Our office receives many inquiries from start-up companies that want to hire employees under H-1B visa. As the H-1B season has begun, we would like to provide our readers with the updates and important considerations for this category of H-1B visas.
The following article was prepared by attorney Ekaterina Powell from our office and was featured as the cover article in VOICE, the American Immigration Lawyers Association publication.
Recently, the Israeli government approved a proposal from Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar for American investors who wish to visit Israel on a more frequent basis. It is a new arrangement that is part of a recent program to allow Israelis seeking to invest in the U.S. and who wish to stay to develop and manage their business, will be given similar special conditions.
The approval of the plan by the American embassy in Israel is conditioned on the granting of benefits to American investors in Israel. According to this plan, Israeli investors who obtain approval from American authorities will be offered a fast track entry into the US and will receive E2 visas that allow stays of up to two years in the United States.
This new plan will be implemented within the next few months, after several legislative amendments required to complete it are made. Following the approval of the plan, Sa’ar said that the “US is a major economic partner for Israel. It is the main source of foreign investment in Israel and is at the same time one of the major destinations for investments by Israelis. Investor visas constitute another stage in the United States-Israel Free Trade Agreement and will promote the economic cooperation of the two countries”, Sa’ar added.
It is that time of year where companies and individuals are preparing to send their cases to US Immigration to apply for an H-1B visa. Last year the entire cap was filled in the first week of filing, meaning many people were left out and could not get an H-1b visa. When thinking about how many people could not get jobs through this process, an organization that has studied the affects of H-1b visas on the market came out with a job loss calculator, which estimates the numbers of American jobs lost due to the lack of H-1b visas. Compete America’s calculator estimates that 500,000 new U.S. jobs could have been created this year absent outdated restrictions on H-1B visas. From another perspective, according to Compete America, the 2.37 million new payroll jobs created in 2013 might have been increased by 21 percent under a different H-1B scheme.
So what does this calculator really highlight? Well, the calculator clearly shows the fact that higher-skilled immigrant workers impact the U.S. economy, helping push cutting-edge innovation, which then creates more jobs for everyone. According to a new report by Standard & Poor’s, “Adding Skilled Labor to America’s Melting Pot Would Heat Up U.S. Economic Growth,” which means highly skilled immigrants help create jobs for American workers, not take them away like many who stand opposed to increasing the cap would claim. Higher skilled workers actually complement U.S. workers’ skills instead of competing with them, and are more likely to start a new business than U.S.-born workers, which further increases innovation and productivity, according to S&P. Research from the National Foundation for American Policy suggests the hiring of each H-1B worker actually creates employment for 7.5 workers in small to mid-sized technology companies.
The insufficient number of H-1B visas goes to a deeper problem of having an outdated system that cannot respond to the demands of an ever-changing economy. Absent a few years of temporary increases, the cap on H-1B visas for skilled workers with bachelor’s degrees has been set at 65,000 per year for more than 20 years. Since demand far exceeds supply, the cap runs out every year, which last year’s cap was filled the first week it was open.
By Andrew Desposito (an Irish-American immigration attorney)
While many will be celebrating the holiday wearing green clothing, eating or drinking green food and celebrating with some Irish music, today is also a day for many Irish-Americans to remember why this day is celebrated. Most Irish-Americans in the United States are descendants of immigrants who came to the U.S. seeking better lives. It is about our ancestors leaving that country, often in bitter circumstances, and risking everything on a hazardous journey and being met with fierce hostility and scorn. It is about immigrants struggling, and mostly succeeding, in their new life, or making success possible for their children and grandchildren.
It is a story that should describe all newcomers to America. Before the mass exodus from Ireland provoked by the great potato famine of the 1840s, new arrivals to North America were either settlers or slaves. The Catholic Gaelic Irish were the first cohort consistently labeled as “immigrants” in the modern, quasi-pejorative sense, and their experience established a stereotype, a template, applied ever since to whichever national or ethnic group happened to be the latest impoverished arrivals: French-Canadians, Chinese, Italians, Eastern Europeans, or Latinos. But thinking about the contributions of Irish-Americans to the U.S., their story is the same as many others who immigrate to the U.S. with hopes and dreams of a better life. In time, many Irish-Americans rose through the ranks of business and politics to reach the heights of our society (think President John F Kennedy, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, etc). The U.S. is a place where any who come has a chance of doing great things.
House Republicans took aim at President Barack Obama’s immigration policy’s that allows young undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States.
The ENFORCE Act, which passed 233 to 181, is not about immigration exclusively. The bill goes after Obama for alleged overreach on a variety of issues, including the Affordable Healthcare Act, education and drug laws. The bill would allow Congress to sue the executive branch for allegedly failing to enforce the law, which could lead to key policies protecting some undocumented immigrants to being dismantled.
This move stands in stark contrast to the immigration principles put forward by House Republican leadership in January and moves further away from the Democrat-controlled Senate actions to try to pass immigration reform. While those guidelines called for young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children — often referred to as Dreamers — to receive eventual citizenship, this bill could end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that keeps the same people from being deported.
For those who will go through the marriage petition process, the very end of the process comes at the interview for your green card. During the interview the immigration officer asks the beneficiary if they have ever lied to them for an immigration benefit. This question tends to come early on in the interview because anything said during the interview will then be taken into consideration regarding that question, by which they swore under oath that they have not done. The seriousness and consequence that this question poses can be applied even years after the interview happened.
Recently a client of ours was issued a Request for Documents from the USCIS field office that held the client’s marriage interview more than years ago. The request stated that our client was made inadmissible because it stated she misrepresented herself at the marriage interview when she said she worked for a company that was a “non-existent, fictitious shell company”. While this allegation was not true of our client, since they were never given the opportunity to rebut this claim it was required of us to file a hardship waiver to handle the inadmissible status of the client.
There are two issues to this situation that needed to be addressed, the first issue was the allegations against the client. The determination by USCIS that our client was inadmissible was not founded on any facts that had been challenged or questioned by immigration throughout the entire process. What occurred was that USCIS found out through its background checks of our clients work history that one of its employers ended up being a bad company and ended up folding. It concluded that because our client worked for the company, that it must have known the company was not a legitimate company and therefore lied about working for a legitimate company. All of these assumptions were never questioned during the marriage interview nor was a second interview issued to address what came up while the case was pending (for more than two years). Although the hardship waiver was needed in filing the response, the record needed to reflect that this was an egregious error on USCIS’ part since it neither gave our client nor her husband the chance to address the implied allegations laid against them. Despite the fact that our client had an approved petition from USCIS that was for the “non-existent, fictitious shell company”, they still implied by making her inadmissible that she must have had knowledge of their fraudulent practices. Our response to USCIS made it clear that no such proof exists and that without concrete evidence confirming her knowledge of their activities that she cannot be held accountable for their actions.
Today in a town hall-style meeting in Washington DC designed to showcase his health reform law for the Latino community, President Barack Obama told those who attended that he was powerless to stop mass expulsions of illegal immigrants, which has prompted one Latino advocacy group to brand him “deporter in chief.” The president said Congress is forcing him to enforce existing immigration laws while balking at passing a comprehensive bill that would offer illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. “I am constrained in terms of what I am able to do,” Mr. Obama said. “The reason why these deportations are taking place is that Congress said ‘you have to enforce these laws’. I cannot ignore those laws any more than I can ignore any of the other laws that are on the books.”
To mitigate Congress’ lack of action on immigration reform, Mr. Obama said he ordered government agents to give priority to deportations of those involved in illegal activity and gangs — and even used executive power to shield undocumented young people with illegal status who have known no home other than the United States. “What I have done is to use my prosecutorial discretion,” Mr. Obama said.
The National Council of La Raza, America’s largest Latino advocacy organization, week broke with the president over the deportation issue. “Any day now, this administration will reach the two million mark for deportations,” said NCLR CEO Janet Murguia. “It is a staggering number that far outstrips that of any of (Obama’s) predecessors, and it leaves behind a wake of devastation for families across America. We respectfully disagree with the president on his inability to stop unnecessary deportations. He does have the power to stop this.”
More than 500 leaders for the networks of young immigrants, frustrated with House Republicans’ failure to move on immigration this year so far, have decided to turn their protests on President Obama in an effort to pressure him to act unilaterally to stop deportations.
Months of lobbying, rallies and sit-in demonstrations have not brought any movement in the House on a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally. The youths who gathered in Phoenix last week for an annual congress of the network, United We Dream, have voiced severe disappointment by Republicans and Democrats who seem to not be moving over political reasons more than a true desire to reform immigration. Pointing to Mr. Obama’s promise earlier this year to use his own powers when Congress would not move on this agenda, they now demand that he take executive action to increase protections for immigrants without papers.
“The community we work with is telling us that these deportations are ripping our families apart; this has to stop,” said Cristina Jiménez, the managing director of the network, the largest organization of immigrants who grew up in this country without legal status after coming as children and who call themselves Dreamers. “And we know the president has the power to do it.”
Recent hearings in the House of Representatives are showing us that the focus is not on solving the issues to pass immigration reform but focused on past problems that have been debated about before. In one House hearing before the Homeland Security committee, Secretary Jeh Johnson laid out his vision for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Among the questions the Secretary took from committee members were inquiries about deportation priorities and immigrants who overstay their visas. At the same time, the House Judiciary committee held a hearing about the president’s constitutional duties and the use of executive power in his administration. The real question is why are our House members focused on enforcing current immigration policies when the dialogue should be on immigration reform?
It is clear that many Representatives are concerned about border security more than anything. In fact, at the House hearing with Sec. Johnson, he fielded questions about whether the administration was deporting immigrants who fit the department’s stated priorities, including putting resources toward finding immigrants who overstay their visas. “If in the category of visa overstays there are those people [who are national security threats], then we need to go after those people,” Johnson said. Some House members claimed the administration wasn’t deporting enough immigrants, while Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) expressed concern that too many immigrants are being removed because of minor driving offenses and not violent crimes. These comments show how the focus is still on the current policies being implemented and less on how the changes to our policies will affect these concerns.
With the debate over the President’s constitutional authority to unilaterally implement immigration policy going on, House members assert that his broad authority is still limited. Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC) asserted that while the president has prosecutorial discretion, “he does not have the authority to exempt a specified class of up to 1.76 million individuals.” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) explained that DACA is decided on a case-by-case basis as every individual application is examined before DACA is granted.
Reflecting back on the State of the Union Address, it has been a month since President Obama said he was not afraid of using his executive powers to make sure immigration reform will happen. There is pressure on President Obama from those whose favor he curried heading into the 2012 election. Young immigrants, members of United We Dream (UWD), are demanding that the president stop deportations of illegals.
Young immigrants may be in luck. Recent polls are showing that for the first time that Americans are just as concerned about what to do with people already in the country illegally as they are about securing our borders. Historically, people have been more worried about shutting down border crossings.
Further confirmation of a sea-change in attitude comes from a recent CNN poll. Last month, in answer to “What should be the main focus of the U.S. government in dealing with the issue of illegal immigration,” 54 percent selected “developing a plan that would allow illegal immigrants who have jobs to become legal U.S. residents.” Only 41 percent chose “developing a plan for stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. and for deporting those already here.” In 2010, the numbers were significantly higher calling for tighter border security.
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