Priority date

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the concept of priority date in patent law, see priority right.

Priority date is a United States immigration concept. A common path to the green card in the United States is to obtain it through employment, a very complex process that can take many years to complete. When someone begins the long process to the green card, they are assigned a priority date which is the date the process started. Years later, when the case is finally approvable, the immigrant still needs to contend with the fact that there is an annual quota based in part on their immigration category and country of birth--a quota which can delay the case still more. However, at that point priority is supposed to be given to the intending immigrants with the earliest priority dates, so that those who have been waiting the longest get their green cards first.

The United States State Department publishes a monthly visa bulletin which lists cutoff dates for different immigration categories and birth countries. Only those intending immigrants with priority dates before the cutoff date can actually be awarded their green card. The cutoff dates generally move forward over time as old cases are disposed of. However, in certain cases, such as if a large number of old cases work their way through the system at about the same time, the cutoff dates can actually retrogress (move backward).

This happened on September 13, 2005, when the State Department retrogressed many of the cutoff dates, perhaps in anticipation of a large number of backlogged Adjustment of Status application (I-485) about to be approved. In the worst case scenario, certain immigrants from India found their cutoff dates retrogressed all the way back to January 1, 1998. This means that those immigrants cannot receive their green cards unless their priority date becomes earlier than the "current" cut-off date. A similar situation happened in 1998, when other groups of immigrants (mainly those born in Mainland China and Mexico) found their cutoff dates retrogressed only slightly less severely.

The decision to retrogress cutoff dates is likely to prove controversial. On one hand, American citizens are likely to feel that they already face enough competition from foreign workers, and that there is no particular reason to be in a hurry to grant green cards to foreign workers, regardless of their length of stay. On the other hand, foreign workers are likely to argue that they have already been paying taxes as productive members of society for years, and should be granted green cards because if they were to leave, their knowledge and skills would leave the US along with them.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../p/r/i/Priority_date.html"