of them. The application is the simple part, but should anything go wrong after that then keep in mind that this might be your only chance for permanent residency for many years.

Make your EB-5 immigration investment only when you are completely convinced that the program in which you are investing can keep to their part of the agreement. Generally they will be able to, but some centers may be better investments than others. Your advisor should be able to help you to come to the right decision that ends with you receiving your Permanent Residency within the year.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Immigration-Investment-Can-Get-You-an-EB-5-Green-Card-Visa&id=4444602