Legal Immigrants Rally . What about their spouses?

New York Times ran a story on how Legal Immigrants Rally at Capitol to Protest Backlog The immigrants, including doctors, medical technicians and computer engineers from India and China, came from as far as California and Washington State to call on Congress to provide more permanent visas for highly educated immigrants and more resources for the overburdened immigration system.

A similar group of Immigrants, many of them professionals await their spouses who are waiting outside the US due to backlogs in the processing of F2A family immigration visas. UniteFamilies.org website says "These are mostly young families — a husband or wife, separated from their spouse and young child.  They are waiting for their I-130 petitions (petition for relative) to be approved.  The current waiting time is 5 years."

This issue seems to have been sidelined in the immigration debate. Wonder why spouses of law-abiding permanent residents are destined to wait outside the borders for over 5 years!

•  New post based on inputs

  for my earlie post from sdgeek

  by b2bhandshake on Thu Sep 20, 2007 at 06:11:18 AM PDT

  •  Great diary!

    The issue is important, and dear to my heart. I almost got caught by the same issue (in the end, we didn't get married for unrelated reasons).

    I hope you don't mind me picking nits (and no need to delete/recreate a diary; you can edit it if you want to): they aren't actually waiting for the I-130 to be approved.

    They are waiting for the priority date to become current. So even if the I-130 was approved within a week, they would still be waiting five years. The only reason it takes five years for the I-130 is that USCIS knows that the long processing time doesn't make any difference in the first place.

    The priority date is basically how the immigration quota is implemented; the quota for F2A is just plain too low.

    As an aside, there is one thing you personally may be able to get out of the wait: apply for US citizenship as soon as you are eligible. As soon as you are a citizen, your spouse qualifies for to bypass the wait.

    There also is a little bit of good news. This issue actually didn't get sidelined in the immigration debate. The otherwise atrocious Kennedy-Kyl bill (that died, thankfully) did contain a provision that would have eliminated the quota for spouses of GC holders, and treated them the same as US citizens.

    by sdgeek on Thu Sep 20, 2007 at 07:40:02 AM PDT

•  And what about the affect on the children and

  spouses after being pretty much separated from mom, dad, wife or husband for 5 years? And what effect does that have on America in the long run?

  by immigradvocate on Thu Sep 20, 2007 at 11:00:02 AM PDT