Obama on Immigration: Streamlining Immigration

President Obama’s stance on immigration has caused a lot of talk in the recent months.  As a top issue among politicians, this issue is very volatile and prone to misinformation.  This blog series focuses on clarifying three of the main immigration issues and the stance the White House and President Obama have taken, or will take, on these issues.  Any actions taken in the next few months could have a large impact on immigration in North Carolina and we want you to be clear on what’s going on and what could happen in the future.  In this third post, we will discuss streamlining the immigration process.

The Issue

The immigration process can be long and challenging.  Every aspect of the process requires a lot of documentation, time, and processing.  That is important to make sure the right people are granted visas while potentially dangerous people or incorrectly filed requests are not granted visas.  This does mean the bureaucracy can stifle the process and make the entire process take an unnecessarily long amount of time.

 

The Plan

President Obama has proposed a few different ways to streamline immigration.

• Make it easier for employers to hire immigrant workers, this would decrease the incentive to hire easier undocumented workers. This would mean eliminating yearly country caps and adding more visas to the system.
• Keep families together by eliminating the backlog of family sponsored visa requests
• Give a green card to students with STEM college diplomas. This would encourage foreign students to remain in the USA and use their knowledge to help the United States economy.
• Encourage tourism by making it easier to get travel visas and allowing travel between certain countries without a visa.

These are just a few proposed ways to streamline the immigration process.  There are other proposed ways to streamline the immigration process, including, but not limited to, reforming the H-2A temporary agriculture visa program, better addressing humanitarian and refugee issues, and providing more resources for immigrants.

The plans mentioned in this blog series are just proposals, not much progress has been made yet and it’s uncertain when any progress will be made.  It’s possible to see every proposal pass into law and regulation, but it’s also possible to see every proposal struck down.  The most likely possibility is seeing some proposals pass while others are altered and others still dropped entirely.  No matter what, don’t count on what has been proposed, if you are working on applying for a visa stick with the regulations that are in place now.  If you need any assistance, let us know.  We’ll be happy to help you out.