Dear Readers: It has been a long time in coming, but the word on the street is that immigration reform may occur within the year. Those of us in the trenches are skeptical, but as we understand it, President Obama has scheduled a meeting to take place in early June with congressional leaders to launch a dialogue on comprehensive immigration reform. In the meantime, we expect over the coming weeks and, in particularly, after the June meeting(s), to see a spate of bills introduced into the legislature focusing on different aspects of reform. As recently as yesterday (May 20, 2009), for example, Senators Robert Mendoza, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Edward Kennedy introduced into the Senate, the bill S. 1085, affectionately called the Reuniting Families Act. The Act seeks to facilitate family immigration by, among other things, raising the per-country quota on immigrants from 7% to 10% and allowing for the use of close to 400,000 unused family visas that accumulated over the period 1997-2002 . For many of our clients who are legal permanent residents (”LPRs”) with petitions pending for a spouse, probably the most significant part of the proposed bill is to allow permanent residents the ability to petition as “immediate relatives,” like in the case of U.S. Citizen petitioners. This is a potentially huge reform, which could dramatically improve the status of spouses of LPRs. To recap, immediate relatives of U.S. Citizens are, generally, able to adjust from even an undocumented status to a conditional residency status and visas for immediate relatives are almost always available. This is in contrast to the situation that exists today, where LPRs are compelled in most cases to wait many years for a second preference petition (a petitition for a spouse, sons and daughters and unmarried children) to be adjudicated, which can leave the spouse of the LPR in immigration limbo. This legislation has been introduced before and has died on a limb, but maybe, this time, it will be different.
