Filams, Asians hail resurrection of stalled measure
WASHINGTON – Filipino and Asian Americans are hailing the revival of the stalled bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill in the Senate. The Senate is set to resume debate on the controversial measure after it passes the energy bill.
They are praising President Bush and senators from both parties for exerting extra efforts to resume deliberation on the controversial measure.

For Filipino American veterans, the revival will give renewed hope to family members of veterans who have lobbied hard for family reunification. The veterans’ family reunification amendment has already been overwhelmingly approved by the entire Senate two months ago. This is the second time that this provision has been incorporated in the immigration bill.

Filipino and Asian Americans are also concerned over provisions that will limit family-based visas only to spouses and minor children of American citizens or permanent residents. The bill also adds skills and education as basis for the grant of immigrant visas. Tens of thousands of relatives of Filipinos who are now American citizens or permanent residents have been waiting for years to get their visas. While the bill will shorten the wait to eight years, the cutoff date for new applications is set for 2005.

Also expected to benefit are the more than 200,000 Filipinos who are now illegally in the US. Many of them, unlike the Mexicans and other South Americans who entered the United States by sneaking through the border, have come to the US the legal. They merely overstayed their visas. The resurrection of the bill will now give its advocates an opportunity to lobby harder for its passage. They know only too well that failure to have it approved before the end of this year will mean it will be many more years before any new attempt can be had.

The Senate has revived the stalled bill and is expected to resume debate on the measure soon.
The measure was revived after the White House and senators from both parties mapped out possible changes in the bill that would put more emphasis on national security instead of the grant of a path to citizenship for the some 12 million illegal immigrants in the US.
Also included is an outlay of several billion dollars for tougher border security and law enforcement and would allow the government to take more time before granting work permits to illegal immigrants who seek legal status.

The proposals were drafted as part of an effort to recast the debate on immigration and revive the bipartisan bill, which was pulled from the Senate floor late last week. They come a day after President Bush met with senators to try to persuade those on the fence to support the measure.
As the White House shifts its tactics on the bill, immigrant rights’ groups have begun their own push to move the legislation forward by emphasizing the benefits of immigration.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who was haggling with senators over possible amendments, said: “This is a national security bill. We are fixing a national security problem."
Gutierrez said the bill would eliminate a threat to national security that arises because of the presence of millions who are here illegally. The path to citizenship is one of the most controversial provision of the bill which has generated animosity among conservative Republicans and Democrats. President Bush said the revised bill is a way to secure the borders and curtail the influx of illegal immigrants. This is expected to assuage the desire of the conservatives to have stronger enforcement provisions.

Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, a member of the small bipartisan group that wrote the bill, said its sponsors hoped to attract more support by passing an emergency supplemental appropriation of $3 billion to $5 billion to pay for the enforcement measures. More than 300 amendments to the current bill have been proposed. Leading supporters of the bill are trying to winnow those down, with the thought that the Senate might vote on a dozen proposed by Republicans and a dozen from Democrats.

Meanwhile, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services has blamed the delay in FBI checks of applications for naturalization as the reason for the growing backlog. USCIS said applications awaiting FBI name checks has doubled to 329,160, prompting a flood of lawsuits in federal courts, bureaucratic finger-pointing in Washington.

At a time when Congress is intensely focused on border security, the growing backlog is one of the most visible signs of the U.S. immigration system’s breakdown, current and former government officials said.

Unexplained delays in determining whether longtime residents pose a threat promise neither justice to the applicants nor added security to the country, they said. They blame bureaucratic mismanagement and poor coordination at the FBI and the immigration service, and the inefficient methods of screening files for genuine security threats.

In his annual report to Congress last week, USCIS ombudsman Prakash I. Khatri called the backlog of FBI name checks “unacceptable from the standpoint of national security and immigration benefits processing.”

Calling the delays the “most pervasive problem” in processing, Khatri concluded that they “may increase the risk to national security by prolonging the time a potential criminal or terrorist remains in the country." He concluded that the agency should end or sharply narrow its use of name checks.
The withholding of citizenship — and the continuation of the attendant restrictions on voting, employment, travel, reunification with family members, and access to credit and federal assistance programs — replicates on a far vaster and more damaging scale the inconvenience rendered to travelers who are mistakenly placed on no-fly lists because of spelling confusions or errors, civil liberties lawyers said.

Some lawyers warn that such burdens may be discriminatory if they fall disproportionately on people perceived to be from Muslim countries or from ethnic groups whose names are transliterated from non-Roman alphabets. But others representing individuals in the Washington area or participating in four national class-action lawsuits over the delays say the most distinctive — and frustrating — feature is their seeming randomness, and the refusal of agencies to say when checks will be done or why problems have arisen.