Elias Mama, of Houston, has been separated from his daughter, Dorin, 4, and his wife for about a year because of the federal backlog for visa and naturalization applicants. His family is in Israel.
SHARÓN STEINMANN: CHRONICLE



June 14, 2008, 11:51PM
Visa backlog puts lives on hold for years
Quotas, red tape build frustration, and may encourage unlawful entry


By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Elias Mama is happy to be spending Father's Day with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. But he had to fly to Israel to do it.

Mama, the 51-year-old owner of a Houston garage, is among millions of legal immigrant families whose lives are on hold while their cases move slowly through a complex immigration system.

Last August, before his four-year wait to become a U.S. citizen ended early this year, Mama took his wife on an emergency trip to see her ailing mother in Israel.

When they flew home in September, U.S. immigration officials at the Atlanta airport ordered his wife to return to Israel because her tourist visa had expired while he was waiting for citizenship.

That lapse means Mama's wife now faces a penalty of up to 10 years before she can again enter the country legally.

"We're talking about people's lives, not paperwork," said Mama, who left Israel 20 years ago.

"We're talking about life, family, kids. She's suffering there (in Israel), and I'm here.

"Why?"

Part of it is the fact that Mama's wife allowed her visa to expire.

But the other cause of his woes is that there is a current backlog of about 4 million applications for visas pending, as well as about 1 million citizenship applications, according to U.S. government officials.

If Mama's citizenship processing hadn't taken four years, his wife could have qualified for entry as his spouse.

Many anti-immigrant activists blast undocumented workers for cutting ahead of the long lines of waiting visa applicants, but those arguing for more liberal immigration say the queue is moving so slowly it encourages people to enter the country without permission, or to stay longer than their visas allow.

"It's a huge problem," said Bruce Coane, head of a large Houston immigration law practice. "There are many families where part of the family may be U.S. citizens, or legal permanent residents, and part of family is out of status and can't get legal status until their quota number is reached."

And, legal immigration is crucial in cities with large immigrant communities such as Houston, where the census estimated that in 2006 one of four residents was foreign born, and 41 percent spoke a language at home other than English.

And although the immigration system is complex, the basic problem is simple: There are many more immigrants wanting to enter than the number of visas available each year under a quota and preference system implemented by Congress.


An unhealthy delay
Currently, the law gives preference to four categories of immigrants who are related to U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, as well as to immigrants needed for employment.

However, except for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, there is an annual limit for each category, as well as a quota for each country.

So those from countries that have historically sent large numbers of immigrants — Mexico, India, China and the Philippines, for instance — face lengthy waits for visas to become available for relatives.

"If your brother sponsors you, it's 20 years," said veteran Houston immigration lawyer Gordon Quan. "If an employer sponsors you and you have a bachelor's degree, it's three years. And for people from India, it's seven years."

The 4 million backlog includes an estimated 1.5 million relatives of Asian immigrants, said Karen Narasaki, president of the Asian American Justice Center.

The long waits to reunite families prevent many immigrants from assimilating, she said.

"That's not healthy for the family, for the community," Narasaki said. "It means it takes longer for a family to put money down for a house, because they're sending money home to a spouse."

Doris Meissner, who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration, said untangling family immigration will require that Congress alter the existing system.

"So as long as you have a system that defines broadly what the family relationship can be that makes you eligible to immigrate, but at same time has very few (visa) numbers available, that's a recipe for backlogs," said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Those who favor limiting immigration, however, say the family preferences are too broad.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., said family-related immigration should be limited to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens.

"The problem ... is that we over-promise and underdeliver," Krikorian said. "We have this smorgasbord of different categories, and they all have numerical caps leading to huge waiting lists.

"Either you triple or quadruple legal immigration, or narrow the categories of who gets to come in."


Lack of workers, permits
Government officials stress the backlogs are due, in part, to shortages of trained workers to process applications and large numbers of cases pending because visas are not available.

Chris Rhatigan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, said the agency has hired 700 new workers to process visa applications filed by resident immigrants and citizens trying to bring relatives into the country.

She said that at the end of April, there were 1.4 million petitions on file for family-sponsored visas, but the agency is processing only 300,000 for which visas are available.

U.S. State Department officials said there were 2,765,771 active visa applications pending as of March 2007 from people outside the country, although they stressed there is no way of knowing how many of those immigrants remain interested in obtaining a visa.


Slow FBI processing
The long waits extend to people waiting for their citizenship applications to be processed, which in many cases are slowed by required FBI background checks.

In the case of Elias Mama, the delays scuttled his plans to obtain legal residency for his wife, Smadar Benaim. The couple was married in December 2001, after he brought her to Houston on a tourist visa.

Mama applied for citizenship in June 2003, but his FBI background check was not completed until after he filed a lawsuit against the immigration service in October 2007.

Mama, a former Israeli soldier, finally became a citizen in January, but it was after his wife was forced to return to Israel in October because her visa expired.

The couple decided she should take their daughter, Dorin, who was born in Houston, to Israel with her.

"I'm here almost a year by myself," Mama said. "My life is no life. I'm alive, but there is no happiness."


Hoping for a waiver
The couple's immigration attorney, James McCollom, says Mama's wife now faces a 10- year ban for overstaying her visa.

To join her husband, she must petition State Department officials for a rare waiver of the penalty.

"He created the problem because his wife overstayed her visa, but the immigration service contributed by not adjudicating his naturalization petition for more than four years," McCollom said.

james.pinkerton@chron.com






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