We don’t often write about the major political issues around US Immigration as the primary purpose of this site is to help foreigners to live, work and study in the United States. However we have been outspoken on occasion with some issues and legislation surrounding things like the H1B visa legislation, Employer hiring practices of Foreign Immigrants, Green Card Waiting Lists and the Start-Up Visa as well as report on things like the Dream Act and the plight of Illegal Immigrants.
Today we thought we give an update as released by the US Government as the nature of Deportations of foreigners from the US in the fiscal Immigration year FY-2011. We don’t really have an opinion on this as we don’t know anything about any of the individual cases or much about deportation generally as a US Immigration issue. Certainly for convicted violent felons who happen to be foreigners it is hard to feel much sympathy when you think the many thousands of foreigners who are want to come to the US legally or those that are already here on waiting lists for more permanent status like a Green Card or US Citizenship.
However deportation is something that any Immigrant who is not a US citizen certainly faces as a reality of the status whether due to fault of their own or things beyond their control. So it is important to be aware of what is going on in the world of US Immigration as far as deportation is concerned. In the past we have written specifically about the cases of deportation of people who were already approved and received an H1B visa from the US consulate for dubious and yet fully unknown reasons at best.
So exactly 396,906 foreigners were deported in FY2011 of which about 55% had either a felony or misdemeanor conviction for some crime committed within the US. Unfortunately this crime rate was up about 89% from 2008 levels and possibly could be attributed to the more bleak economic picture and bad job situation meaning many of these immigrants who are living close to the poverty line were following a trend that is all too common with crime and bad prospects for prosperity. This also includes people who were found to have re-entered the US after being ordered to leave or violating an earlier order to leave the country.
Let’s hope that these negative statistics with both deportation and violent crimes committed by foreigners trends back down in next period and that positive legislative efforts and reforms are made to make the whole US Immigration system fairer for all.
Cj