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USCIS urges July start to renew CW permits expiring on Dec. 31
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is encouraging CNMI employers to start in July the application for renewals of CW permits expiring on Dec. 31, 2014, to prevent gaps in employment authorization. USCIS supervisory public affairs officer Marie Thérèse Sebrechts said Friday that the 240-day grace period is “only a proposal at this time.”
Sebrechts, who was on Saipan on Friday, said employers can petition for renewal six months prior to the CW permit’s expiration.
Many of the CW permits are expiring on Dec. 31, the supposed date of the end of the transitional CW program. U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez recently extended the CW program by five years or up to 2019. This allows the CNMI continued access to some 10,000 foreign workers, among other things.
“Right now the 240-day grace period is a proposal. You don’t want anybody to fall out of status because if they do and that proposal isn’t finished, they have to stop working and they’re no longer in lawful status. So that’s the problem,” she said.
At the same time, Sebrechts said USCIS is “already looking at and discussing what the next step would be” concerning the paroles-in-place granted to immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. USCIS granted 1,102 of such paroles, expiring on Dec. 31, 2014.
USCIS, she said, has also started discussing the 2015 cap on the number of CW permits. The agency had to wait for the U.S. Labor secretary’s decision “because there would have been no cap if the program ends Dec. 31st.”
“If you look at the decisions that were made in the past couple of years, they were made according to CNRA, taking into account the economic situation here and making sure there are enough CW slots to not jeopardize the economic growth here,” Sebrechts said.
Three pending bills in U.S. Congress also seek to address CNMI immigration issues including extension of the E-2C investor program, extension of the CNMI’s exemption from accepting asylum applicants beyond 2014, and extension of the CNMI and Guam’s exemption from the national H visa cap. (Haidee V. Eugenio)
For more information and announcements about the CW-1 program, visit www.uscis.gov/cw.
