For more than a year, religious organizations have lobbied Congress and the Biden administration to fix an abrupt procedural change in how the government processes green cards for religious workers, threatening the ability of thousands of them to continue serving in the United States.
The Catholic Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, and five of its priests, whose legal status in the United States will expire as soon as next spring, have now sued federal immigration agencies. They claim the change will “cause serious and significant disruption to the lives and religious freedoms of priests and the hundreds of thousands of Catholics they serve”.
“Our priests feel we are doing our best,” said Bishop Kevin Sweeney, whose diocese covers 400,000 Catholics and 107 parishes in three New Jersey counties.
Paterson is the first diocese to file this lawsuit against the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said its attorney, Raymond Lahoud.
But “there is a buzz” among religious groups similarly affected, Lahoud added, because many depend on foreign-born clergy who build strong ties in their U.S. congregations.
“It’s so disturbing,” said Bishop Mark Seitz, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ immigration committee. The group has advocated legislative and administrative corrections, because the recently excessively long delays in green card processing are not sustainable.
In his own border diocese of El Paso, Texas, Seitz is at risk of losing priests whose permanent residency cases will now not be approved until their visas expire. The law requires them to leave the United States for at least one year.
“One is the pastor of a large, growing church. Now I’m supposed to send him away for a year, sort of put him on ice — and somehow organize a fair?” Seitz said.
To address a shortage of religious workers that has worsened in recent decades, American dioceses have long made deals with foreign dioceses to bring in seminarians, priests and nuns from places as diverse as Poland, the Philippines and Nigeria, the Rev. Thomas Gaunt said. From Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
Most other religious denominations, from Buddhism to Islam to Pentecostalism, also recruit foreign-born clergy, for reasons ranging from the need to minister to growing non-English-speaking congregations to specialized training at foreign institutions steeped in religious history.
Most such “religious workers,” as defined by the U.S. government, are covered by temporary R-1 visas that allow them to work in the U.S. for five years. It used to be enough for the organization to assess whether the clergy were a good fit and then petition them for permanent resident status — known as green cards — under a special category called EB-4.
Each year, Congress sets the maximum number of green cards available per category, usually based on either employment or family ties to US citizens. The waiting time depends on whether and by how much the demand exceeds the available visas in each category.
Citizens of countries in particularly high demand face separate, often longer “lines” — currently the most congested are Mexican children married to U.S. citizens, where only applications filed more than 24 years ago are processed.
Neglected or abused minors from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — a growing number of whom have sought humanitarian green cards or asylum after entering the United States illegally since the mid-2010s — were also in a separate line. But in March 2023, the Foreign Office announced that it was a mistake and immediately began adding them to the general queue with the clergy.
This has created an order backlog that is currently over 3.5 years old and may grow. Some estimate that it can take 10-15 years to get green cards.
“This is an unsustainable situation,” said Lance Conklin, who co-chairs the religious workers group of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and often represents evangelical pastors. “The lawsuit represents how many people think.”
The Bar Association, along with the Bishops’ Conference and other organizations, has lobbied for long-term congressional solutions — which most know will be difficult to obtain because of the political sensitivity of immigration reform — as well as simpler administrative changes to agencies. could be implemented quickly.
Advocates and lawyers say that among them would be the opportunity to change jobs in the ministry – to move from assistant pastor to senior pastor, for example, or to move to another monastery, for example – without losing their place in the green card line. Or the government could reduce the amount of time they need to spend outside the U.S. after their visa expires before they can get a new one.
“We can handle a month,” Seitz said, while the current required time is 12 months.
For the time being, most organizations will continue the course, hoping and praying that the administration will make at least these temporary fixes — perhaps under the influence of a lawsuit filed in August in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey.
This is largely because they have no other options.
Various work visas and green cards are much more laborious and expensive to apply for, and many priests do not qualify. For example, those who don’t get paid can’t show they’re being offered the “prevailing wage,” one of the requirements designed to protect U.S. workers in non-religious workplaces.
That’s often the case with Catholic nuns, said Mary O’Leary, a Michigan attorney who represents religious organizations.
“Many religious organizations are not wealthy,” he said. “They’re not like Microsoft, you can’t go to a business school or a computer science school to recruit.”
A nun who works as a school aide in the Archdiocese of Chicago must leave the country when her visa expires in a couple of weeks, said Olga Rojas, the archdiocese’s senior immigration attorney.
“This principal is so devastated,” Rojas said, adding that religious workers across the United States have already been forced to leave. “They want to stay and quit their jobs.”
In some cases, their organizations are trying hard to bring religious workers back from abroad, said Miguel Naranjo, director of Religious Immigration Services for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.
“It’s outside the ministry,” Naranjo added, because they often provide education, health, youth and other social services. “
___
Associated Press religion coverage is supported through AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. AP is solely responsible for this content.
