UNITED STATES, May 19, 2007: (HPI: the following article focuses on religious workers’ visas for Catholic priests. However, the changes in United States immigration law and increased paper work required for the federal office of Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) will impact Hindu temples working to bring priests from India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere to the United States. Hindu organizations concerned about this visa should contact Arumugaswami, managing editor of Hinduism Today, who is coordinating with several organizations on the Hindu response to the proposed changes.)
In the last few months Father Pomerleau’s part-time position as vicar for international clergy also means he has had to play host to inspectors from Citizenship and Immigration Services, or CIS, who came to the chancery, unannounced, to ensure the diocese is what it said it is in the visa paperwork and that the church genuinely sought to hire the applicants. The priest is also a reporter for the diocesan newspaper and a pastor. In the Diocese of Springfield, Mass., one of Father Bill Pomerleau’s jobs is to handle the paperwork for eight foreign priests who work for the diocese. He helps with applications that the would-be employees file with U.S. consulates in their home countries and gathers the supporting documents that the federal office of CIS requires to prove that there’s a valid employment offer from a bona fide religious organization. If the immigrants decide they want to stay permanently, he helps them apply to change their temporary visas to permanent ones.
It’s likely to get a little harder to ensure that the Polish, Tanzanian, Ugandan and Peruvian priests who minister to the Catholic immigrants of western Massachusetts in their own languages get to stay in the United States. So too for Filipino nuns staffing hospitals in the Midwest, Mexican seminarians doing pastoral internships in Southwestern states, the Franciscan brother from Nigeria working with immigrant teens, the Irish priest teaching history and the lay catechist from Brazil.
Allegations of fraud that have plagued the religious worker visa program since it was created in 1990 have prompted proposed changes that users of the visas worry will add unnecessary delays and costs. Such inspections are under way for an estimated 4,000 religious institutions nationwide that have applied for immigrant religious workers, according to CIS spokesman Bill Wright. Between 10,000 and 11,000 religious worker visas are approved each year, about half for temporary workers, he told Catholic News Service.
Physically inspecting the sponsoring organizations, like the Diocese of Springfield, is one of the steps CIS has taken to address fraud. A survey by the Homeland Security Office of Fraud Detection for National Security found a fraud rate of 33 percent in applications for R (for religious) category visas. The 2006 survey was a random sampling of 240 of the thousands of applications submitted annually, not a study of cases that were approved. It did not quantify how many examples of fraud it found were caught by CIS verification procedures and no visa issued, Wright said.
The most common type of fraud found was applications in the name of a nonexistent religious institution, he said. Other problems included using the name of an institution that did not support the application or applying for the visa on the basis of one type of job and then taking another one. Because the Office of Fraud Detection is relatively new, Wright said there is little information about fraud in other visa categories to compare with that found in R visa categories. A similar survey of applications for I-90 visas, one of the most common types of green cards, found about 1 percent fraud, Wright said. He attributed some of the difference in the percentage of problems to the recent requirement there be biometric data such as fingerprints for I-90 applications.
Fraud detection surveys of other categories of applications to be released in coming weeks will show at least one category with fraud rates comparable to that of the religious workers program, he said. He declined to elaborate until those reports are final.