Actualité - US: Immigrants Go Home

Washington, Jul 7 (Prensa Latina) US Federal bureaucracy encouraged thousands of highly skilled workers to apply for green cards (right to live and work in the United States) to snatch the opportunity away, denounces The New York Times on Saturday.

The tease came in a bulletin issued by the State Department in June announcing that green cards for a wide range of skilled workers would be available to those who filed by July 2.

That prompted many of whom have lived in the US with their families for years, to assemble little mountains of paper. They got certified records and sponsorship documents, paid for medical exams and lawyers and sent their applications in. Many canceled vacations to be in the United States when their applications arrived, as the law requires.

The State Department had issued the bulletin to prod Citizenship and Immigration Services, the bureaucracy that handles immigration applications.

The agency is notorious for fainting over paperwork - 182,694 green cards have been squandered since 2000 because it did not process them in time, says the newspaper s editorial.

That bureaucratic travesty is a tragedy, since the annual supply of green cards is capped by law, and the demand chronically outstrips supply. The State Department said it put out the bulletin to ensure that every available green card would be used this time.

The NYT concludes that collapse of immigration reform in the Senate showed the world what America thinks of illegal immigrants - it wants them all to go away. But the federal government, through bureaucratic malpractice, is sending the same message to millions of legal immigrants, too.

(Prensa Latina News Agency)