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With the U.S. Government shutdown looming, many are wondering how immigration will be directly impacted by U.S. Congress’ failure to pass a budget bill to keep our services in operation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has passed on information regarding key services that will be directly impacted by the government shutdown. These key services directly affect business immigration the most with respect to employers being able to hire foreign workers because of the involvement of the Dept. of Labor in that process. The Dept of Labor put out this notice to practitioners and individuals who will be affected by the government shutdown:

“OFLC functions are not “excepted” from a shutdown and its employees would be placed in furlough status should a lapse in appropriated funds occur. Consequently, in the event of a government shutdown, OFLC will neither accept nor process any applications or related materials (such as audit responses), it receives, including Labor Condition Applications, Applications for Prevailing Wage Determination, Applications for Temporary Employment Certification, or Applications for Permanent Employment Certification. OFLC’s web site, including the iCERT Visa Portal System, would become static and unable to process any requests or allow authorized users to access their online accounts.”

Basically, the statement from the DOL is that many of the services that business immigration clients use to allow individuals to work in the U.S. will be placed on hold until the budget is resolved and appropriations are made to allow those functions to work again. As of tomorrow, no further services by iCERT and PERM’s websites will put a lot of those cases on hold until the U.S. Congress has resolved its budgetary concerns.

The question prompted in this article is on the minds of many individuals. For those who are interested in immigration services, it is hard to fathom that the U.S. Government could shut down and no longer provide any immigration services for those who want to get visas to come to the U.S., those who have visas that need renewing, or others who have different immigration matters to address. Well rest assured that the government “shutting down” does not mean that all of its services will cease functioning while the U.S. Congress resolves its budget. In fact, many agencies and government functions are exempt from a shutdown. All government agencies that are not funded through annual congressional appropriations will not be affected. In addition, there are certain functions deemed “excepted” by the federal government that may continue in an absence of appropriations. Such functions include those necessary for emergencies involving “the safety of human life or the protection of property,” and those necessary for activities essential to national security, including the conduct of foreign affairs essential to national security.

Now if you are wondering what will be affected by the government shut down the most, these agencies, groups, services are affected the most:

1. Washington, D.C. – The city of Washington, D.C. will face limited sanitation services while the government resolves its budget issues. In addition, all Department of Motor Vehicles locations would be closed as well as all of the city’s public libraries. Washington’s Department of Transportation “will be operating with a skeletal crew, so routine maintenance and repairs will cease.” Other departments, including police, fire and public schools, will remain open.

The head of a now out-of-business Los Angeles law firm was sentenced Thursday to 10 months in prison for his role in orchestrating a lengthy employment visa fraud scheme where the illicit profits were used to purchase several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of vacant cemetery plots and grave monuments.

Joseph Wai-Man Wu, 53, former president of the East West Law Group, pleaded guilty in August 2011 to one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud, one count of money laundering and one count of obstruction of justice. As part of a plea agreement reached in February, Wu surrendered a portion of his profits derived from the visa fraud scheme, forfeiting to the government 30 vacant cemetery plots and 20 grave monuments, all of which were purchased with proceeds from the scam. Wu used the cemetery plot purchasing scheme to launder some of the money he unlawfully obtained through the visa fraud scheme. The grave plots will now be sold at public auction and the proceeds given to the U.S. Treasury.

Wu’s sentencing is the latest development in a 2 ½-year investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) that also involved the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Fraud Detection and National Security Unit.

An operation by federal immigration agents in Detroit set off protests from Latino and church groups on Wednesday after the officers stopped two illegal immigrants as they were dropping off their children at school.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement followed both immigrants, who are from Mexico, as they left their homes in southwest Detroit on Tuesday morning, officials from the agency said. Both men had children in their vehicles.

One of the men, Jorge Hernandez, said he was pulled over by agents in unmarked cars across the street from his 4-year-old daughter’s school, the Manuel Reyes Vistas Nuevas Head Start center in southwest Detroit. Mr. Hernandez was questioned but eventually released.

The other man, Hector Orozco Villa, told immigrant advocates that he had been detained by agents near the elementary school of two of his children, Cesar Chavez Academy, a few blocks from the Head Start center. Mr. Orozco remains in the custody of the agency, which is known as ICE.

The presence of the immigration agents has spread alarm among arriving parents and children in the Latino neighborhood, school officials said. More than 100 people rallied on Wednesday to protest, according to a report in The Detroit News, saying the immigration agency had broken an earlier promise to avoid arrests near schools and other community gathering points.

“It is very alarming to me to have this happen during the rush hour of people taking their children to school,” said Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic state representative who attended the rally. “We are really worried about the impact on these United States citizen children.” Several of Mr. Hernandez’s and Mr. Orozco’s children were born in the United States.

The incident revealed the raw sensitivities in some immigrant communities as federal agents are required to carry out the increasingly complex deportation policy of the Obama administration. Agents have been instructed to focus on capturing illegal immigrants who are convicted criminals or repeat immigration violators, and to avoid detaining those who have committed no serious crimes and have strong family ties to the United States. Determining which individuals fall in either category has been a difficult balance for ICE to maintain while carrying out the directive.

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The federal government will formally instruct immigration agents to consider same-sex relationships the same way as heterosexual relationships in deciding whether a person should be deported.

The announcement by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano comes as welcome news to some Democrats in Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who had voiced concerns already that informal instructions to do so could be ignored by immigration agents.

Napolitano said on Thursday she would issue the instruction in writing to immigration agents. The administration had only informally indicated same-sex relationships would be taken into account when making deportation decisions.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law that will allow hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and vetoed another that would have restricted sheriffs from helping federal authorities detain undocumented Californians for potential deportation.

The driver’s license measure will allow illegal immigrants to drive legally in California if they qualify for a new federal work permit program. The Obama administration’s executive order known as Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) allows illegal immigrants who came to the United States before they were 16, and who are now 30 or younger and meet certain other criteria, to obtain work permits.

“Gov. Brown believes the federal government should pursue comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship,” said Brown spokesman Gil Duran. “President Obama has recognized the unique status of these students, and making them eligible to apply for driver’s licenses is an obvious next step.”

A while back we posted on Alabama’s immigration bill which would allow schools to check the immigration status of new students in its public schools. Part of Alabama’s immigration law that ordered public schools to check the citizenship of new students was ruled unconstitutional Monday by the federal appeals court that also said police in that state and Georgia could demand papers from criminal suspects they had detained.

The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Alabama schools provision wrongly singled out children who were in the country illegally. Alabama was the only state that passed such a requirement; the 11th Circuit previously had blocked that part of the law from being enforced.

Judges said fear of the law “significantly deters undocumented children from enrolling in and attending school.”

The United States is favored to win the most medals of any country in the 2012 London Olympics, continuing a long tradition of dominance in the Summer Olympics. A survey of all the summer Olympics shows that the United States consistently finishes in the top three, and has the most first-place medal count finishes of any country in the world. Following 1896, when the United States finished second to Greece, Americans would dominate most of the 20th century, routinely doubling the medal count of the second place nation. With the exception of a few Olympics, when Germany, the Soviet Union, and most recently China, rose to prominence, the Summer Olympics have been a time for Americans to truthfully proclaim, “We’re number one!”
The real question is: What explains this tradition of American Olympic excellence over the years? Going strictly by population numbers, China and India should win the most medals since they have the largest populations in the world. Both China and India have over four times as many potential Olympians to choose from, which in theory should give them an advantage. China did win the most gold medals in 2008, but the United States won the overall medal count that year by ten. This year, the United States is projected to match China’s gold medal count, while also winning the overall medal count. In contrast, India only won three medals in 2008 and is not projected to win many more in 2012, proving that it takes much more than a large population to succeed in the Olympics.

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In new statements regarding Obama’s immigration policy, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended President Barack Obama’s decision to stop deporting many illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and letting them apply for work permits. “Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a strong and sensible manner,” Napolitano said in prepared remarks submitted to the House Judiciary Committee. “But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case.”
Obama announced in June that he was easing immigration laws by executive order for many illegal immigrants brought to the country as children. Under the policy change, illegal immigrants would be eligible to avoid deportation if they can prove they are 30 years old or younger, have been in the United States at least five years, arrived before they turned 16, graduated from a U.S. high school or earned a GED or are currently in school and don’t have a criminal record. They can also apply for a work permit that will be good for two years, with no limit on how many times it can be renewed.

The policy change could affect more than a million illegal immigrants and partially achieves the goals of the so-called DREAM Act,the legislation that was to provide a pathway to citizenship for many young illegal immigrants.

Napolitano has said DHS has broad authority to use discretion when deciding which illegal immigrants to deport, and said Thursday that the recent Supreme Court decision striking down much of Arizona’s strict immigration law backs up that authority. “Indeed as the Supreme Court noted in its recent decision on the Arizona immigration law, `a special feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials,'” Napolitano said.

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The Pew Research Center survey and accompanying report says Asian-Americans now make up 5.8 percent of the nation’s population, up from less than 1 percent in 1965, when the modern immigration wave from Asia began.

Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S. In 2010, 36 percent of new immigrants to the U.S. were Asian, up from 19 percent in 2000, according to Census figures.

The Pew report, titled “The Rise of Asian Americans,” finds that Asians are the highest-income and best-educated racial group in the U.S. Nearly half (49 percent) of Asian-American adults have a college degree, and they boast a median annual household income of $66,000 (versus the U.S. median of $49,800).