Immigration Service bringing 500 jobs to Overland Park, 300 to Lee’s Summit

By KEVIN COLLISON
The Kansas City StaR
Updated: 2012-11-14T00:32:14Z

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service is adding 800 jobs to its already sizeable work force in the Kansas City area to help with the increased workload the agency has picked up system wide since a presidential order last summer.

Five hundred of the new jobs will be going to Rosana Square at 119th Street and Metcalf Avenue in Overland Park. The 300 others will be added to an existing immigration service facility in Lee’s Summit at 850 N.W. Chipman Road.

All hiring will be for the agency’s national benefits center operation and will be completed within 10 months.

The new Overland Park employees will occupy a building at 7600 W. 119th St. That space was vacated six years ago when hundreds of Internal Revenue Service workers moved to the new IRS processing center near Union Station. The employees in Lee’s Summit will join the current benefits staff at the Chipman Road facility.

The immigration service already has a big presence on the Missouri side of the metro with about 1,900 employees. Most work at two facilities in Lee’s Summit, the national records center at 150 N.W. Space Center Loop and the national benefits center on Chipman Road.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, once called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is the federal agency charged with overseeing lawful immigration.

Employees at the Kansas City-area operations generally process applications for immigrants applying to replace their alien registration cards, better known as green cards, or applying to bring relatives to the United States.

The additional full-time jobs coming to the area indirectly result from President Barack Obama’s decision in June to let young undocumented immigrants stay in the U.S. The immigration service began accepting deferred action applications for the program in mid-August.

At the time, the Associated Press reported that the new policy would lead to more than 1 million applications in its first year with about 890,000 people being immediately eligible.

The new Kansas City area employees won’t be handling those specific applications, but they will be helping relieve the workload the presidential order created overall at the agency.

The presidential directive applied to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. when they were under the age of 16 and are not over the age of 30. They must have lived in the country continuously for at least five years and can’t have been convicted of a felony, or significant or multiple misdemeanors.

Jason Klumb, regional administrator for the federal General Services Administration, said his office was able to act quickly when the immigration service put out its request for additional space last summer because it still controlled the area formerly occupied by the IRS at Rosana Square.

“It’s important to point out the USCIS was looking nationally and wanted to move quickly,” Klumb said Tuesday. “The GSA could not only meet the time frame they were looking for, but was also able to expand the lease to meet the new requirements.”

Timothy J. Counts, a spokesman for the immigration service, said the hiring will roll out through mid-2013.

“We were looking nationally and it was the GSA that came up with this facility that met our needs well,” Counts said.

The salary range for the federal jobs will be from $27,431 to $41,563.

Applicants should go to the online government job site, www.USAjobs.gov, and enter the keyword “USCIS” along with a geographic location such as Kansas City or local ZIP code.

Klumb said the lease for the expanded national benefits center at Rosana Square extended through 2021, and operations were expected to begin in mid-December.

“It’s great news for Overland Park and the metropolitan area,” said Sean Reilly, a spokesman for the city. “Overland Park has added 3,000 jobs this year and we’re slowly recovering like many other cities.”

Jim Devine, executive director of the Lee’s Summit Economic Development Corp., said the federal immigration agency has been a big employer there for years.“Any time you can add new jobs in this economy that are good paying and long-term, that’s good for everybody,” he said.

To reach Kevin Collison, development reporter, call 816-234-4289 or email kcollison@kcstar.com. Follow him on Twitter @kckansascity.

Immigration Service bringing 500 jobs to Overland Park, 300 to Lee’s Summit - KansasCity.com