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.
WTF would be the problem if everyone who applies for EAD with a pending 485 get a 2year card?
Frankly nothing new here. Typical petty-mindedness of people at the USCIS. They'll never change.
Usually they try their best to make the laws passed by the legislators as unfriendly to the immigrants as possible when they "implement" them. Or they come up with just solutions, before you could blink your eye they'll make it 90% useless.
What do these workers at USCIS think? Do they think harassing, making life miserable for immigrants a patriotic duty or something? How does this hep any one or the country?
Posted by: wha'ts new | June 14, 2008 at 03:46 PM
Yes, if you have an adjustment pending and you cannot complete processing because a green card number is not available, you can apply for a two year EAD.
Posted by: Greg Siskind | June 13, 2008 at 05:06 PM
Greg, can you pls clarify what this means in plain english. Since visas for folks from India/China/Phillipines who filed either under EB2/EB3 last June are retrogressed are they eligible for 2 yrs EADs?
Posted by: Vento | June 13, 2008 at 04:37 PM
Nothing unusual coming from CIS because it doesn't follow rule of reason in most of its policies and procedures. You are absolutely right in that why not make receipt notice for an AOS application act as EAD and AP. I'm still waiting for them to process my I-485 application which was apparently eligible under the Feb. 04, 2008 Name check memo but now I'm being given the usual run around. "Pending extended review", "additional review needed" etc Do you have any update on what's going with these cases at the service centers?
Posted by: AOSApplicant | June 13, 2008 at 11:41 AM