The all stone Hindu Temple being built on the beautiful island of Kauai, was started 32 years ago and is being built solely with the hands of masons using ancient long ago ways to carve the stone into a landmark that will be viewed by people vacationing on Kauai for thousands of years to come. That is if it is finished.

Six shipli, the specially trained masons, who were set to help with work on the temple were denied visas, due to new rules put in effect by Homeland Security Office which could effect many different religious endeavors worldwide.

‘Within Hinduism, building temples is a religious occupation,” said Sannyasin Arumugaswami, managing editor of Hinduism Today magazine and a disciple at the Kauai monastery. ”These kinds of workers that can do this, they don’t exist in the United States.”

The law will void out much of the religious-worker visa program established in 1990 to help short-handed religious organizations employ foreign workers. Each year there are 10,000 to 15,000 people granted these Visas.

Homeland Security Office of Fraud Detection and National Security released a report saying they found a 33 percent rate of fraud in these applications. Thus they have made changes insisting that the needs of religious organizations have not been discounted.

”We want to make sure we’re addressing our vulnerabilities. The proposed changes strengthen the program,” said Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The new requirements and definitions have given rise to protests from Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Mormon and Mennonite groups.

Hindu and other religious officials say that the requirements and definitions are written from an almost exclusively religious perspective. For example the shilpis who would work on the Hindu temple aren’t covered under the new definitions of “religious worker.”

Along with not being defined as a “religious worker” the new rules require applicants to prove they are affiliated with the denomination of the house of worship they will be working at but they don’t recognize that interdenominaÂtional Hindu temples are common in America.

The Christian organizations stand to be impaired as well by the new regulations. Jeffrey Apthorp of the Bible Broadcasting Network has asked that rule makers ”broaden the terminology regarding denominations to include highly public religious ministries that elect not to officially affiliate with a recognized denomination in order to refrain from being exclusionary.”

Other changes would shorten the visa from three years to one year thus creating a huge amount of time that workers would have to spend filing paperwork and possibly being called away before they could finish the job they had come to do. They could also deprive the religious communities of the workers they need to do missionary work, lead services and perform other important tasks.