Visa processing in 6 Max Months, Fast-track NVC Interview and Green Card | U.S Immigration
Introduction:
Hello everyone, welcome back to the website. We hope you are doing great. In this article, we’ll talk about the recent developments related to green cards and permanent residency in the United States.
A presidential advisory commission has unanimously voted to recommend U.S. President Joe Biden to process all applications for green cards or permanent residency within six months. If adopted, this proposal is likely to bring cheers to the hundreds and thousands of Indian Americans including those waiting for it for decades.
Green Cards and Permanent Residency:
A green card, known officially as a permanent resident card, is a document issued to immigrants to the U.S as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently in the U.S. Indian IIT professionals, most of whom are highly skilled and come to the U.S mainly on the H-1B work visas, are the worst sufferers of the current immigration system which imposes a seven percent per country quota on allotment of the coveted green card or permanent residency.
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Recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Commission:
The recommendations of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders are to be sent to the White House now for approval. If adopted, it is likely to bring cheers to the hundreds and thousands of Indian Americans and those waiting, some even for decades, for a green card.
The proceedings of the meeting were webcast live last week in the national capital. To reduce the pending green card backlog, the advisory committee recommended the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) review its processes, systems, and policies and establish new internal cycle time goals. This would be done by streamlining processes, removing redundant steps, if any, automating any manual approvals, improving their internal dashboards and reporting system, and enhancing policies.
The recommendation aimed to reduce the cycle time for processing all forms related to family-based green card application DSC renewals and all other green card applications within six months, ensuring adjudicate decisions within six months of applications received by it.
The commission recommended National Visa Center (NBC) State Department facility hire additional officers to increase their capacity to process green card applications, and interviews by a hundred percent in three months from August 2022, and to increase green card applications, visa interviews, and adjudicate decisions by 150 percent up from the capacity of 32,439 in April 2022 by April 2023. Therefore, green card visa interviews and visa processing timelines should be a maximum of six months, it said.
Aimed at making it easier for immigrants to stay and work in the country, the commission recommended that the USCIS should review requests for work permits, travel documents, and temporary status extensions or changes within three months and aggregate decisions.
USCIS’s Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2023-2026
Pending Interviews and Green Cards:
Only 65,452 family preference green cards were issued in fiscal 2021 out of the annual 2 lacks 26,000 green cards available, leaving hundreds of thousands of green cards unused, with many likely to be permanently wasted in the future and keeping many more families needlessly separated.
There are 421,350 pending interviews every compared to 436,700 in March, said the policy paper by Butoria, noting that while the U.S. population has grown substantially in recent decades, the immigration system has no chance to keep pace.
He said the annual levels of immigration were established in the early 1990s and have remained largely unchanged since then. He said to make matters worse, the method used to calculate the annual number of employment and family-based immigrants is deeply flawed