Thread: NE: Lincoln lands more immigration jobs

Lincoln lands more immigration jobs

by Art Hovey

December 4, 2010

The Department of Homeland Security has chosen Lincoln to become the second site in the nation for a verification operations center for immigrant workers.

The decision to pair Lincoln with a similar center in Buffalo, N.Y., will add 80 federal jobs in the downtown Lincoln area by about March 1, according to Marilyn Wiles, director of the Nebraska Service Center for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Wiles said her staff has been working since summer to clear space in the Star Building near the main Lincoln post office to accommodate more employees. They will work with the federal government's E-Verify system to check the immigration status of workers in Nebraska and other states.

"As a result of that," she said, "we will be bringing to the state 80 new positions."

That action will add to the almost 600 federal employees and 280 contract workers already on payrolls at the Nebraska Service Center downtown and near the Lincoln Airport.

Wiles said a cutback in contract workers from about 350 a year ago helped free up space at the downtown location.

"The point we want to make there is we're being fiscally prudent in being able to maximize use of the facility here," she said.

E-Verify compares documents held by workers against Homeland Security and Social Security records to make sure they're employable, said Tim Counts, a public affairs officer with USCIS in Minneapolis.

Wiles said some of the new jobs will be filled locally, and salaries will range from about $27,000 up.

Local people who want a shot at the jobs can indicate their interest at usajobs.gov.

During a Friday interview, Wiles also covered some of the high points of another year of operation for a local staff that works mostly on helping people achieve legal status in the United States. The results for fiscal 2010 include the following:

* More than 1 million adjudicative actions on applications for immigration benefits, up from 950,000 a year ago.

* Almost 2,000 approvals of citizenship paperwork submitted by Iraqi and Afghani translators who have helped the U.S. military and want to relocate to the United States. The Nebraska Service Center handles all translator and military cases for Homeland Security.

* More than 12,600 processing actions for U.S. military personnel serving overseas and seeking naturalization.

Also in 2010, Wiles and her staff took on the special task of responding to the earthquake in Haiti. Haitian citizens in the United States at the time of the January catastrophe needed temporary protected status to stay until a degree of order was restored.

"We thought that was really great," Wiles said of the chance to assist in the disaster response.

http://journalstar.com

I'm going to look into this more, first I'd heard of it, even tho I'm in NE. It sounded good at first, with these new employees helping with E-Verify and checking status of employees. But other than that its all about the "high points", which are helping people get legal status. And of course the numbers are up this year - oh yea, what a high point.