Category: Immigration

Immigration

U.S. Expects to Use All Employment-Based Green Cards This Year

By Michelle Hackman | Wall Street Journal

U.S. immigration authorities project that they will use up all the extra available employment-based green cards for the fiscal year ending this month, averting the risk that the government would for the second year running let thousands go to waste.

Typically, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes green cards and other immigration applications, hands out about 140,000 employment-based green cards to foreign employees and their families, representing a fraction of demand that results in a decadelong wait for some applicants.

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Immigration

Why Nigeria is the only African country excluded from 2023 DV-Visa Lottery

By Biodun Busari | Vanguard

The United States has excluded Nigeria from its 2023 Diversity Immigrant Visa programme which is also known as the green card lottery.

Nigeria’s exclusion from the programme makes it eight years in a row that the US ignored the most populous African country in the world among immigrants entering via DVL.

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Immigration

Visa lottery 2023 results | 4 million foreigners can now check if they won

By Ebimo Amungo

Four millions foreign nationals around the world who last year entered the 2023 visa lottery to legally immigrate to the United States with permanent resident status can now check if they were among the 50, 000 lucky winners of the lottery from noon on Saturday May 7th, 2022.

According to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs the DV Entrant Status Check function at the Bureau’s website will be live for status searches from that day and entrants in the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program can find out if they were randomly selected for a U.S. green card.

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Immigration

U.S. Offers Protection to People Who Fled War in Cameroon

By Miriam Jordan | The New York Post

The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would offer temporary protected status to nationals of Cameroon, shielding them from deportation and enabling them to obtain work permits, amid escalating armed conflict that has spawned a humanitarian crisis in the African country.

Some 40,000 nationals of Cameroon, many of whom sought safe haven in the United States in recent years, are expected to be eligible. The largest communities of people from Cameroon are in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and California.

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Immigration

African refugees see racial bias as US welcomes Ukrainians

By PHILIP MARCELO | AP

Wilfred Tebah doesn’t begrudge the U.S. for swiftly granting humanitarian protections to Ukrainians escaping Russia’s devastating invasion of their homeland. But the 27-year-old, who fled Cameroon during its ongoing conflict, can’t help but wonder what would happen if the millions fleeing that Eastern Europe nation were a different hue.

As the U.S. prepares to welcome tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing war, the country continues to deport scores of African and Caribbean refugees back to unstable and violent homelands where they’ve faced rape, torture, arbitrary arrest and other abuses.

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Immigration, News

Young undocumented immigrants in Maryland can’t grow up to be whatever they want. This graduate student is trying to change that.

By Theresa Vargas | The Washington Post

There are glass ceilings that force some people to work harder and longer to reach top jobs within their fields. And then there are steel ceilings, ones that are not penetrable, no matter what skills, education or work ethic a person brings. No amount of striving gets a person past those because they are fortified with laws and policies.
Those are the kind Ewaoluwa Ogundana is telling me about on a recent morning.

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Immigration

Led By Africans, Immigrants Now Make Up 1 of Every 10 Blacks In America

By Nicole Duncan-Smith | Atlanta Black Star

The Black immigrant demographic is growing at lightning speed. Fueled chiefly by an influx of people coming to the continent from Africa, over the past 40 years the number of Black immigrants in the United States has sextupled.

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Immigration

Black immigrants are more likely to be denied US citizenship than White immigrants, study finds

By Giselle Rhoden and Nicole Chavez, CNN

(CNN)Black male immigrants are less likely to be approved for United States citizenship than White immigrants, a new study released this week shows.

Researchers at the University of Southern California analyzed more than 2 million citizenship applications filed by US permanent residents between October 2014 and March 2018, and found racial disparities among those whose applications were approved.

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Immigration

How Two Columbus Nonprofits Help New Americans

Immigrants and refugees from Africa often face a difficult transition, navigating disparate cultures and questions of identity.

By Chris Gaitten | Columbus Monthly

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Immigration

LGBTQ Africans struggle to navigate US asylum process

By Prince Chingarande | Washington Blade

It is no secret that many LGBTQ individuals around the world live in fear of the negative implications that result from identifying outside the limits of cisgenderism and heteronormativity. For Africans living in Africa, this panic is even more pronounced as many are abused, jailed, or even murdered for simply existing as queer.

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Immigration

Bronx Ethiopian Marathoner

By TexasNewsToday

Still, P1 visas may be restrictive, but without them, they simply provide undocumented migrant athletes with at least a little security. For most of these runners, a P1 visa is not a dream come true enough to avoid a nightmare. As a longtime member of WSX named Girma Segni says, “just go to America and you’ll be rewarded.”

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Immigration

Fund honors Sudanese woman, helps immigrants seeking citizenship

ROBERT PORE | The Grand Island Independent

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (AP) — Sometimes an immigrant to this country, seeking citizenship, can teach us or make us realize that not only is the United States a country of immigrants, but also how important and a privilege being an American really is. Recently, the Greater Grand Island Community Foundation and the Multicultural Coalition joined forces to create The Khadija Abdudaim Citizenship Assistance Fund.

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Immigration

Why Nigerians Are Immigrating to Canada in Droves

By Colin Singer | CANADA IMMIGRATION NEWS

In the five years before COVID-19 Nigerian immigration to Canada more than tripled, and a new study shows this “Canada Rush” was driven by a longing for a more prosperous future.

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Immigration

Relief among Africans as Biden signs order to end Trump’s travel ban

By Ted Hesson, Mica Rosenberg, Mimi Dwyer, Kristina Cooke | Reuters

WASHINGTON U.S. President Joe Biden signed half a dozen executive orders on Wednesday to reverse several hardline immigration policies put in place by former President Donald Trump. The executive actions, signed at a ceremony at the White House, included immediately lifting a travel ban on 13 mostly Muslim-majority and African countries, halting construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and reversing a Trump order preventing migrants who are in the United States illegally from being counted for congressional districts.

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Immigration

Trump’s parting gift echos his immigration policies toward Africa

By ANTHONY AKAEZE  |  Baptist News Global

Africans look with dismay on the parting gift U.S. President Donald Trump has given them:  On the last day of 2020, Trump extended the U.S. government’s ban on green cards and work visas, which his administration imposed in April last year as the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe. The new order, like the first one, was meant to ensure that American workers didn’t lose jobs to foreign nationals desiring to migrate to the United States, the administration said. But in Africa, even before the coronavirus outbreak, Trump’s immigration policies had been particularly felt.

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Immigration

African Students Could Be the Hidden Victims of Trump Administration’s Proposed Visa Restrictions

By Greer Jackson | Truth Be Told

Whether by design, coincidence or indifference, the Trump administration’s proposal to tighten restrictions on international students could extract greater tolls on those from Africa, whose numbers are among the least contributing to what the administration asserts is a national security threat, critics of the plan say.

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Immigration

Biden Promises to End Trump’s Muslim and African ‘Travel Ban’. But Its Legacy Will Be Felt for Years

BY SANYA MANSOOR | Time

Afnan Salem’s father, a Somali citizen living in Malaysia, has been waiting three years for United States immigration authorities to allow him to come to Ohio to live with his family. But Trump’s severe travel restrictions on many visas for those with citizenship from more than a dozen predominantly African and Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia, means he is, at least temporarily, barred from entry.

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Immigration

‘Betrayed’ Black asylum seekers say Trump administration is ramping up deportations by force and fraud

By MOLLY O’TOOLE, ANDREA CASTILLO | Los Angeles Times

Owning a small business in Cameroon selling French products was enough to trap the young man between the English-speaking minority and French-speaking majority government in the warring West African nation. In July 2019, he was kidnapped by armed rebels, who tortured him for months in the jungle, demanding $10,000 ransom from his family, he said. Then, shortly after they paid, government forces arrested and tortured him for another month — for “financing” the separatists.

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Immigration

Citizens of 15 African countries will have to post bonds of up to $15,000 to visit the US
Donald Trump

By AFP

The Trump Administration has imposed new rules on citizens of 15 African countries who will now will have to post bonds of up to $15,000 (£11,000) to visit the US, according to a new temporary travel rule which comes into effect on 24 December.

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Immigration

Nigeria leads China for asylum claims to Canada despite Covid-19

By Yomi Kazeem | Quartz Africa

In February, data showed that, for the fifth year in a row, more Nigerians emigrated to Canada in 2019 than the year before. Another marker of that exodus is that the number of Nigerians issued permanent residence (PR) permits by the Canadian government has tripled since 2015. 

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Immigration

Coming to America: It’s Not Like the Movie for African Immigrants

BY FRANCESCA BENTLEY | Pulitzer Center

Democracy, liberty, freedom, equality—these are the fundamental tenets Abdi Nor Iftin hoped would shape his life in America, after leaving Kenya. Upon miraculously winning a direct entryway into the United States via the annual visa lottery, Somali-born Iftin was rapturous over the chance to pursue his piece of the American dream. What he didn’t realize is that being one of the lucky few and becoming an American, particularly a Black American, comes with caveats, some more dangerous than others. 

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Immigration

The Africans Among Them

By Jaylin Ward | Truth Be Told

The woman who said a doctor at an immigrant detention center removed one of her fallopian tubes without her consent doesn’t quite fit the Trump administration’s suggested image of a desperate illegal alien sneaking across the border from Mexico. She is 30 years old, has a 12-year-old American-born daughter, and has lived in the United States for more than two decades.

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Immigration

Canada clarifies on refugee and immigration application process for Nigerians, others

By Chike Olisah | Nairametrics

The Canadian Government in a clarification to Nigerians and other nationals has said that its Embassies, High Commissions, Consulates, Consulates-General or Honorary Consulates, do not accept refugee applications directly from people.

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Immigration

Ghanaian, Boukinabe, Ivorien among immigrants sworn in as newest U.S. citizens at Berkshire, Massachusetts
  • By Heather Bellow | The Berkshire Eagle

Their faces as hopeful as the sun and the shimmering Berkshire hills behind them, a dozen new Americans took the oath that means they now belong. At a coronavirus pandemic-adjusted naturalization ceremony in the Chinese garden at Naumkeag on Wednesday, 12 people from nine countries became U.S. citizens.

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Immigration

Nigeria is the only African country barred from US visa lottery for 2022

By Chike Olisah| Nairametrics

The United States government has barred Nigerian citizens from participating in the US Visa Lottery for 2022. This disclosure is contained in a document, ‘Instructions for the 2022 diversity immigrant visa program (dv-2022)’ obtained from the US Department of States website on Thursday, October 15, 2020.

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Immigration

Cameroonian asylum seekers fear deportation means death – Los Angeles Times

By KATE MORRISSEY | The Los Angeles Times

Asylum seekers from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo are raising the alarm that U.S. immigration officials plan to deport them on a chartered flight as soon as Tuesday morning to countries where they believe they will be immediately arrested and killed.

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Immigration

Protests grow over pending deportations to Cameroon, amid abuse allegations

“We ran from our countries to be protected here. Now, when they are deporting us, our lives will be at risk.”

By Dianne Solis | The Dallas Morning News

A national protest is widening over the pending deportations of dozens of Cameroon-born immigrants who lawyers and other advocates say were abused in U.S. detention centers and could face death if sent back to their homeland.

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Immigration

The United States Must Not Deport People to Cameroon

By Amnesty International

Amnesty International USA calls upon the Trump administration to refrain from deporting people to Cameroon, as the administration schedules deportations this week from Alexandria Airport in Louisiana. The organization is also concerned about the threat of imminent deportation of Cameroonians now being held at the Prairieland detention center in Texas.

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Immigration

US mulls two-year limit for many African student visas

By BBC News

Proposed new US immigration measures could leave many African students in the country having to reapply for visas in the middle of their degree courses. A plan issued by the Department for Homeland Security (DHS), that is now up for discussion, outlines changes to student visas that have previously been issued for the duration of a course.

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Immigration

Stories of Welcome: Congolese refugees are embraced by their new community in Boise, Idaho

By International Rescue Committee

Jacqueline Uwumeremyi fled from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Africa because of violence. After facing constant xenophobia because of her refugee status, she and her five children were finally resettled in Boise, Idaho, in 2018.

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