a Beijing blog about U.S. visas and immigration law
美国欢迎您！中国美国商会，在美国驻华大使馆的参与下，发布了“明明白白游美国”中文版DVD，向去往美国的旅客说明了如何申请签证，介绍了在美国最好的观光点，购物以及娱乐场所。
如果你想要获得这张DVD，请将您的姓名和完整地址发送电子邮件至 beijing@fwhonglaw.com，标题上请注明“明明白白游美国”。（我们尊重您的隐私权。您的联系信息将会用来邮寄您的DVD，而不会被保留或使用于其他任何的目的）。
美国现在成为中国游客的主要目的地的原因之一是，美中两国签署了旅游谅解备忘录（MOU）来促进中国前往美国的团队旅游。根据谅解备忘录，美国旅游目的地可以在中国宣传，经批准的中国旅行社也可以组织到美国休闲旅行的团队，以及驻华的美国领事馆为了这些团队开启了团组休闲旅游的签证预约。据预测，到2011年去美国的中国游客将会有每年57.9万。
这张DVD将会帮助您了解到美国团组休闲旅行的最佳选择，以及如何最大限度地提高您获得签证的机会。该DVD还精选了在美国最好的酒店，购物中心和主要旅游景点。
现在就向我们索取免费DVD。
America welcomes you! The American Chamber of Commerce-China, with the participation of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, has released “Travel USA 101,” a Chinese-language DVD explaining how travelers to the U.S. can apply for visas, and the best places to visit, shop, and party in the U.S.
If you would like a copy of the DVD, send an email to beijing@fwhonglaw.com with your name and complete address. Don’t forget to mention “Travel USA 101.” (We respect your privacy. Your contact information will not be retained or used for any purpose other than to send you the DVD).
One reason the U.S. is now a prime destination for Chinese travelers is that the U.S. and Chinese governments have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) facilitating Chinese group travel to the United States. Under the MOU, U.S. travel destinations can advertise in China, approved Chinese travel agencies can organize group leisure travel to the U.S., and the U.S. Consulates in China will book group visa appointments for such groups. According to forecasts, by 2011 there will be 579,000 Chinese visitors to the U.S. annually.
This DVD will help you understand the best options for group leisure travel to the U.S. and how to maximize your chances of obtaining a visa. The DVD also features information about the best hotels, shopping, and major attractions in the U.S.
Request your free copy now.
This is the Pilot Program that allows USCIS to receive, process, and adjudicate Forms I-526, Immigrant Petitions by Alien Entrepreneur, affiliated with Regional Centers relying on “indirect” job creation analysis. The law also gives USCIS the power to approve applications for adjustment of status on the basis of such I-526s and gives U.S. Consulates the power to approve applications for immigrant visas on the basis of such I-526s. Currently, there are 45 regional centers throughout the United States.
Unfortunately, the Pilot Program was extended only through September 30, 2009. This leaves investors in doubt–if they invest in a Regional Center now, their applications for adjustment of status or immigrant visas will only be approved after September 30 if the law is extended once more.
Such a short extension doesn’t exactly inspire foreign investors’ confidence in the American economy, does it?
Image: Praying Mantis
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, nonimmigrant visa applicants are now waiting for 12-14 weeks for Visas Mantis security advisory opinions (SAOs).
This SAO is a security check to ensure that science and technology students and professionals seeking U.S. visas aren’t likely to try to illegally export U.S. technologies.
These waits are terribly disruptive to business and universities.
Our firm has updated the advice we give to companies on (a) how it may be possible to persuade the Consulate that no SAO is required; (b) what documents and information to prepare for an applicant likely to be subject to an SAO; and (c) how to provide to the Consulate information about future planned trips during the SAO validity period so that visa applications during that period may be subject to merely “postcheck” SAOs—which won’t delay visa issuance—rather than new SAOs.
You can find our memo here.
One publication that recently highlighted SAOs is National Research Council, Committee on Science, Security, and Prosperity, Beyond “Fortress America”: National Security Controls on Science and Technology in a Globalized World (National Academies Press 2009). I’ll discuss this report in an upcoming post.
SAOs were also discussed in the below New York Times article by Cornelia Dean, published on March 2, 2009:
When Alena Shkumatava opens the door to the “fish lab” at the Whitehead Institute of M.I.T., she encounters warm, aquarium-scented air and shelf after shelf of foot-long tanks, each containing one or more zebra fish. She studies the tiny fish in her quest to unravel one of the knottiest problems in biology: how the acting of genes is encouraged or inhibited in cells.
The work, focusing on genetic material called micro-RNAs, is ripe with promise. But Dr. Shkumatava, a postdoctoral researcher from Belarus, will not pursue it in the United States, she said, partly because of what happened last year, when she tried to renew her visa.
What should have been a short visit with her family in Belarus punctuated by a routine trip to an American consulate turned into a three-month nightmare of bureaucratic snafus, lost documents and frustrating encounters with embassy employees. “If you write an e-mail, there is no one replying to you,” she said. “Unfortunately, this is very common.”
Dr. Shkumatava, who ended up traveling to Moscow for a visa, is among the several hundred thousand students who need a visa to study in the United States. People at universities and scientific organizations who study the issue say they have heard increasing complaints of visa delays since last fall, particularly for students in science engineering and other technical fields.
A State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that delays of two or three months were common and attributed the problem to “an unfortunate staffing shortage.”
The issue matters because American universities rely on foreign students to fill slots in graduate and postdoctoral science and engineering programs. Foreign talent also fuels scientific and technical innovation in American labs. And the United States can no longer assume that this country is everyone’s first choice for undergraduate, graduate or postgraduate work.
Albert H. Teich, the director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, organized a meeting on the subject in January with representatives from the National Academy of Sciences and several dozen other scientific and academic organizations. Among other things, he said, the group will try to bring the issue to the attention of the new administration.
It would be hard to argue against security checks for foreigners coming to the United States to pursue high-level scientific or engineering work. And some experts argue that people from certain countries — China, India, Pakistan and Middle Eastern countries are most often mentioned — should be subject to additional scrutiny.
When visa applicants from problem countries seek opportunities in research fields related to national security, the State Department official said, he hoped Americans “would want us to look at those cases very closely.”
Researchers and students seeking to enter the United States routinely encountered difficulties in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, but as security checks became faster and more efficient, most could count on receiving a visa or a visa renewal in about two weeks. That appears to no longer be the case.
“I started hearing this back in early November,” said Amy Scott, assistant vice president for federal relations at the Association of American Universities. “We are very concerned that we are losing ground here, that people are missing the opportunities to come to the U.S., to teach, conduct research or just participate in a conference.”
John Marburger, President George W. Bush’s science adviser, said in an interview in the February issue of the magazine Seed that “it should be easier to get into the U.S. as a student,” adding, “We really need to be careful about our openness to the world.”
According to “Beyond ‘Fortress America,’ ” a report in January by the National Academy of Sciences, universities around the world now have the research equipment and infrastructure to compete with their American counterparts. When the United States puts up barriers, the report said, “foreign universities are well positioned to extend competing offers.”
Or as Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it: “There are other countries that want these folks. They are the best of the best. They have other options.”
Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook directs the International Students Office at M.I.T. Foreign students eventually make it to campus, she said, although the path may be slow and bumpy and they do not necessarily arrive on time. Problems typically occur if they leave the United States — for family visits or scientific meetings abroad — and then find they need a new visa to return.
She told of one student from the Middle East who agonized when he was called home to the bedside of his dying father for fear he would not be allowed back to his classes. He made the trip, she said, and his return was delayed.
Visa requirements vary from country to country, Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said, but because some students must renew their visas often and cannot predict how long it will take for their documents to come through, some of them spend a lot of time calculating when they can travel and when they must start the paperwork dance again.
She and others said that students from all over — even the European Union and Australia — had had problems, but that they seemed most acute for people from China, India, the Middle East and Russia. Belarus was part of the former Soviet Union, which might explain some of Dr. Shkumatava’s difficulties, said Kathie Bailey Mathae, director of the Board on International Scientific Organizations, part of the National Academy of Sciences.
“You are never going to have a system that is 100 percent guaranteed to get people in, in the time they need to be in,” she said. “But when you see problems recurring and the same sort of problems over and over — that’s when you know you have a problem.”
She said researchers were increasingly unwilling to schedule conferences or other scientific meetings in the United States. Although the problem is particularly acute for meetings organized on short notice, she said, some groups are looking for sites outside the United States even for meetings scheduled two years or more in advance.
“That’s unfortunate,” the State Department official said. “We want people to think this is the best place to hold their meetings.”
The official said that time limits for visas were ordinarily a matter of reciprocal agreements between nations. Dr. Shkumatava’s case, he said, may have been further complicated because Belarus severely limits the number of foreign service officers the United States can have there at any given time.
Dr. Shkumatava said her experience was particularly nerve-racking because she was kept from her lab for three months, just as she was struggling to publish new findings before her competitors. When she was required to hand in her passport in Moscow, employees at the embassy lost it, stranding her there for nine days with no documents.
When she returned to the United States, she found that two colleagues had also been stranded by visa problems, one in India and the other in Peru.
Dr. Shkumatava said she will probably return to Europe. Her husband, a computational biologist from Germany, left the United States last fall for a job in Vienna. She might have tried to stay on, she said, if entering and leaving the country were not such a “discouraging” process.
“I got the visa and so I am back,” she said. “But it’s for only one year, so next year in December if I am going to stay here I am going to have to reapply for this stamp.”
Here’s my take on this study. The study doesn’t explain whether the rate at which Chinese are violating U.S. the immigration laws (i.e., entering without inspection or overstaying their visas) is increasing or decreasing. It’s possible that the rate has decreased significantly due to improving social and economic conditions in China. The figures may not reflect this decrease because, according to some sources, there are up to 50,000 PRC citizens in the U.S. with final orders of deportation who have not been repatriated because the PRC government has not cooperated sufficiently by issuing the necessary travel papers for them to be returned to China. If this is true, a large percentage of the increase in the number of unauthorized immigrants from China may be due to the slow rate of violators departing the U.S., not due to the rate of violations by new entrants.
Last year I wrote a post about possible future changes in U.S. visa processing. The State Department has now released more information about their plans, allowing a clearer glimpse at the future of visa processing.
A Consular Electronic Application Center (CEAC) has been created by the State Department with the goal of supporting “an Internet-based, full-service application service center” where nonimmigrant and immigrant visa applicants will be able to complete and submit applications, make payments, attach photos, and track their application status. Applicants will be able to scan and submit documents (e.g., bank statements and court records) electronically with their application forms. The CEAC could represent a major leap forward for a number of reasons. For example:
Of course, as with any technology developments, the devil is in the details. Will the CEAC create a bright, shiny visa future, or a bug-filled software nightmare?
Many Chinese have followed with interest the case of Zhao C. This young man had used “C” as his given name for his entire life, but when he needed to update his national ID card to a second-generation version, the local Public Security Bureau refused to use that name on the grounds that it was not a legal name and that PSB computers are not equipped to handle names with non-standard characters. Zhao took the PSB to court in what was heralded as China’s first name-rights lawsuit. The district court in Yingtan, Jiangxi Province, ruled in Zhao’s favor, but the PSB appealed. While the appeal was pending the case settled, Zhao agreeing to change his name and the PSB agreeing to waive the paperwork fee.
The legal provision at issue in the case was issue in the case was Article 4 of the PRC Citizens’ ID Law, adopted by the National People’s Congress in 2003. It states that standard Chinese characters and numerals and symbols conforming to national standards shall be used in filling out a national ID card (居民身份证使用规范汉字和符合国家标准的数字符号填写). Article 3 of the implementing regulations further specifies that the name shall be registered in the standard language used throughout the country (全国通用的文字). Zhao argued that the letter C is part of Hanyu Pinyin, the PRC’s official Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese, while the PSB argued that C is a foreign language letter.
If Zhao can use one foreign letter in his name, the government’s concern is that other parents may give their children English names, potentially eroding Chinese language and culture.
The Zhao C case is relevant to U.S. immigration law because China’s policy on names determines what name will be used on an immigrant visa. The visa must follow the name in the Chinese passport (9 FAM 42.73 PN1.2-1), which in turn is based on the name in the national ID.
PRC clients applying for immigrant visas as the spouse or child of a U.S. citizen sometimes ask our firm if they can use the citizen’s western surname on their immigrant visas. The answer is no, since the western surname can’t be used in a PRC national ID or passport.
The solution, then, is to change one’s name after entering the U.S. This could be accomplished by (a) filing for a name change in state court, (b) re-marrying in the U.S., since every state will allow a wife to use her husband’s surname, or (c) changing names at the time of naturalization.
