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Wait for U.S. Residency Soars Over 18-Month Span
April 6, 2004
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Gabriella A. Barschdorff, a vice president for strategic
investment at J. P. Morgan Chase in New York, is not
exactly the huddled-masses type. But one rainy day last
week, shortly before 7 a.m., she joined the long,
bedraggled line of immigrants standing outside 26 Federal
Plaza in downtown Manhattan. There she took the spot held
for her by a young man she had hired to camp out in his
sleeping bag.
It was all part of a last-ditch bid to get her formal
travel document, a paper that, as a legal foreign worker
with a pending green card application, she badly needed. If
she failed, she would miss a business meeting in London. If
she went without the permit, she risked being barred from
coming back to America.
Ms. Barschdorff, who is Swedish, is one of thousands of
skilled foreign professionals working legally in the United
States who find themselves virtual prisoners of a
ballooning immigration-services backlog. In the last year,
the mostly routine paperwork they need to work and travel
has slowed to a crawl.
Processing times - for everything from renewing an annual
work permit to securing permanent legal residency - have as
much as quadrupled over the last 18 months, despite the
Bush administration's pledge to cut waiting times in half.
The wait to replace a lost green card, for instance, has
grown to 19 months from four. And the kind of paperwork
sought by Ms. Barschdorff - a document allowing her to
re-enter the country after a brief trip - now takes seven
months instead of two.
As a consequence, and despite an infusion of $160 million
earmarked for cutting the backlog, the number of pending
applications has risen by nearly 60 percent over the last
three years, to 6.2 million, according to a recent
congressional report. The root cause, officials say, is the
post-9/11 reassignment of 1,000 agents who used to issue
documents and now do extensive security checks of every
applicant instead.
The fallout ranges from minor inconveniences to wrenching
dilemmas.
There is Christopher B. Murray, for example, the manager of
nano-scale research for I.B.M., who had to decide whether
to rush to his mother's side when his father died in Nova
Scotia last week, or battle for an emergency travel
document to replace the one that he had applied to renew
last year. And there is William Powell, an American
journalist for Fortune magazine, and his Chinese wife,
Joyce Cui, who spent most of her pregnancy agonizing over
whether she should go back to Beijing to give birth near
her family. Because she had applied for a green card, she
risked being barred from the United States if she left
before her travel documents came through; if she stayed,
she risked going into labor alone in New York when he was
reassigned to China.
"The delays in processing some of these cases have clearly
been as a result of moving so many of our employees,
especially in the service centers, into security checks,"
said William R. Yates, associate director of operations for
Citizenship and Immigration Services, in Homeland Security.
"We don't apologize. We have identified a number of persons
who represented a threat to the United States."
But he added, "Everything else has suffered,
unfortunately."
Mr. Yates reiterated the commitment to cut the backlog by
the end of September 2006. But there is little optimism
among many international businesses and institutions
struggling with the problem on behalf of 700,000 U.S.-based
foreign employees.
The new obstacles and delays, business leaders say, are
already hurting their ability to recruit and keep the best
talent worldwide.
"There are key people who are unable to work, unable to
close the gaps in their status," said Mr. Murray, adding
that his recruitment of foreign researchers at Harvard and
M.I.T. had been damaged. "There are family impacts. But if
you want to be very cold about it, it puts the U.S. at a
serious disadvantage."
One reason the backlog has ballooned is that processing
delays force employers to file costly multiple petitions
just to keep an employee and dependents in legal status,
complained Lynn Shotwell, director of the American Council
on International Personnel, a Washington organization for
250 corporations and institutions that want to ease the
movement of personnel across national borders.
The council has protested a Bush administration plan to
impose higher processing fees to cover the cost of hiring
additional personnel.
One of the regional immigration offices most beset with
delays is the Vermont Service Center, which handles
applications from New York and other Northeastern states.
Mr. Yates, the homeland security official, said the office,
in St. Albans, stopped issuing travel documents for several
months this winter because it ran out of security paper
with the department's new logo.
The overflow spilled into district offices like 26 Federal
Plaza. In theory, after waiting 90 days for a work permit
to be renewed by mail, for example, an applicant is
entitled to have one issued in person, the same day. But in
practice, no more than 100 such permits are given out
daily.
Such problems played out last week when Ms. Barschdorff,
33, passed through the metal detectors at 26 Federal Plaza.
She wanted to renew her annual work permit and to get the
document that would let her travel safely to London and
back to her 1-year-old American daughter.
For her, the last best hope was the young man with the
sleeping bag, Kendo McDonald. Mr. McDonald, 28, has worked
for a decade as a trusted "runner," shepherding documents
and now clients for the international immigration law firm
of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy. He has his own
measure of how much worse the backlog grew in the last
year.
"Before I didn't have to do this 3 o'clock in the morning
thing," he said, rainwater still dripping from his jacket.
"I could come at 8 a.m."
After vetting Ms. Barschdorff's documents, and those of two
other clients, Mr. McDonald guided them into the
netherworld of federal bureaucracy. Ms. Barschdorff would
spend the next nine and a half hours there, in a labyrinth
of lines and waiting rooms.
The two other clients asked that their names not be
published, worried that publicity could hurt their pending
green card applications. One was a 33-year-old computer
scientist at I.B.M. who left India eight years ago to earn
a doctorate at the State University of New York at
Stonybrook. He said he had risen at 3 a.m. to make it from
his home in Mohegan Lake, where his wife and 5-month-old
U.S.-born daughter were sleeping. The other man described
himself as a "denim consultant" who was born in Zimbabwe
but had lived for years in London before moving to New York
six years ago to work for the fashion designer Calvin
Klein.
Together with Ms. Barschdorff, who previously worked at the
European Parliament in Brussels and has degrees from
Columbia and the London School of Economics, the trio
almost typified the mobility of an international class of
go-getters whose cosmopolitan careers help make New York a
global hub of finance, science and design. Both men were
being sponsored for green cards by employers as "aliens of
extraordinary ability" - a phrase "that makes people think
of E.T.," Ms. Barschdorff joked. But without the work
permit renewals they needed, they could be left without a
paycheck.
Mr. McDonald warned Ms. Barschdorff that her goal of
renewing two documents at once might be impossible. The
waiting room for one was on the eighth floor, the other on
the ninth.
There are plans for every waiting room to adopt a number
system like the one used by busy New York delis, Mr.
McDonald said, but for now, after turning in papers to one
of the window agents, applicants just have to wait until
they are summoned by name. The typical wait is four to six
hours, he said. And if Ms. Barschdorff ran up and down
between waiting rooms, she would risk missing one or both
calls.
It was Mr. McDonald who helped her manage the juggling act,
and smooth the way when her paperwork seemed deficient. J.
P. Morgan was paying $1,500 for the law firm's work to
renew Ms. Barschdorff's employment authorization card
alone, she said.
Many in the room were fending for themselves. The line that
snaked through the ninth-floor waiting room included a
Polish construction worker, a Nigerian nurse, and a
turbaned chef from India. Only the chef, Manjit Singh, 42,
would give his name after explaining that his boss was
sponsoring him because of his skill at making curry for a
restaurant on Union Turnpike in Queens.
Some were turned away, but after nearly 10 hours, Ms.
Barschdorff emerged triumphant. She had gained both the
right to travel and another year's work authorization. Her
two companions had their work permits, too. Mr. McDonald
was headed back to Queens for a few hours' sleep before
doing it all over again.
"Even though I absolutely despise this bureaucracy," Ms.
Barschdorff said, "at the end of the day you can come to
America."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/nyregion/06VISA.html?ex=1082354506&ei=1&en=69babbd02e1f31e7
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