I am the receiver of a flow of immigration-related information from some of my readers that is often, but not always, useful. Some of the messages border on the illiterate, some come from PhDs; some come directly to me and some via CIS — all of it is welcome and most of it, frankly, is depressing.
For example, a reader, who I suspect is of Indian origin, called to my attention the murder of what appears to be an Indian college student in the U.S. He was working the midnight shift at a gas station, probably after being hired through the Optional Training Program. This is clearly tragic, but one cannot learn much about immigration policy from such a death, though it sheds a little light on our feckless gun policy.
While murder is rarely mentioned in these notes, even though we see it all the time in the papers, many of the messages I receive deal with marriage-related immigration fraud, which almost never is covered by the press. For instance:
I would like to share ... my experience of being a victim of green card fraud as part of my healing and recovery. I feel my story mirrors the stories on your website and I want to be validated for what I went through from 2006-present. The person I married abandoned the marriage immediately. The person I married immigrated his father using my name in a letter while we were divorcing. The person had possible ties to national security issues. This person targeted Violence Against Womans Act to obtain sole custody of my child and also frivolous law suits against me in criminal court.
The writer appears to be a citizen of the U.S. and the spouse an alien from Vietnam. There is little that can be done 17 years later, but in other, newer instances we can offer obvious advice, such as get yourself a tough lawyer, seek to cut your losses by withdrawing the form that the citizen sent to USCIS promising to support the alien financially, and do not waste your time and energy trying to get the erring spouse deported.
Two other messages came in recently. One dealt with a posting I had written several years ago about the apparent misuse of the H-1B program by a school district in New Mexico — there have been some new, perhaps questionable developments and one of the Filipina H-1B teachers and I are conversing about that. More later, perhaps.
The final message in the set showed with remarkable precision just how pro-migration the Biden administration is. A U.S. reader, one of the American high-tech types injured by the H-1B program, follows the Indian press and sent me a link to a recent news item in the Economic Times, which said: “The new US Consulate in Hyderabad is now the biggest Consulate in South Asia [it covers 12 acres] with 54 [visa] windows as against 16 in the Paigah Palace earlier. It will process 3,500 visa applications.”
That’s a huge increase, from 16 to 54. Although the last line of the quotation does not say so, let’s assume that the 3,500 visa applications is for a day. If that is the case, then each window would handle just under 65 applications a day, or eight an hour, or one every 7.5 minutes.
You can imagine the level of review that happens at that speed — if my assumption on the 3,500 is correct.