News Update - December 22, 2009

By Alan Lee, Esq.^†‡

First Bill Introduced For Comprehensive Immigration Reform Generous On Qualifications For Legalization

In Congressman Luis Gutierrez' (D.-Ill.) "Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009," introduced this past week as the first bill proposing comprehensive immigration reform, the terms for legalization are very generous and hopefully serve as a template for future legislation.  It would include persons without legal status on December 15, 2009, upon the payment of a $500 fine plus necessary application fees to obtain a conditional nonimmigrant status valid for six years with work and travel authorization and protection from removal.  A later application for adjustment of status to lawful permanent residence could be completed no earlier than six years after the date of law enactment unless all the immigrant backlogs have been cleared before that time. 

Persons with final orders of removal would be covered under the legislation as well as those with other disabilities such as illegal immigrants and immigration violators.  Many other grounds could be waived by DHS for humanitarian purposes, to assure family unity, or for the public interest except certain criminal or security related grounds or those relating to polygamists and child abductors.  The applicant cannot have been the persecutor of others on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in the social group or political opinion; been convicted by a final judgment of a particularly serious crime and who constitutes a danger to the community of the United States; for whom there are reasonable grounds for believing that the alien committed a particularly serious crime outside the United States; for whom there are reasonable grounds for regarding the alien as a danger to the security of the United States; or for those who have been convicted of a felony or three or more misdemeanors for which the alien has served not less than twelve months of imprisonment in the aggregate.

† The author is a 26+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.

‡ This article © 2009 Alan Lee, Esq.

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