Letter to the community leaders and organization leaders

Dear Community Organizers/Community Leaders,

I am currently serving as President of the Pakistani-American Public Affairs Committee. Our community has reached out to us over the past many months stating about some of the challenges with respect to the security clearance and the name check challenges.

This issue has been affecting a large number of communities including anyone applying for green card or naturalizing citizens.

According to the Ombudsman's office for the CIS, this was the single largest issue that has affected the immigration process and the largest number of complaints and queries that were sent to the ombudsman's office in 2007. It was felt that majority of this process was held back because of the name check process and security clearance with the FBI.

Working with many Members of the Congresses office, we have not been able to expedite or identify ways of solving this difficult challenge. It is our understanding that this issue affects primarily to certain communities and our feeling is that it is primarily affecting the Muslim Americans more than others.

At this time, the Pakistani-American Public Affairs Committee is focusing and has developed a committee to work on this. The committees recommendations have included the follows.

a. Develop a large broad-based coalition and bring this issue to the forefront within the fellow organizations, which include:
(i) Other Pakistani-American organizations.
(ii) American-Muslim organizations.
(iii) Immigrants community organization.
(iv) Lawyers and Immigration Lawyers Association.

b. Developing information and database on these issues with respect to not only getting an information on the number of such cases pending, to the demographics of these cases and identifying differential treatments if there are any in such cases.

c. Getting anecdotal stories to highlight how lives of immigrants, who are going through the legal processes, are being impacted with such significant delays.

d. We feel once we have adequate information and adequate base and group/community organizations working around this issue, we should be able to reach out to our respective Members of Congress and in the near term start with a short-term goal of bringing this to the attention of the Department of Homeland Securities Congressional Committee and consider having a hearing on this issue.

As per the Ombudsman's office for CIS, the status quo is not acceptable and I want to invite you to join us in this important responsibility or if you are already working on this issue and far ahead of us in this challenge, we would like to join in so collectively we can make a larger difference. Please send me an email with your organizations name, your contact info on this current email or the email below.

We look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,


M. Saud Anwar, M.D.
President of PAKPAC
202 558 6404
President@pakpac.net