Are lines between legal and illegal immigration blurred beyond recognition?
President Trump’s administration announced Tuesday March 12, 2019 of its plan to close the U.S. immigration agency’s overseas locations, which will affect offices that currently handle family visa requests, international adoptions and other tasks.
This is the latest nativist endeavor of pulling up the drawbridge from an administration that has worked to limit both legal and illegal immigration since Trump took office in January 2017. While vowing to respect and preserve legal immigrants’ ability to adopt this nation as their new home, unsubstantiated assaults on legal immigrants use of welfare remain the president’s focus.
On Monday, senior USCIS officials told employees within its Refugee Asylum and International Operations division that the agency had decided to close its overseas posts, one current and one former official said. The closures will happen over the next year and some of the offices’ tasks likely will be shifted to the State Department, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The current plan would affect 23 offices overseas, scattered across Latin America, Europe and Asia. Services affected would include: helping American citizens who want to bring relatives to the United States; processing refugee applications; enabling overseas citizenship applications; and assisting Americans who want to adopt foreign children, according to its website.
Most importantly, the international offices can also process naturalizations of U.S. military service members who are not already U.S. citizens. USCIS officers abroad also look for fraud in visa applications and provide technical immigration advice to other U.S. government officials.
This plan stands in direct contrast to president Trump’s State of the Union expressed support for ongoing unimpeded legal immigration.
Information for this article was obtained from Reuters:
U.S. immigration agency to close its overseas offices
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To Be Or Not to Be a Legal Immigrant En Route to the United States of America, that is the question.
