2015 Old Blog

The holiday travel season is here, and that means thousands of students and young people will be spending school breaks and vacation time in international destinations. Tourist destinations such as Australia, Japan, Ireland, France, Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom offer a working holiday visa to allow tourists to work while traveling to pay for their tourism expenses.

This week we look at the E Visa, a temporary work visa for foreign nationals of certain “treaty” countries that have struck up immigration deals with the United States. You can find the full list of treaty countries on the U.S. State Department website (there are around 50 of them.)

ellenm1 on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0

If your Adjustment of Status (I-485) green card application is pending, you may want to consider filing an I-765, Application for Employment Authorization Document (EAD), and/or an I-131, Application for Advance Parole Document.

With the clock ticking on the legislative year the chance for comprehensive immigration reform to be passed looks dim.

Early in 2013, the Illinois became one of the first U.S. states to pass legislation that would permit undocumented immigrant residents to obtain driver’s licenses. Eleven months later, the state is officially ready to start issuing new Temporary Visitor Driver’s Licenses (example at left) to undocumented immigrants in order to improve the lives and safety of everyone on Illinois roads.

The D visa is a non-immigrant (temporary) visa for foreign national crewmembers on ships, cruise liners, and airplanes. Like the C visa, you must intend to depart the U.S. on the same vessel or on another vessel within 29 days. If you are a crewmember traveling to the U.S. to begin passage on a plane or ship, you would apply for the combination C-1/D (transit/crewmember) visa.

When the dust settles on comprehensive immigration reform and it becomes the law of the land, people might look back on this week as one of the most significant.

The December 2013 visa bulletin was just released by the U.S. State Department, and the news is a mixed bag for work and family-based green card applicants. The priority dates for the F2A family visa category, which was current in August, continue to stay put. All family-based green card categories besides the F2A and Mexico groups saw advancements in their priority dates.

Today, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) finally made a formal announcement regarding the Senate immigration reform bill that passed in June.

“The idea that we’re going to take up a 1,300 page bill that no one ever read, which is what the Senate did, is never going to happen in the House, and frankly I’ll make clear that we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill,” he told reporters in a press conference this afternoon.

Many immigration reform advocates have seen a conference between the House and Senate as a viable solution to the gridlock in the House. A conference would mean that House members would have the opportunity to negotiate with the Senate and come up with a new bipartisan plan that utilizes the most agreeable parts (in their eyes) of the Senate proposal. Boehner’s rejection of a conference on the Senate bill means that any immigration reform legislation that passes will be solely authored by House members.

Boehner’s announcement disappointed and confused many of his constituents, including GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who released a statement this afternoon in response to Boehner’s remarks:

“I remain steadfast in the fact that the House needs to take up immigration reform. I urge Speaker Boehner to remain open to any options that allow us to solve this crucial issue. It has been said time and time again that our immigration system is broken, and we must come together to find a sensible solution to fix it. I continue to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle on a bill that secures our border, respects the rule of law, strengthens our economy, modernizes the visa system, and addresses the millions of undocumented immigrants in a way that is both reasonable and humane.”

Diaz-Balart has a long history of working on bipartisan immigration reform efforts, though he has not been optimistic recently about the outlook for reform in 2013. As a conservative representative from a heavily Latino district, his opinion on immigration carries a lot of weight within the Republican party.

Another interesting development around Boehner’s announcement was the fact that this morning, he was interviewed on camera by two young DREAMers while eating at a local diner. The video’s popularity exploded within hours, in particular because in the video Boehner assures the young women (one of whom has a father that was recently deported to Mexico) “I’m trying to find some way to get this thing [immigration reform] done. It’s not going to be an easy path forward, but I’ve made it clear since the day after the election that it’s time to get this done.” Just a few hours later, he would announce publicly that he wasn’t going to consider one of the most viable paths to passing real immigration reform.