USA Green Card Immigration Blog

Doing away with the `widow’s penalty’ – Editorials – MiamiHerald.com.

With a 79-19 Senate vote, Congress has corrected one of the more draconian immigration policies to be visited upon foreign-born spouses of American citizens.

Called the “widow’s penalty,”‘ the policy allows immigration officials to annul spouses’ applications for permanent residency when their American husbands or wives die before the marriage is two years old.

The new immigration measure will allow foreigners married to U.S. citizens to apply for permanent residency without waiting two years, and the death of a spouse won’t be a determining factor in the outcome.

In spite of recession, there has been a constant rise in Massachusetts’s immigrant population. The rise in immigrants in this state is in contrast to the national trend, which shows a decrease in foreign-born residents after so many decades.

According to the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau on 3 million households nationwide, the number of immigrants rose to 937,200 last year from 913,957 the previous year, States such as California, Florida, and Rhode Island on the other hand, have seen a decrease in the immigrant population.

So the increase in the immigrant population in the Bay State, though a modest 2.5%, has bewildered researchers and advocates. In Framingham alone, the rise in immigrants was almost a quarter of the total town’s population, much to the surprise of researchers.

Researchers have put across various theories to explain this trend. The performance of the state’s economy than other states and the exclusion of the departures from Massachusetts by the survey are some of the reasons cited. Some point out that, immigrants in Massachusetts who account for 14 percent of the state’s population are highly educated and are less likely to leave as they have an advantage even if the economy is not faring well.

Moreover, the population of illegal immigrants is also very less when compared to other states. Only one in five Massachusetts immigrants is here illegally. This is well below the national average of one in three.

Other reason for the immigrant influx in Massachusetts is the welcoming environment. For instance, Governor Deval Patrick has ordered a yearlong study on ways to integrate immigrants.

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University is of the opinion that the availability of work was one of the main reasons that immigrants stayed in Massachusetts.