Posted on: Tuesday, February 15, 2005

EDITORIAL
Immigration plight needs swift remedy

Like everything else, understandable tightening of visa and immigration rules after the attacks of 9/11 turned out to have unintended and unhappy consequences.

As reported Sunday by Frank Oliveri and Vicki Viotti, another situation has emerged that goes way beyond inconvenience or frustration: It is literally a matter of life and death.

The authors report that individuals, particularly from the Philippines, who want to travel to the United States for organ donation are being routinely rejected.

That's because they cannot offer convincing proof that they intend to, and will, return to their home country once the procedure is over.

For instance, St. Francis Hospital here used to process several temporary visa applications a year for purposes of organ donation. That flow has virtually stopped.

National security is clearly an important objective. But there must be a way to slice through the red tape when lives are, or may be, at stake.

Oliveri and Viotti report two likely avenues for improvement.

The first is to modify the existing law that requires an assumption, on the part of immigration officers, that the applicant intends to remain in the United States no matter what they say.

Hawai'i Reps. Neil Abercrombie and Ed Case are pushing for a change in the law that would eliminate that presumption requirement when the travel is for legitimate family emergencies.

This makes excellent sense and should quickly be adopted.

A second avenue is a little-known provision of the Homeland Security Act that allows for something called "Humanitarian Parole" in cases of urgent humanitarian need or when a significant public benefit would be realized.

This would appear to fit the bill perfectly, but again there are bureaucratic problems to overcome. The first is that this option is not well publicized and is not known even to people working in the field.

That will change.

The other is that humanitarian parole is not an automatic given. Essentially, it is an option for "extraordinary" cases where the applicant is otherwise inadmissable.

The Catch-22 problem here is that although most of the potential organ donors may be legally admissible, they simply cannot come up with convincing documentation that they can and will return home.

That's why a change in the law covering presumption in humanitarian cases is so important.

The number of cases involving potential organ donations is small in the context of the overall burden faced by overworked immigration officials. But while it is small, it represents real lives that could be saved or lost depending on an immigration decision.