Massive IV campaign for Administrative
fixesDear Members,
Immigration Voice is starting a
massive campaign to get administrative relief for our community. We have had
several fruitful meeting with the administration in 2007, some of these meetings
were scheduled in September, November and then in December. In these meetings,
we were able to convince the administration about the implication and hardship
due to current broken system. Since Congress has not been able to address our
issues in 2006-07, we were successful in creating a case for administrative
fixes that would give much needed interim relief to EB community. These meetings
helped us start a conversation on possible administrative fixes like 3 year
EAD-AP, clearly defining “same or similar†if AC-21 is invoked, and we are
hearing favorable feedback.
Due to lack of action on legislative front
our community’s patience is running out and we want some relief urgently to get
out of probationary status. We are thus starting this nationwide campaign that
will help our advocacy efforts and get administration to act quickly. There are
several components to this campaign.
1) Support from lawmaker offices:
We urge all our members to meet their lawmaker offices and get them to write
to The President in support of administrative fixes and urging for an immediate
administrative relief. The template of the letter is attached. Letters from
lawmaker offices to administration get far more attention as compared to anybody
else writing the same letter. The template of the letter is posted below. Please
request lawmakers to give you a copy of the letter or lawmakers could copy IV on
their letter to The President.
2) Support from employers: We urge
all members to approach their employer and have them send a letter to The
President expressing support for our administrative fixes and appealing for an
immediate relief. The template of the letter is attached below. Please request
your employer to give you copy iof the letter so that you could provide IV with
the copy of the letter.
3) Plea from our community: We urge all
our members to write personalized letters to The President directly and convey
their plight. If you would like to write your own personalized letter, please do
so with your own story. Make sure to stick to the administrative fixes we have
listed in the letter template and how these fixes could help you and your
family. Please put your name and address in your letter. Anonymous letters will
not be delivered and will be discarded. We request that you
create 2
copies of your letter. One copy should be posted to The President and the
second copy should be sent to Immigration Voice mailbox address at
–
Immigration Voice
P O Box 1372
Arcadia, CA
91077-1372You can write your own letter or use one of the LETTER TEMPLATES below. Be sure it includes the key
points.
http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/sh...86&postcount=5http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/sh...83&postcount=2http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/sh...84&postcount=3http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/sh...85&postcount=4The
deadline for receiving all the letters is 9th February 2008. Our plan is to
collect thousands of letters that we will also receive in IV mailbox and deliver
them, along with the letters from employers and lawmakers across the country,
during our meeting with the administration. We believe that this will make a
necessary impact to strengthen our case and gather the necessary political will
required for administrative fixes. We will also try to get media coverage for
this campaign and draw national attention.
Please inform all your friends
stuck in greencard retrogression and have them participate in this effort.
Please post information about this campaign and link to this thread to as many
sites, blogs you can so that we can get extraordinary scale of participation.
The success of this effort will depend on the collective sincerity of the entire
EB community to get letters from lawmakers, employers and members of the
community. Immigration voice is counting on each and every member and it is in
up to each member to make this campaign a success and help us to improve our and
our families’ lives.
Reminder: Pls mail 2 letters
1)
(copy
1)please send a separate letter to the President.
2)
(copy 2)Send
a copy of that letter to IV. After the letters are sent to the President, IV
will have a meeting with senior administration officials. In that meeting we
will carry the copies of the letters and deliver to
them.
============================================
Pls feel free
to change the text of the letter and personalize it if you wish.
If you wish to include your story and attach a photo copy of your
degrees, patents, awards, please do so. Just make sure to include the
information on provisions we are trying to push.
If you are handwriting
the letter, your writing should be legible. If nobody can read your writing,
then it will defeat the purpose. Write the letter in such a way that the key
points are easy to read. If you would like to use rules, bold text, highlighters
etc... go ahead and do it.
We all need to be as creative as possible to
make this campaign a
success.
============================================
Everyone
that took part in the IV lobby day in September 2007 should get in touch with
the lawmaker offices now and request them for letters. If you have met your
local lawmaker offices through state chapters or on your own, it is time to
visit them again for this request.
"Letter Template
#1":
Quote:
The
Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White
House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Mr.
President:
I write today to urge you to fix America’s broken legal
employment-based immigration system. Currently, more than 500,000 skilled
individuals who contribute to the American economy through their hard work in
high technology, scientific research, medicine and other fields find themselves
trapped in a process that is hopelessly backlogged. If nothing is done, hundreds
of thousands of immigrants will wait years or even decades in a process that was
never intended to take so long. While comprehensive change will require
legislative action, your administration can implement administrative remedies to
improve America’s competitiveness, eliminate bureaucratic inefficiencies, and
improve the quality of life for these legal, highly-skilled immigrants.
Attracting and retaining the best and brightest minds from around the
world is in America’s best interest. In February 2006, your Domestic Policy
Council issued a report on the American Competitiveness Initiative that
recognized the importance of employment-based immigration. The report
stated:
“The President also recognizes that enabling the world's most
talented and hardest-working individuals to put their skills to work for America
will increase our entrepreneurship and our international competitiveness, and
will net many high-paying jobs for all Americans. The United States benefits
from our ability to attract and retain needed immigrant and non-immigrant
students and workers, and it is important that America remains competitive in
attracting talented foreign nationals.â€
You can advance your stated
objective by making common-sense administrative reforms to fix a system that is
clearly broken.
Implementing much-needed reforms will also free
government resources to focus on pressing national security matters. For
example, current rules require the Department of Homeland Security to renew the
Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) of hundreds of thousands of legal
immigrants each year as those immigrants wait for green cards and permanent
residency in the U.S. Rather than renew these EADs annually, the government
could renew these documents every three years, freeing countless hours that
could be better spent serving the Department’s mission.
The greatest
impact of the broken green card process is borne by the legal immigrants and
their families. The more than half million highly-skilled legal immigrants
already working productively in the United States find themselves trapped in a
system that is taking years longer than intended. During this wait for a green
card, these immigrants remain trapped in a legal maze, unable to change jobs –
even within the same employer – without starting the arduous immigration process
over again, and subject to waits that grow longer and longer.
We implore
you to exercise your authority to implement administratively these much-needed
reforms.
• Recapture administratively the unused visas for permanent
residency to fulfill the congressional mandate of 140,000 green cards per
year.
• Revise the administrative definition of “same or similar†to
allow slight additional job flexibility for legal immigrants awaiting
adjudication of adjustment of status (I-485) petitions.
• Allow filing of
Adjustment of Status (Form I-485) when a visa number is not available.
•
Implement the existing interim rule to allow issuance of multi-year Employment
Authorization Documents (EAD) and Advance Parole.
• Allow visa
revalidation in the United States.
• Reinstate premium processing of
Immigrant Petitions.
I urge you to implement these administrative
remedies without delay. Action is urgently needed to fulfill your stated goal of
attracting and retaining highly-skilled legal immigrants from around the world,
eliminating bureaucratic inefficiency, and improving the lives of future
Americans already living and working legally in the United States.
Thank
you for your attention to this matter.
Respectfully, |
