Immigration Law

BAIT AND SWITCH: USCIS ANNOUNCES EAD POLICY NOT QUITE WHAT WAS CLAIMED BY CHERTOFF

By Greg Siskind

Remember my post from the other day where I mentioned that Secretary Chertoff announced that employment cards in adjustment cases would be issued for two years in cases where adjustment cases were expected to take more than a year to adjudicate? Guess what? Only cases where people lack a current priority date will get the two year EADs. That's nice for the folks who had a priority date retrogress on them (especially people who filed during VisaGate last summer). But adjustments almost always take more than a year to adjudicate so most of us were presuming that this policy was going to cover the bulk of adjustment applicants.

Which raises the bigger question of why we have this silly requirement to have an employment authorization card at all as opposed to making employment authorization incident to being a pending adjustment applicant (like we do for asylees)? This is a huge boondoggle since EADs are automatically granted when adjustment applicants are properly pending.

Same story for advance parole documents. Unbelievable stress just so USCIS can collect a fee for a case that is automatically going to be approved.

Download ead_guideline.pdf

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on June 13, 2008 (boomark / email).