Religious Visa Workers Fear Program Overhaul

Some Groups Critical of Proposed Regulations Intended to Reduce Fraud

Rameshbabu Potukuchi, left, and Venkatesh Rajangam, both in the United States on religious worker visas, perform a morning offering to the deities at Sri Siva Vishnu temple. (By Michel Du Cille -- The Washington Post)

At the Sri Siva Vishnu temple in Lanham, 11 Hindu priests recite mantras before intricately chiseled altars to deities carved by expert temple stonemasons. They offer the idols lentils and rice prepared in a small kitchen by Haridas Padithaya, 38, who looks like a line cook in his stained T-shirt but who was trained from childhood to cook for the deities by his father, who learned from his father before him.

All -- the priests, the masons, the cook -- owe their work at the temple to religious worker visas, which gave them passage from their native India to suburban Maryland jobs.

"The sustenance of the temple depends as much on the priest as on these two," said temple trustee Doddanna N. Rajashekar, referring to the cooks and masons as he stood in the temple's incense-perfumed entrance hall on a recent morning.

But proposed regulations for the religious worker visa program, which the U.S. government says is rife with fraud, have kindled fears at Sri Siva Vishnu and religious organizations nationwide that workers they depend on might be shut out. Scientologists, Mormons, Jews and other religious practitioners have united in outcry over changes that they say would be burdensome and discriminate against legitimate religious workers such as Hindu stonemasons, causing serious staff shortages and violating religious freedom.

"They looked for ways to make the use of the [visa] process completely impossible," said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta lawyer and president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "There's a hostility that's unjust even in the light of one or two fraud cases."

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that drafted the proposals, said officials are weighing public comments as they consider new regulations, which are expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

"It doesn't mean that we're trying to restrict occupations, denominations or anything else," spokesman Bill Wright said. "We want to make this fair across the board. That's why we want to hear from people, and we are."

The proposals come as tensions over immigration and security have prompted the government to tighten its grip on who enters the country. Meanwhile, religious organizations that increasingly serve immigrant populations cite a need to bring in workers with the spiritual, cultural and linguistic expertise to serve them.

Religious worker visas are used to bring in Catholic nuns, Hebrew teachers, Muslim imams and Baptist church administrators, among other workers. In 2006, more than 11,000 of the visas were issued, most to natives of Korea, Israel and India.

Religious organizations say no other visa category fits their workers as well, and they praise the current system for being relatively hassle-free: Religious workers get visas at U.S. consulates abroad or ports of entry. But the process might have invited fraud, immigration officials say.

A 2005 Department of Homeland Security review of 220 religious worker petitions found that nearly a third had been falsified. Some visas were issued to people who said they planned to work at nonexistent facilities, the report said. Last fall, federal immigration agents arrested 33 Pakistanis who held religious worker visas but who, in many cases, had no theological training and were working secular jobs.

The changes would require employers to file petitions in the United States before consulates could issue visas and to renew the visas more frequently. They would give notice of possible site inspections. Religious organizations say increased paperwork would make the process costly and cumbersome. Widespread site visits, rather than just to those whose applications raised red flags, would cause major delays, they say.