In recent weeks, USCIS has received a large number of applications prepared by an online business that charges users to complete their USCIS forms. In most cases, the charge for preparing an application is the same as the USCIS filing fee. When applicants pay these businesses online using an electronic check, the applicant is only paying for the service provided to prepare the application, and not the actual USCIS filing fee. As a result, applicants are attaching a copy of a cashed electronic check when mailing their applications to USCIS. Because the applicant has not paid the USCIS filing fee, USCIS cannot process these applications and must return them to the applicant.

Clearly, USCIS knows about this website…but isn’t planning to tell you. USCIS even worded their alert carefully to avoid calling such practice fraud or scam. I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of confused. So if an online business intentionally charges the same amount for preparing an immigration form as the USCIS filing fee, and as a result, a large number of its customers mistakenly think they are paying the government rather than the business, does USCIS consider it a scam or not? What about selling free USCIS forms for a profit?

Maybe USCIS is worried about getting themselves into legal trouble by disclosing these companies’ names; maybe they don’t think they are in a position to do anything — USCIS is not a law enforcement agency, after all. But I still hope they would do a bit more in the future, other than relying on public warnings. The intended audience here is the immigrant community which consists, obviously, immigrants. Many of them are new to America, don’t know much about immigration, and aren’t fluent in English. This is a group that is hard to reach, but in the mean time, the most vulnerable and easiest target for scammers.

In recent years we’ve seen increased efforts from USCIS, DOS, DOJ and other government agencies to fight immigration scams. There are also broader media coverage (see BBB, Union Tribune and the Beacon) and more ways for consumers to report fraudulent activities (see FTC Complaint Center and eConsumer.gov). Most recently the National Initiative to Combat Immigration Services Scams also kicked off. Let’s hope all the hard work will soon pay off.

Update 9/19/2011: USCIS posted another blog entry on this subject, again without releasing any names.

Update 9/23/2011: Illinois Attorney General has filed a law suit against a Chicago man for immigration fraud:

The lawsuit alleges Lekarauskas deceptively marketed and represented his website, www.USAimmigrationsupport.com, as an official government site. The website features a logo that closely mimics a federal seal next to the title “United States Immigration Organization,” and attempts to make consumers believe it is an official government site where they can obtain passports, visa and citizenship applications.

The initiatives are brought up with very good intentions – there is no doubt about that. In fact, it is a key part of the Obama administration’s Startup America campaign, aimed to attract the world’s best and brightest to become America’s job-creating entrepreneurs.

However, the new policy immediately raised concerns among current EB-2 applicants – many of them have been waiting in queue for several years. The visa bulletin for August 2011 set the cutoff date for China and India EB2 categories to April 15, 2007, which means that you may be able to get a green card only if you started your immigration process nearly five years ago. EB3 preferences face even a longer wait, ranging from 6 to 10 years.

Given the current situation, increasing demand without increasing the supply of visa numbers doesn’t seem like a good way to reduce existing backlogs. So the initiative to allow new entrepreneurs to share the same pool of EB2 visa numbers could potentially worsen the retrogression. On the other hand, however, more jobs created by more startup companies are good for the economy, which in turn improves the political atmosphere necessary for a true immigration reform. What do you think? We posted a survey shortly after the USCIS announcement and here is the breakdown of 120 responses (a small sample size, but from people who truly care about immigration):

USCIS is supposed to release the pending EB I-485 inventory on a quarterly basis, but is apparently running late for the first quarter of 2011. The last release was on January 5, so the next one should be somewhere around mid April, including a couple weeks of lead time. So USCIS is roughly three weeks behind as of today (5/6/2011).

Last year’s inventory releases were generally three months apart, on March 8, May 27, October 1, and then January 5 of this year. The 5/27 – 10/1 gap was a little over four months, however.

Many readers have recently asked when they will see an update on the green card tracker, which uses the official I-485 inventory for the calculations. Honestly we don’t know, but we do expect USCIS to release the next inventory by the end of May.

On a side note, USCIS has indicated their intention to publish the family-bases I-485 inventory as well. If the delay of EB inventory continues, we wonder if USCIS is trying to synchronize them. If this is the case, the delay will be certainly understandable and actually very good news for those waiting in the family queue. This, of course, may be just our wishful thinking. The immigration agency made no commitment as to when or if they will release the family-sponsored I-485 data.

Table A is for E-11, which is supposed to be only for Alien of Extraordinary Ability petitions (aka EB-1a). But the description indicates “E-11 Extraordinary Ability, Professors, Researchers, or Executives,” which apparently covers all EB1 categories.

Table B is for E-12, Outstanding Professor or Researcher petitions (EB-1b), but the description says “EB-2 Exceptional Ability in the Sciences, Arts, or Business.”

By the numbers, it appears that the tables are only for E-11 and E-12. Hopefully USCIS will provide clarification shortly.

Below is a graph that shows the total number of I-140 approvals and the approval rate for a given fiscal year. The denial rate equals (100% – approval rate).

Update 2/28: USCIS has modified the descriptions and the data are indeed for E11 and E12 only.

USCIS provides an excellent Office Locator on their website, where you can search for a particular office by Zip Code or State. The only tricky part is that for a new immigrant, the differences among various types of offices are not obvious. For example, you want to look for an application support center  (ASC) for fingerprinting needs, but a field office for customer support, even though they may be located in the same city.

Below is a list of most USCIS offices, including headquarters, field offices, service centers and international locations, but excluding application support centers and other specialized offices. They are color coded to separate them into different groups by function.

The new card is essentially an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) with added text that reads, “Serves as I-512 Advance Parole.” And just like current EAD, the new card will be issued with one or two-year validity.

From the released Q&A, it doesn’t appear that applying for the combo EAD/AP card would save money, or the hassle of applying for such documents. Rather, it would offer convenience since an applicant no longer has to maintain two separate documents, especially paper-based Advance Parole.

If you already have EAD and/or AP, you may renew them and get the new card instead if you meet certain requirements listed below:

Q7. What if I already have an EAD or an Advance Parole document?
A7. If your Advance Parole document and EAD card have different expiration dates, you may only receive this card if both documents have less than 120 days of validity left, or if the EAD has less than 120 days of validity left and the Advance Parole document is for a single entry only. If you decide to file for this card by filing Forms I-765 and I-131 simultaneously, do not apply more than 120 days before your current EAD expires. The validity period for the EAD and Advance Parole card will begin on the date of the adjudication of the Forms I-765 and I-131.

You may still apply for separate documents if you wish to do so. Some people choose to renew only EAD, but not AP, for example.

The combo EAD/AP card is still new – USCIS just made the announcement today – so there is still unanswered questions with regard to the issuance of this document. We’ll post more details later on.

From my own experience running blogs, the ratio of spam over real comments is more than 100 to 1. A basic CAPTCHA system can stop most machine generated spam – those filled with irrelevant keywords and links to junk websites. Nowadays spammers are hiring real people to get past the software filtering. They also attempt to make their comments look “real.” However, spam is spam. After seeing 10 or 20 of them, you’ll be able to tell which is which rather easily. There are also free programs, such as Akismet, that can do an excellent job catching this type of spam.

In my humble opinion, USCIS should be able to do a better job managing their only blog. With an annual budget nearly three billion dollars, USCIS probably has a large IT team, or outsource the entire project to a third-party technology firm. In either case, spam control shouldn’t be overlooked as it is now. Nobody can guarantee spam-free, but please, just get rid of the obvious.

Now, just for fun, I’m listing some of the comment spam received on this blog:

Very inspiring post, Many thanks !… – linked to a website selling hand bags

I admire the beneficial information you offer in your articles. I will bookmark your website and have my kids verify up here generally. I’m rather confident they will understand plenty of new things here than anybody else!… – linked to another hand bag seller

Me and my friend have been arguing about an issue similar to this! Now I realize that I had been appropriate. lol! Thanks to the info you article….

I believed that was extremeley intriguing. Thank you to the unusual details. I’ll keep next this….

It is great to have the ability to understand a beneficial high quality submit with useful facts on topics that plenty are interested on. The place that the facts indicated are all initial hand on live experiences even assist more. Continue performing …

Let’s look at the figure below, which is generated by our Green Card Tracker:

The ROW category (Rest of the World: all countries other than China, India, Mexico and the Philippines) had a total of 40,429 pending EB3 cases in the October, 2010 inventory. For January, 2011, however, the number had increased to 47,627. And it happened without a single new I-485 filed – because the visa bulletin hasn’t been current since August of 2007.

Now what caused the sudden increase of 7,198 ROW EB3 cases? It is a huge number. Moreover, since USCIS has been processing older cases during the same three-month period, the actual addition should be even higher.

One logical explanation is that USCIS recently added cases held at field offices to the inventories. But I’m having a hard time believing such a large amount. All along USCIS has been saying that only a small number of I-485 applications are pending at local offices, and as you can imagine, 7,198 (more than 15% of the total) is certainly not a “small number.” In fact as of today the USCIS FAQ still says:

…there is a small population of cases within the jurisdiction of the Field Offices that are not included in this report. (inventory).

Maybe USCIS under-estimated the total number of pending I-485 cases at field offices. Maybe they simply missed a stack of EB3 applications at service centers and just started counting them in the January inventory. I won’t be shocked either way. But I do wish USCIS would have offered an explanation of some sort, to account for such a large discrepancy in one of their most useful reports.

The primary purpose is to detect fraud. Say you have been talking to your friends on Facebook for a year about your girlfriend in another country, and how you’ve been planning for the big day, but all of a sudden you applied for green card based on marriage to a U.S. citizen. Not saying that it won’t happen – people do fall in love quickly – but you bet it will raise a couple red flags if USCIS officials somehow become aware of your above conversations.

However effective it may be, the method itself sounds a little creepy. Are there undercover USCIS agents who register on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks just so they can “friend” their targets for investigation? What is next?

Internet privacy, or the lack thereof, has been debated extensively for years. The increasing popularity of social networks makes it an even more pressing issue. But now you know that as an immigrant, you really have to be extremely careful what you say online – not to defraud anyone, but to avoid unnecessary questioning later on in your immigration journey.

Below is an excerpt from the memo:

Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Blassmates, Hi-5 and other similar sites are designed to allow people to share their creativity, pictures, and information with others. Sometimes people do this to find romance, sometimes they do it to find friends with similar interests, and sometimes they do it to keep in touch with family. Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS (Fraud Detection and National Security – IR) to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities. Generally, people on these site speak honestly in their network because all of their friends and family are interacting with them via IM’s (Instant Messages), Blogs (Weblog journals), etc. This social networking gives FDNS an opportunity to reveal fraud by browsing these sites to see if petitioners and beneficiaries are in a valid relationship or are attempting to deceive CIS about their relationship. Once a user posts online, they creat a public record and timeline of their activities. In essence, using MySpace and other like sites is akin to doing an unannounced cyber “site-visit” on a petitioners and beneficiaries.

Just from the title alone you shouldn’t be surprised that it already got the attention of law makers.

According to Foxnews, several Republican senators asked immigration officials about the memo. Their major concern, of course, is the so-called “non-legislative version of amnesty.” But it is the other parts of the Memo that caught our attention:

“For workers in the U.S. whose occupations require frequent travel, or who are seeking permanent residence, USCIS could also build on a regulation issue by the former INS that, among other things, relieved H and L non-immigrants with pending adjustment applications from having to secure advance parole before departing the U.S. Expanding this “dual intent” concept to cover other long-term non-immigrants, including F, O, TN, P and E visa holders would enable these workers to maintain valid nonimmigrant status and travel overseas without advance parole while their adjustment applications are pending. They would also be allowed to maintain their nonimmigrant status if USCIS denies their adjustment applications. The agency could also consider extending employment authorization to the dependent spouses of certain skilled workers. For example, USCIS could allow employment authorization for H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B principals where the principals are also applicants for lawful permanent residence and have extended their nonimmigrant status under the provisions of AC21. Finally, the agency should afford workers admitted to the U.S. in nonimmigrant status a reasonable period of time to conclude their affairs and depart after expiration of their authorized period of employment, performance, training, or vocational activity. The current 10-day “grace period” is insufficient. USCIS could amend its regulations to permit longer periods ranging from 45 to 90 days depending on employment category and overall time spent working in the U.S.”

As you can see there are a few things USCIS may be able to do without the enactment of new laws, and still greatly improve the legal immigration process. This is exactly what ImmigrationRoad has been promoting all along: nobody knows what is going to happen to CIR, let’s start fixing the broken system with policy changes first, which can be done NOW.  One idea was demonstrated in our Light Green Card proposal more than a year ago.

Even though it is a leaked, unofficial, draft Memo, we are still excited about it. It proves that some high-ranking USCIS officials are indeed considering their options! Now we just hope that they can push DHS and the White House to make something happen.

USCIS apparently has been trying to downplay the importance of this memo. In an announcement, USCIS offered their “official” clarification:

“We will not comment on notional, pre-decisional memos. As a matter of good government, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will discuss just about every issue that comes within the purview of the immigration system. … Internal memoranda help us do the thinking that leads to important changes; some of them are adopted and others are rejected…..To be clear, DHS will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”

It remains to be seen what happens from here, but to the immigrant community, hopefully the memo means more help is on the way.

This is a list USCIS compiled after conducting a survey three months ago asking your input on the areas that USCIS should review their policies and make changes first. It was an important study, and we called for actions in our community forum. Hopefully you had a chance to voice your opinion at that time.

After “nearly 5,600 stakeholders responded to the survey, representing current immigrant and non-immigrant visa holders, employers, immigration attorneys and advocates, among others, in addition to responses from approximately 2,400 members of the USCIS workforce,” the Top-10 list is quite extensive and other than a couple items, I think it hit the nail on the head:

1. National Customer Service Center
2. Nonimmigrant H-1B (specialty occupations)
3. Naturalization and Citizenship
4. Employment-Based Adjustment of Status
5. Family-Based Adjustment of Status
6. Employment-Based Immigrants Preference Categories 1, 2 (priority workers, professionals and holders of advanced degrees) and 3 (skilled workers and professionals)
7. Refugee and Asylum Adjustment of Status
8. Form I-601 (Application for Waiver of Ground of Inadmissibility)
9. General Humanitarian Programs
10. Employment Authorization and Travel Documents

I would say that EAD and AP could have been a little higher on the list, and B-2 visitor visa should have been included given the massive number of people its policy affects. Nonetheless, this is good list to start.
What comes next is as dissappointing as usual. According to the official announcement,

The USCIS Policy Review is a comprehensive, multi-year effort with four stages.

The word “multi-year effort” reminds me, and many others I’m sure, the typical government way of doing business. There will be meetings after meetings, reviews after reviews, and reports after reports. And in the end, we don’t even know what they are working on any more.

Come on! Have your “working groups” sit down and talk about one issue at a time. Give each member one week to read/review the policies and bring up their own suggestions. Give them another week to convene, one more week to test their ideas, and yet another week to tweak them. So a total of one month per issue, not enough? No one is expecting them to fix everything, just hit the big ones. There may be 100 items that can be improved over USCIS customer service; just fix the top 3, which should address 80% of complaints if not more.

Maybe I’ve made it sound too easy. But if you know there are issues, how do you justify a “multi-year effort” to address them? Should your paying customers continue to suffer while you spend “years” reviewing them?

Don’t get me wrong. I like the list, and I like the fact that USCIS is willing to work on it after soliciting input from immigrants. But sometimes, “do something” is more important than trying to do everything, which often ends up being nothing.

Update 7/27/10: USCIS Survey Report

http://goo.gl/nVat

What is that!? In case you’re wondering, it is actually the same address (URL) as this one:

http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.
5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=8c75d06dcebf9210VgnVCM
100000082ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=
68439c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD

Yes, we are using shortened URLs, but almost exclusively on USCIS pages which are extremely long, as demonstrated in the example above. USCIS’ content management system apparently add these dynamically generated “keys” in their URL, but it is meaningless to users. We started using URL shortening on Twitter first, which is necessary due to the 140-character limit, but thought it wouldn’t hurt to try it on our news page because it contains lots of links to USCIS updates.

There are many URL shorteners such as TinyURL, bit.ly, tr.im, and so on. I picked Google’s shortening service arbitrarily, or because I have been a fan of Google’s tools for years and their Chrome browser offers a convenient tool to trim long URLs with one click.

So there you go. Don’t grow suspicious when you see a weird goo.gl link on our site; it is taking you to a legitimate source – as always – we are just tired of super long USCIS web addresses.

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is aware of the fact that some private parties are selling free USCIS forms and Infopass appointments for profit. In a recent blog post, USCIS reminded immigrants of such activities, but fell short of calling them fraudulent.

These services are offered free of charge by USCIS, but they do cost money. To design all the forms and to maintain local offices where infopass appointments take place aren’t necessarily cheap.

Immigrants are effectively paying for these services through application fees.

But some are tricked into paying more, by falling prey to websites and individuals who somehow manage to sell them.

Although selling USCIS forms is not nearly on the same level as green lottery scams yet, it is still troublesome.

USCIS can do more to raise awareness among unsuspecting immigrants, not only to save them money, but also to minimize their chances of using outdated USCIS forms, which can have severe consequences. Here are five suggestions:

1. On all USCIS forms, clearly indicate they are available for free, as shown in the image above. Free advertising for uscis.gov as well:
2. Convert more applications to electronic filing, which would eliminate or greatly reduce the need for downloading forms. E-file offers numerous benefits, not limited to detering fraud.
3. Make all PDF forms fillable, save-able and user friendly. This should help people who may be knowingly looking for better alternatives to save time. Also update expiring forms with new expiration dates or replace them with new versions in a timely manner.
4. Educate immigrants with information on unethical vs. illegal practices, and encourage them to report fraud.
5. Make all USCIS forms copyright protected. As a federal government agency, USCIS may have to work with a private organization to do this. But if implemented, it will enable them to pursue legal actions if they have to.

Our only advice to immigrants is very simple:

Just don’t download any USCIS forms from anywhere but uscis.gov!

With RFID embedded in the new green card, a CBP officer is now able to read your card while you are still standing in line at the airport. This, hopefully, can get you through a port of entry a bit faster. But the problem is, anyone with a sophisticated reader can read the same information as well, all from a distance without you even knowing it.

Before you push the panic button, however, let me just say that USCIS isn’t playing around with all the hassle of redesigning the green card. They must have worked with LaserCard (the manufacturer) to make sure that any embedded data isn’t easily accessible by an unauthorized source. And people who can break an RFID encryption are probably working on other stuff than reading your green card anyway.

But it remains a privacy concern. Since you are supposed to carry your green card with you at all times, the thought that someone walking by may have just read your green card is simply uncomfortable. So you want to follow all instructions from USCIS with regard to the storage and carrying of your new card. In fact, according to Piers Fawkes at PSFK, his new green card arrived with a warning on the card sleeve:

We recommend use of this envelope to protect your new card and prevent wireless communication with it.

The little card holder is probably some sort of electromagnetically opaque sleeve that shields your green card from external readers. At a minimum, it will make contactless access to your RFID more difficult.

Wikipedia has a good article on RFID, with a large section dedicated to security and privacy risks of the technology. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a consumer report several years ago that had a section called The ABCs of RFID – another good read if you want to learn more:

In RFID systems, an item is tagged with a tiny silicon chip and an antenna; the chip plus antenna (together called a “tag”) can then be scanned by mobile or stationary readers, using radio waves (the “RF”). The chip can be encoded with a unique identifier, allowing tagged items to be individually identified by a reader (the “ID”).

Well, I think that is too far.

Sure, the data is incomplete. But it is something we never had before. Prior to September of 2009, if you had a pending I-485, all you knew was that you were standing in line waiting for the next visa bulletin. Now, with the inventory, you can find out approximately how many people are actually ahead of you. Even if USCIS doesn’t count all the pending cases, you now have a general idea of how long the line is, and more importantly, what position you are in.

USCIS clearly indicated that I-485 applications transferred to field offices are not included in the inventory. And it appears that they plan to add this missing piece in later releases. There has been much debate about the exact percentage, and I guess nobody knows until USCIS publishes the data, but we do know that the majority of employment-based AOS applications are being processed by service centers, not district or field offices.

Another source of missing cases in the inventory, as claimed by many, is that USCIS simply isn’t capable of counting! I’m not as pessimistic, however. After all, it is a database. Let’s look at the case status checking system first. How many people with a pending I-485 cannot find their case in the system? Not many, right? It is a non-scientific indication that the database at least contains the vast majority of I-485’s out there. With data being present, counting and sorting is a few queries away. And there are multiple ways to cross reference your results to make sure nothing is obviously off track.

Many people also question the accuracy of the data. I can’t guarantee the inventory is error-free; in fact I can pretty much guarantee there are errors. But it serves its purpose well, and is good enough to shed some light on a matter that traditionally has been a black box.

We want to push USCIS to further improve their reporting of the inventory data – no doubt about that. But we shouldn’t ignore what we already have, especially since there is nothing better right now. Let’s not tell a starving person to throw away the burger in hand, and just wait for a steak dinner.