Immigration Lawyer in Houston: What Does Three Years Mean in the U.S. Immigration System?
On July 8, 2013, I moved into a room and officially opened the Law Office of Kathryn N. Karam PC. Within three months, I’d met Katrina Espinales and Nadine Chen, two of the three other team members at the firm. By January 2014, we had moved into a formal office suite of our own, and in August 2014, we celebrated our first anniversary.
My team gave me a beautiful sign which is in our reception area today. By January 2015, Britny Martinez had joined us, and later that year, we expanded into our current office space. Now, as we round out our third year in business, I am more grateful than ever for the team we have in place, the number of difficult of cases we have successfully handed, and the service we provide to our clients. So on the firm’s three-year anniversary, I am grateful for my team, for the work we get to do, and for our wonderful clients. Three years has felt like a long time, and yet, it feels like it passed in the blink of an eye.
What does three years mean in terms of the U.S. immigration system?
- For some cases, it can feel like forever: three years of case processing for your relative to join you in the U.S. would feel like an eternity. Yet, many adult sons and daughters of U.S. citizens and Permanent Residents face wait times of seven years or more to immigrate. Brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens face wait times of anywhere from 12 years to 20 or more years
- Highly-skilled employees of U.S. companies who are from India and China wait 6 to 12 years for a green card.
- Due to backlogs in the immigration court system, wait times for immigration court case hearings can be anywhere from a few months to three or four years.
- An investor from China seeking to invest $500,000 or more to create 10 full-time jobs for American workers through the EB-5 immigrant investor program will wait at least two years to get to a temporary green card.
At Kathryn N. Karam PC, we have had the privilege of working with many individuals, families, and companies on a range of immigration matters. We were honored to assist a family who had been in the United States since 1991 to finally get their green cards last December. We assisted a young woman who had been separated from her parents since age 19 in returning to the United States, we helped to get a 2005 deportation order reopened to allow one of our clients to apply to remain in the United States with his family, and we finished an 18-month process of helping a man obtain U.S. citizenship after his application was initially denied.
Since our inception, we have prided ourselves on providing responsive service, employing creativity and specialization, and working as a team to help our clients obtain the results they are seeking and resolve the issues they face as they navigate the United States immigration system. We are based in Houston, Texas and we service clients from all over the United States and the world. Looking at how long our clients may wait and how much difficulty they often face in the pursuit of their goals, we hope to continue to help keep the United States a top destination of people from all of the world – be they entrepreneurs with new ideas and innovations, people fleeing violence and persecution, talented and skilled researchers, managers, artists, entertainers, and athletes, and those seeking to join their family here. While we are shocked and saddened by the recent events in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and Dallas, Texas, we still believe that we are privileged to live in the United States. We look forward to many more years of services to our clients in Houston, the U.S., and around the world.
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