Immigrant Advocates Push Work Permit Fix in Race Against Clock

Nearly a quarter million work permit renewals pending Tens of thousands at risk from employment eligibility cliff Tens of thousands of immigrants working in jobs like health care, construction, and delivery risk losing their employment authorization in a matter of weeks without Biden administration action on massive backlogs for work permit renewals, advocates and local government leaders are warning. They’re asking US Citizenship and Immigration Services to re-issue a measure it adopted two years ago extending the work eligibility period for those with pending renewals or to go even further to reduce persistent backlogs at the agency. The government is currently taking about 16 months to process those work permit renewals, said Leidy Perez, policy director at the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a member-led organization that supports immigrants seeking asylum. Although immigrants get an automatic six-month extension of employment eligibility with a pending renewal application, thousands who filed in October could see their legal work status begin to lapse in the coming weeks. “We’ve seen the waiting period for renewals skyrocket,” Perez said. “It’s continuously more concerning as we get closer to that April date.” USCIS didn’t comment on specific regulatory plans. However, the agency sent a final rule to the White House earlier this month, still under review, that would temporarily increase the automatic extension period for certain applicants renewing work permits. The agency declined to share details on the forthcoming regulations. Immigration advocates have urged the agency at a minimum to boost the automatic extension period for work permits pending renewal to 18 months—as it did in the face of serious backlogs two years ago. Elected officials from across the country meanwhile have asked the agency to go even further by making the relief permanent. Improving Efficiency Andreas M., a member of ASAP, has worked as a cell phone repair tech, a barista, and most recently as a pharmacy technician at CVS since immigrating to Los Angeles and filing an asylum claim in 2016. His ability to maintain legal employment in the US was thrown into doubt beginning in 2021, however, when the wait to renew his work permit stretched past a year and a half. “It was such an uncertain situation; I didn’t know what was going to happen,” said Andreas, an ethnic Armenian seeking asylum in the US from Azerbaijan. “I was waking up in the mornings three, four times a week calling USCIS so I could try to catch someone.” With mounting work permit backlogs prompting multiple class action complaints, USCIS in May 2022 issued temporary regulations tripling an automatic extension period for work permits pending renewal decisions from 180 to 540 days, part of a slate of new measures to improve efficiency. Those regulations allowed Andreas to maintain his employment authorization and keep his job until eventually securing a new five-year work permit. “I wouldn’t have lasted more than a month, especially in Los Angeles,” he said. “I could breathe again.” That temporary final rule expired at the end of October, meaning asylum seekers and other immigrants with pending work permit renewals would only have the typical six months of additional employment authorization. Backlogs for those renewal applications have meanwhile persisted. Absent comparable measures from the agency, advocates say other immigrants could soon face similar pressures in the coming weeks. While most initial work permit applications are adjudicated within two months, more than 160,000 asylum seekers had work permit renewals pending for more than 180 days as of Sept. 30, according to the most recent update released by USCIS. More than 246,000 total renewals were pending overall. In response to questions on current processing times, the agency said it had adopted other measures to improve efficiency since May 2022, including increasing the duration of work permits for some categories from two years to five. Median processing times for employment authorization documents have also been reduced, with most processed in three months or less this year, the agency said. Local Impact Immigrants who do obtain work permits typically go straight into the workforce, filling essential jobs in the health-care system and schools, said Pious Ali, a city council member in Portland, Maine. “They are transforming the face of the workforce and the face of the community in a very positive way,” he said. Immigrants applying through the Boston Asylum Office of USCIS, which serves Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine, face some of the highest backlogs in the country to have their cases heard. The government should allow asylum seekers to obtain employment authorization continuing until the date of their initial interviews, Ali said. “If there’s a break in employment authorization, you are disrupting their lives again,” he said. “Extending it until they go to a hearing—that’s a win-win. They will continue working and employers won’t have to spend money and resources hiring someone else.” A letter from more than 40 local elected officials last month asked that USCIS adopt a permanent extension of the 540-day auto renewal period for pending work permit renewals. If it doesn’t go that far in new regulations, the agency should make any temporary increase effective for at least three years so it can work through renewal backlogs, the officials said. Meanwhile, some immigrants with short-term status wait so long for work permit renewals that they may be only valid for a few months by the time they are issued, advocates say. That’s the case for thousands of Temporary Protected Status recipients, said Gueline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. “By the time they get the card, it’s about to expire,” she said. “We applaud the fact that USCIS is doing a lot to get short turnarounds on work authorization, but we really need them to make sure that people who are renewing their cards can get them as soon as possible.” Labor Squeeze Research from FWD.us, which advocates for immigration reform, found those admitted through programs like TPS are filling hundreds of thousands of jobs in industries with persistent labor shortages. The Biden administration “needs to act quickly to reduce any further wait, or even worse, put employers in the position of losing employees,” Todd Schulte, the group’s president, said in a statement. The prospect of letting immigrants be kicked out of the workforce—even temporarily—because of slow processing of work permits is sparking nervousness among employers otherwise eager to fill jobs with immigrant workers, said Jennie Murray, president and CEO at the National Immigration Forum. “They may say, I can’t continue to pour training time and resources into people I’m not sure I’m going to be able to keep employed with us,” she said. While USCIS aims to reduce processing times, Congress must also make more resources available and expand legal pathways for immigrant workers, Murray said. Losing employment authorization for those already contributing to the labor force would be damaging for the entire US economy, she said. “Our economy can attribute much of the boom of building back from Covid to immigrant workers,” she said. “Making folks exit the workforce is obviously a really big problem.” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.