Election Year Help or Hurt?

[Lornaevo 48]

This being an election year, does it help or hurt the immigration process? Or is it there no effect at all?

[X Factor 1,112]

My personal view is it had no impact on the process.

[Lornaevo 48]

That's what I was thinking also.

[abner137 48]

It's an election year????

[Penguin_ie 5,997]

I would say no impact on the AOS process; it may speed up the naturalisation process some as they are trying to get as many people to be US citizen and able to vote as possible.

[ThatAnneGirl 4]

I would say no impact on the AOS process; it may speed up the naturalisation process some as they are trying to get as many people to be US citizen and able to vote as possible.

Yes. This is true. My FIL had a little chat with someone 'in the know' a few weeks ago, and they were just talking about this... Naturalization apps have been sped up in the last few months, after 4 years of moving through molasses. Recently had a friend who went from N400 to citizen in less than 3 months. Sworn in on the same day as approval!!! Very cool.

[JimVaPhuong 4,863]

This being an election year, does it help or hurt the immigration process? Or is it there no effect at all?

The President has been issuing executive orders and cabinet level memos at an accelerated pace lately, and some of those have been immigration related. Of course, the objective of these orders and memos is political and designed to curry favor with immigrant advocacy groups, mostly of the Hispanic variety.

One recent memo to the Attorney General directed her to accept deferred action requests from aliens who were brought to the US illegally as children. If approved, these requests would provide the applicant immunity from deportation because of their status, and would permit them to obtain employment authorization cards. The deferred action and EAD cards are valid for two years, and renewable any number of times. The affected agencies, including USCIS, have until mid August to devise policies for accepting these applications. Once they begin accepting those applications then USCIS could potentially be flooded with hundreds of thousands of deferred action applications. How that will impact the immigration process for everyone else depends on the amount of manpower resources which USCIS allocates to those applications. I expect USCIS will be directed to allocate significant resources to those applications at least through the election. If the President isn't reelected then the directive could be withdrawn in January, and USCIS might stop accepting those applications.

The President also issued an executive order earlier this year that directed DHS to devise procedures that would permit them to accept provisional I-601 waiver requests while the alien was in the United States. DHS is taking the normal policy development and approval process for this. This means they have to devise the new policies and then publish them for public comments. USCIS won't begin accepting provisional waiver requests until the policies have been finalized. This policy will only affect intending immigrants who are currently in the United States, are beneficiaries of an approved petition in an immediate relative visa category, are ineligible to adjust status within the US (usually because they entered without inspection), and will face an unlawful presence ban when they leave the US for their consular interview. Unlike the deferred action applications, there won't be a flood of applications coming in for provisional waivers. These will trickle in as immigrant visa petitions for these aliens are approved. The impact on the immigration process for everyone else should be negligible as USCIS would be handling these waiver applications whether they were submitted within the US or to a US consulate abroad.

Other than that, there is usually an acceleration of naturalization petition processing during an election year. The intention is to try to grant citizenship to eligible permanent residents in time for them to be able to participate in the national election.