A day in the life of an immigration counselor

Overall, the bipartisan bill deserves positive consideration, especially because it aims to curtail illegal immigration while providing billions of dollars in additional funding to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan

After reading the early morning news the other day, I was reminded of the lyrics of a popular Beatles song that goes,

“I read the news today, oh boy…,” although mine wasn’t about a lucky man who made the grade.

Neither was the news rather sad.

It was, in fact, quite propitious, and I just had to laugh when I saw the photograph of an antsy-looking MAGA senator in the background.

Neither did it say that the US nor the English army had just won the war against Iran.

No, it was mostly about the US government’s plan to plug the illegal entry holes at the southern border and to count border crossers like the four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

And though the holes were rather small — metaphorically drilled in the imaginary boundary wall by the illegal border crossers — they must count them all.

They have to, because four thousand is the proposed minimum threshold for the US government’s discretionary power to plug the holes and shutter the border wall to kick in.

According to the news — the one that

I just read, not the one lyrically authored by the legendary Beatle John Lennon a long time ago — the US Senate had just passed a bipartisan spending bill that includes sweeping changes to the country’s

border laws, especially those about asylum.

Amongst the most controversial features of the bill is the provision giving the US Department of Homeland Security the power to shut down the border if more than 4,000 people illegally cross the border daily on average in a given week.

And if the average daily crossings exceed 5,000, or if the number exceeds 8,500 at any single time, the DHS is required to close the border (except the legal entry points).

Along with this strict border proviso is the mandate to speed up the asylum adjudication process to six months without the need for immigration court proceedings, in addition to raising the evidentiary bar for granting asylum.

On the flip side — which jolted me wide awake and forced me to fall out of bed and drag a comb across my head before I found my way downstairs to drink a cup — the bill would allow an additional 250,000 new immigrant visas for family-based and employment-based beneficiaries over a five-year period.

Having read the book about the negative repercussions of lengthy waiting periods on the psychological well-being of intending immigrants, I could only imagine the positive impact of this potential development on the mental health of my long-suffering clients.

Other salient provisions of the bill include granting work permits to dependents of H-1B workers, freezing the age of their children at 21 for green card purposes, and granting permanent residency to Afghan nationals who fled their country following the US withdrawal in 2021.

Overall, the bipartisan bill deserves positive consideration, especially because it aims to curtail illegal immigration while providing billions of dollars in additional funding to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

Nevertheless, what blew my mind out in the car — in fact, I didn’t notice that the lights had changed — was the abrupt turnaround by the Republican senators who originally supported the bill.

After initially praising the bill for providing “direct and immediate solutions” to the border crisis, the effete Republican senate minority leader now urges his colleagues to withdraw support for the bill.

This, after the self-anointed MAGA king commanded his acolytes in the US Congress to reject the measure for fear of awarding an election year victory to his presidential adversary.

It was like somebody spoke and everybody went into a dream.