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Three alleged members of an international alien smuggling scheme were charged Tuesday with smuggling hundreds of aliens from China into the United States. The charges stem from an investigation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

HSI agents arrested Hak Tung Lam, 44, of Flushing, N.Y., Wen Wo Lam, 43, of Staten Island, N.Y., and Ying Yang, 30, of Flushing, for allegedly participating in smuggling more than 450 aliens into the United States. Hak Tung Lam, an immigration attorney who practiced in Manhattan, Wen Wo Lam, and Ying Yang allegedly served as legal advisors to alien smugglers by recommending ports of entry, advising on methods of avoiding detection, filing false immigration documents, and obtaining the release of detained aliens through fraud.

“As an officer of the court, Hak Tung Lam swore to uphold the laws and constitution of the United States. Instead, he used his training and education to allegedly perpetrate one of the most wide-ranging criminal fraud schemes that this office has ever investigated solely for his personal financial gain,” said James T. Hayes, Jr., special agent in charge of HSI in New York. “HSI will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to take advantage of this country’s legal immigration system for their own benefit and at the expense of others.”

While many gay couples in New York tie the knot on Sunday, when same-sex marriage becomes legal in the state, Ashley Abraham-Hughes and her wife, Corinne, will be watching the festivities from the other side of the Atlantic.

That’s because since U.S. federal law still does not recognize same-sex marriage, and since Corinne is British, the couple was forced to move to Britain, where their union — they wed in Connecticut in 2009 — is legal.

“While I do still love the U.S. and I always will, I am very resentful of the fact that I was effectively forced to become an expat,” said Abraham-Hughes, a 27-year-old who grew up in Pittsford in western New York and now lives in Manchester. “It’s absolutely ridiculous, and I just think the thinking on this whole issue is completely wrong.”
The couple’s plight is one likely facing many of the estimated 36,000 binational gay couples in the U.S., where the foreign partner in the relationship can face deportation and a 10-year ban from returning to America if they don’t already have or find a legal way to stay in the country.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cNDqprntj0

Beginning March 15, 2011 all Change of Address, (Form AR-11) and Alien’s Change of Address, (Form AR-11 SR) will change filing locations. Now, you must file all change of address forms at the following address:

DHS/USCIS

Harrisonburg File Storage Facility

This article by Attorney Habib Hasbini will shed the light on some of the most recent developments regarding California interpretation of employer’s duty to provide employees mandated meal and rest breaks under California Labor Code section 512 and Title 8, California Code of Regulations section 11010 et seq.

An issue that potentially could shift the balance of powers in favor of the employers in California is currently pending before California Supreme Court in Brinker Restaurant Corporation v. Hohnbaum (2008) 85 Cal. Rptr. 3d 688.

The crux issue is how California employers could satisfy their meal and rest periods obligations. The underlying controversy is whether employers need only “authorize” their employees to take meal and rest periods or employers must “ensure” their employees take their meal and rest periods. Interpreting the law one way or the other will have significant implications on the vast wage and hour litigation and class action lawsuits in California.

Immigration law is important and that is all that we cover most of the time. But our immigrant readers, may be facing other legal challenges from time to time. So we rely on our lawyer friends from across the country, to provide guest articles and reports. This week we are proud to feature Attorney Habib Hasbini’s Employment Law expertise.

Many of our clients and Blog readers are immigrants on work visas. Employment Law and Immigration often go side by side, so the info presented in this article should be very useful to our readers. We often hear the term overtime as it relates to employment practices, but what is Overtime?

An employer may dictate the employee’s work schedule and hours and legally require the employee work overtime. The employer may discipline an employee, up to and including termination, if the employee refuses to work scheduled overtime.

The US National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for parts of New York, New Jersey and other states along the east coast of the United States as a major winter storm bears down on the area on Sunday.

A band of frigid weather was snaking up the East Coast on Sunday, promising blizzards and a foot of snow for New York City and New England, while several states made emergency declarations as the storm caused crashes on slick roads.Heavy snow and blizzards in parts of North Carolina were making driving conditions difficult, and there were dozens of traffic accidents.

North Carolina authorities reported a fatal traffic accident near Charlotte.The North Carolina Highway Patrol said late on Saturday that most of the roads in and around Asheville were either covered or partially covered with snow and ice.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released a revised Form N-648, Medical Certification for Disability Exceptions, for individuals with disabilities who are seeking exceptions from the English and civics requirements for naturalization. USCIS will shortly be offering public information sessions on the revised form for medical professionals and other stakeholders.

The law requires naturalization applicants to demonstrate proficiency of U.S. civics and the English language. Individuals with certain disabilities or impairments may request exceptions from either or both of these statutory requirements. Form N-648 was revised following extensive dialogue among USCIS subject-matter experts, customers, medical professionals, community-based organizations and legal practitioners. The revisions are intended to clarify the requirements and instructions and to standardize the process. The form enables medical professionals to provide information that is necessary for USCIS to understand the medical professional’s diagnosis and its relationship to the naturalization requirements. The Form N-648 and the accompanying guidance will assist USCIS adjudicators as they review each form.

In January, USCIS will begin hosting public information sessions to help medical professionals and other stakeholders understand the changes to Form N-648. Online videos will be available to explain how best to use the form. The interim guidance on the revised Form N-648 for USCIS personnel is currently available for public comment at http://www.uscis.gov/outreach.

In the spirit of the holidays, wanted to share this great post by Eleanor Pelta from AILA

A client of mine is in a real quandary. The client has a major project with an urgent deliverable that requires a key employee to travel to the U.S. urgently. Because the company has a crack operations staff, they were on this issue early on, and we filed an L-1B petition months before the travel was necessary. However, current processing times being what they are, we had to upgrade the case to Premium Processing recently in order to have any chance of obtaining an approval before the start date. Notwithstanding our extensive documentation, we recently received a massive Request for Evidence and I must confess, our office has been struggling with a response. In the interest of getting something in on a timely basis, the client has authorized me to share details about the petition with the AILA membership for the purpose of tapping into the collective brilliance of the immigration bar to put together a winning response. Here are select portions of the RFE. Any comments or suggestions are most welcome.

Petitioner: Clausiseverywhere.com

People applying for tourist visas for the United States in Qatar have greater chance of accessing them than in any other GCC country. Figures released by the US Administration suggest that only 3.2 percent requests for US tourist visas made to the US embassy in Doha were turned down in the FY 2010.

A US government website citing tourist visa (B-Visas) refusal details country-wise said the data were preliminary through September 30, 2010. As for Qatar, the data show this was the lowest percentage of tourist visa refusal in the entire GCC region. The next Gulf state with a lower percentage of rejection was Kuwait (3.6 percent). Bahrain ranked third with a 4.1 percent rejection rate while the percentage for the largest GCC state Saudi Arabia was six.

As for Oman and the UAE, the percentages were higher-8.7 and 9.7, respectively. The GCC states ranked much above their peers in the Arab world like Egypt, Yemen, Sudan and even Iraq. The rate of B-visa rejection in these countries was more than 30 percent.