The visa backlog and its impact on Filipino war vets
The Washington Post paints the picture of why Congress, Obama Administration must do better to reunite families
by Sandhya Bathija
In Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post, reporter David Nakamura told the story of War World II veteran Art Caleda, a Philippines native who served our country, received citizenship under a 1990 immigration law and settled in Hawaii with his wife, Luz.
In 1996, Mr. Caleda and his wife sponsored their three adult sons living in Manila to receive visas to come live in the United States. Mr. Caleda told the Post that when he asked immigration officials sometime in 2014 about the status of his sons’ visas, they told him they were in the middle of processing the applications from 1993.
It’s been nearly 20 years, and Caleda’s sons are still waiting. What’s more, Luz sponsored his three sons, and has since passed away, making it unclear to Mr. Caleda if he needs to reapply and possibly wait 20-plus more years.
The long wait to reunite with family members is a struggle for many of the 26,000 Filipino nationals who were granted citizenship under the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act. The Act granted citizenship to Filipino veterans and allowed them to move to the U.S. with their spouses and children under the age of 21.
But it’s also a problem across the board for many Asian American immigrant families. Of the four million people waiting in the visa backlog, about 1.8 million are from Asian countries.
“If you look at category of visas for adult brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, Mexico has the greatest backlog, but the next six countries on the list after it are all Asian countries,” Erin Oshiro, senior staff attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC told Storyline, a blog of the Washington Post, in November 2014. “It’s huge, and it’s an issue of having a limited numbers of visa available.”
Advancing Justice | AAJC hoped that a comprehensive immigration overhaul in Congress would have addressed these decades-long waits. But because Congress failed to act, many families are still unable to reunite in a relatively timely manner.
Our hopes now turn to President Obama, who used his executive authority in November to grant relief to nearly 5 million undocumented immigrants, including approximately 400,000 Asian immigrants. While President Obama did not take specific action to address the family visa backlogs, which was a key ask for many Asian American and Pacific Islander groups, the president issued a memorandum tasking an interagency group to look at “visa modernization.” The group has been charged with developing recommendations for the president by mid-March 2015.
Advancing Justice | AAJC will be working with the Administration on these recommendations, in the hopes that action will finally be taken to reunite families like Mr. Caleda’s and many others.
“It’s incredibly painful to wait decades to see your children, brothers, sisters and parents. In many cases, it’s financially difficult to support family in both the United States and abroad,” Mee Moua told NBCNews.com in November. “We are still expecting meaningful change in fixing the visa backlog and for the administration to prioritize reuniting families.”
Sandhya Bathija is the director of strategic communications for Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC.
Further reading:
Deportation Relief Welcome, but Visa Backlogs Remain, NBCNews.com, November 21, 2014
Legal immigrants to Obama: End the Decades-long Wait to Reunite Our Families, November 20, 2014
