I took the picture on a beautiful July 4th afternoon. You can see blue sky and palm trees in the background, traffic lights that happened to be green at the time, and a gas station located conveniently nearby. What a fitting image for Immigration Road!

Now, can anyone guess where this road is?

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.

When you receive your card you must carry it with you at all times if you are 18 or older. It is the law.

So there you go. The perfect answer.

However, I’m not sure how many people actually do that. Everyone knows, or should know, to bring their green card with them when travelling abroad, some may do so with domestic trips too, but carrying a green card in a wallet or purse everyday seems like an overkill.

The No. 1 reason for not carrying a green card appears to be the fear of losing it. Although a lost card can be easily replaced, the mere idea of waiting for it to arrive in the mail, again, could bring back nightmares. If you are one of those who waited 10 years for their I-485 to be approved, you know what I’m talking about. The legislators who made up that rule obviously didn’t have to go through the run-around, so they didn’t care.

Another reason, I suppose, is that people don’t see a need for it. How many times were you ever required to show your green card? Other than international travels, there are very few occasions. Even if you do need to use your green card, such as when applying for a home loan, you most likely will be notified ahead of time. Immigration raid in work places may be all over the media, but in reality, it is still a low probability event unless you work in an industry that draws the attention of ICE agents on a regular basis.

Having said that, however, I’m in no way suggesting that you break the law by not carrying your green card If you do decide – at your own risk – that you’d rather leave it in a safe place instead of your wallet, you should make several copies and save them in different places. Also make sure at least one other person knows the whereabout of your original green card. Some people carry a photocopy of the card with them, which might turn out to be a good idea sometimes.

The receipt of demand from Citizenship and Immigration Services Offices has far exceeded their earlier indications of cases eligible for immediate processing. As a result, it has been necessary to hold most of the Employment cut-off dates for November. At this time, it is not possible to provide any estimates regarding future cut-off date movements.

EB2 China will move forward by one week, while EB2 India stays steady at January 22, 2005.

EB3 China is the only category that will experience a rather sizable movement: from February 22 to June 1, 2002. Mexico EB3 will advance one month to June 1, 2002.

Certain religious workers and EB5 pilot programs are “unavailable,” awaiting legislative actions.

Below is a visa bulletin graph for employment-based third preference categories. Y-axis represents visa retrogression, in number of years.