The United States is popularly known as a country of immigrants. The English-speaking Protestant Christians who discovered the country, however, have not always greeted other communities. The disdained have changed over a period of time.
Earlier, non-English-speaking northern Europeans were despised. Then it was French Canadians, the famine Irish, Catholic Italians, anarchist Germans, fleeing Jews, Asian workers faced by other immigrants, and Spanish-speaking Latin Americans.
At the outset, the United States is in its second great wave of immigration with the onset of 19th century. The first wave was primarily Europeans. It enabled limitations on immigration in the 1920s. Relaxed rules in the 1960s allowed the current wave, made up basically of Latin Americans and Asians.
Immigrants are comprised of about 14 percent of the U.S. population: more than forty-three million out of a total of about 323 million people, as per Census Bureau data. Together, immigrants and their U.S.-born children make up about 27 percent of U.S. inhabitants. The figure shows a stable increase from 1970,when there were fewer than ten million immigrants in the United States. But there are proportionally fewer immigrants today than in 1890, when foreign-born residents comprised 15 percent of the population.
Illegal immigration - The unreported population is nearly eleven million and has levelled off since the2008 economic debacle, which cause many to return to their home countries and disheartened others from coming to the United States. In 2017, Customs and Border Protection reported a 26 percent reduction in the number of people apprehended or stopped at the southern border from the year before, which some attribute to the Trump administration’s policies. At the same time, arrests of suspected undocumented immigrants rose by 40 percent.
More than half of the undocumented have resided in the country for more than a decade; almost one third are the parents of U.S.-born children. Central American asylum seekers, many of whom are minors who have escaped violence in their home countries, make up a rising share of those who snap the U.S.-Mexico border. These immigrants have diverse legal rights from Mexican nationals in the United States: under a 2008 anti-human trafficking law, minors from non-contiguous countries have a right to a deportation hearing before being returned to their home countries.
The United States permitted nearly 1.2 million individuals [PDF] legal permanent residency in 2016,more than two-thirds of whom were accepted based on family reunification.
Considering the complexity of U.S immigration law and related sections, a majority of people looking to migrate to US rely on the expertise and skills of a US immigration lawyer in London. These lawyers possess specialized knowledge regarding U.S immigration law and provide full-fledged help to their clients from filing the application to seeking approvals at different intervals.
In order to better your chance of getting visa approval, it is important to count on the expertise of a reputed and experienced US Immigration Lawyer London who can listen to your case carefully and suggest the best way forward.