PR

For those not forced into hectic developments caused by USCIS' bulletin releases, you should know that the tribulations to achieve the coveted permanent residency (PR != Public Relations) have set a threshold unheard of. The first bulletin on June 13th announced that priority dates for all employment based categories have been made current and therefore those seeking to apply can start to do so on July 2nd (1st was a Sunday). There was a deluge of appointments at the local civic surgeons' clinics, affected candidates and their spouses (!!) were flying internationally, the registrars' offices in India received requests for birth certificates or non-availability certificates, loads of paper were frantically used up for copies, etc., enough to make some one outside this circle of inflicted wonder if they were missing something critical. If you do not have an advanced degree, I empathize with your inability to understand the complexities in this domain. For your own good you are referred to http://www.murthy.com/ for more information. Continuing my rant, this sudden news release was amidst activity in the government regarding naturalization process for illegal immigrants. Around June 27th, it was known that the bill favoring the above was defeated in the Senate. Soon, we started to hear rumors that the visa bulletin would be superseded by a newer one. But surely it happened on July 2nd, breaking at least 350000 hearts. I intentionally tie these two events together because I (and many others) believe they are connected. No doubt that all these decisions have political grounds. Immigration is a sensitive issue in many parts of the world and US is no exception. In comparison, US has done fairly well on the whole. A positive concomitant of this fiasco was that a previously clammed up community of highly educated workers found strength to speak up and tell the government that they did not like this whimsical behavior. Of course much of this "fight" was led by lawyers and immigration specialists, since they had invested a lot in the prep towards submission of their clients' cases, many from companies worth 10s of billions of dollars. Under legal pressure (there were going to be several classes of law suits) and having heard some noise about a broken and unfair process, USCIS reversed its decision on July 17th with the following month's visa bulletin. The struggle continues for the skilled worker especially since the next month will be a time to gather paperwork from birth to now, get medical examinations done, and file the cases hoping for a favorable outcome in the next 3-4 years. Yeah...the wait is going to be at least that long, since the number of immigrant visas has not changed as far as I know. Additionally, people need to stay grounded for some time as travel restrictions apply (check with your lawyer). So, while I would love to be proved wrong in this assessment, I am confidently pessimistic as of now. Some other good sites for tracking the changes in immigration policies - http://www.immigration.com/, http://immigrationvoice.org/, http://aila.org/. I refrain from providing the USCIS website link because it is harder to find information in there. The other sites I mentioned have dicussion forums where similar minded folks parse the abstruse messages and present to the rest of us non-lawyer types. Many that I know are stuck in various stages of the PR process and are hoping for deliverance from this mess as soon as possible. As for me, the wait is about to start ....