Immigration news

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has updated its mission statement to ‘welcome immigrants’. The new mission statement replaces a Trump-era version that controversially removed the ‘nation of immigrants’ label. The latest version describes the United States as a ‘nation of welcome and possibility’.

 

In an internal memo to employees, USCIS director Ur Jaddou said that the new mission statement ‘better reflects the Biden administration’s commitment to a US immigration system that is accessible and humane’. 

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that Home Secretary, Priti Patel, can continue to charge more than £1,000 for each child application made for British citizenship. The Court’s decision has sparked outrage among UK immigration lawyers and immigrant advocates following a four-year-long battle to get the fees scrapped.

 

Amid huge staff shortages caused primarily by the coronavirus pandemic, many US hospitals are looking overseas for healthcare workers. The push among America’s hospitals to hire from overseas comes at a time when an ‘unusually high’ number of US green cards are available for foreign professionals, including nurses, who want to move to the United States.

 

UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, recently took to Twitter to ‘celebrate’ what she described as a ‘new fair but firm UK immigration plan to protect the British public’ after reportedly securing agreements with Albania, India and Serbia. The most recent agreement, with Serbia, was reached in January 2022.

 

The UK’s pact with the Balkans nation will mean the quicker removal of Serbian nationals deemed to have violated UK immigration laws and will ‘protect Britain’s borders and communities’, according to Patel. 

The US Department of State (DoS) has hit Belarus with US visa restrictions, citing the ‘repression of athletes abroad including the attempted forced repatriation of a sprinter at the Tokyo Olympic Games’, according to a report published by The Guardian. 

 

The restrictions come after Belarusian sprinter, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, refused to board a flight back home in 2021 when she was removed from the Games against her will following a public complaint she made about her international team coaches.

The UK’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has been accused of ‘misleading’ the public over the UK immigration crisis in the Channel. According to an MP, Patel has wrongly been labelling migrant Channel crossings as ‘illegal’. In December 2021, several judges ruled that refugees attempting to reach a British port or rescued at sea had not committed a crime.