Obtaining a green card is a necessary and important step to full US citizenship. Green card application lawyers – who might speak many different languages – can help their clients with every step.
What’s a green card?
The United States permanent resident identification card is known in parlance as a “green card” because of its color. A green card attests to the holder’s status as an alien living and working in the United States. The holder has been given official immigrant benefits like permission to reside and work in the country; those benefits are recognized and protected by the federal government.
Each year, the U.S. government grants 50,000 green cards. There are often many more applications than cards given per year. The US has to grant the cards by lottery because it receives so many more applications than it is willing to give out.
How does the green card application work?
The application process can be divided into two basic categories — family-based and employment-based. In the former, the applicant uses his or her immediate familial connections to make the case for permanent resident status. In the latter, the applicant uses his or her employment situation to argue for permanent resident status.
The application process has three basic steps:
- An immigration petition. This qualifies the applicant’s relative or employer.
- Immigrant Visa Availability. There needs to be a number available from the National Visa Center. Only so many numbers are made available.
- Immigrant Visa Adjudication. Once the visa number is available, the applicant can adjust his or her status to a permanent resident.
What are green card application legal services?
Immigration attorneys help their clients with the entire green card application process. These identifications are perhaps the most desired documents in the immigration field. So a lot is on the line not only for the immigrants, but for the attorneys who are hoping to add their clients to long lists of those whom they have helped achieve permanent resident status.
These attorneys find the best ways to go about the application process – taking either the family- or employment-based route to applying for permanent residency.
Immigration attorneys help immigrants who have come from all over the world. They help Eastern Europeans, Albanians, Africans, Latin Americans, Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Mexicans, Central Americans, Chinese, Tajikistanis, and many, many more.
And in order to adequately work with these people of all faiths, colors, and nationalities, these attorneys must speak a great variety of languages. These include Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Korean, Russian, Spanish, French, Albanian, Tajik, Tagalog, Turkish, Uzbek, Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Hindi, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Polish, among others.
Immigration attorneys, as they work with clients on their green card applications, can also advocate on their behalf to get them what’s called Advance Parole. This is when an immigrant must travel outside of the United States while the green card application is pending. If the immigrant does not receive Advance Parole before leaving the country during the application process, he could be disqualified and have to start again. So, as you can see, an immigration attorney can be a valuable asset to immigrants who might be traveling back and forth to their home countries while they are in the middle of applying for permanent residency in the United States.
Green card application attorneys communicate immigrants’ needs and application processes to the offices of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly the INS).
Immigrants can begin looking for green card application attorneys by checking web sites that list immigration legal services.
Who should hire a green card application lawyer?
IMMIGRANTS!
