News Update - July 5, 2011Second Circuit Holds on June 30, 2011, that Aged-out Children are not Entitled to Parent's Priority Date Under the CSPA; Movement Afoot to Shorten Visa Waiting Times for Chinese Visitors to Boost U.S. Economy.In Feimei Li & Duo Cen v. Renaud, 10-2560-cv (2d Cir., 6/30/11), the Second Circuit upheld the BIA's restrictive interpretation of the CSPA automatic conversion clause in Matter of Wang. The question of law involved the interpretation of the portion of the CSPA relating to aged out children that "The alien's petition shall automatically be converted to the appropriate category and the alien shall retain the original priority date issued upon receipt of the original petition." The court disagreed that automatic conversion could apply to a different petitioner. In this case as with many others, the child's parent was petitioned for by a relative and by the time the priority date became current, the child had aged out. This unfortunately means that lacking Supreme Court reversal or legislative act, the children who age out must be put at the end of the line under the F-2B category for single adults sons and daughters if still unmarried rather than being able to use their parent's earlier priority date. As reported in Wall Street Journal for June 9, 2011, luxury companies including Polo and Saks Inc. are working through industry groups to press Congress for funding to let the State Department process visas more quickly for Chinese nationals. The visa process for Chinese tourists can take months, and last year, 38% of Chinese on long distance trips visited Europe as opposed to 13% to the U.S. Last year, arrivals totalled 802,000, or four times the number who came to the U.S. in 2003. 94% went shopping spending $5 billion in the U.S. last year, up 39% from the prior year. Scheduling a visa interview in Beijing currently takes about 57 days, Shanghai 65 days according to the Department of State (DOS). Chinese visitors spend on average more than $6,000 each, more than twice that of visitors from the U.K. The group's goal is to get wait times down to 10 days by having DOS hire more staff, reassign them to high demand markets, set up a fast lane process, and expand a waiver program.
† The author is a 30+ 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 © 2011 Alan Lee, Esq.
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