Visa Lawyer Blog

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As Lawyers specializing in the I-601 Extreme Hardship Waivers, we are happy to report on the upcoming changes in the Waiver process as provided by AILA.

An I-601, Application for Waiver of Grounds of Inadmissibility, is filed to permit an alien who has been denied admission to the United States to gain admission as a lawful permanent resident or fiancé(e) under certain circumstances. This waiver is based on extreme hardship to United States citizen or lawful permanent resident relatives of the alien which would result if the alien’s inadmissibility cannot be waived.

What was announced on January 6?

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Great Video that gives a glimpse into the life of a foreign job seeker trying to make it America.

At this rate of mechanical efficiency, supported by technology, it will be extremely difficult to create jobs for the entire world population (not that I’m arguing these companies SHOULD create jobs for the entire population). Again, assuming that I attended school at the of this revolution, I have therefore not worked in a professional capacity with digital marketing. However, I have been able to learn on my own and at school, albeit not at the same pace with which technology has evolved. For formal education to keep pace with changing industries, changes will need to be made in the current academic institution mind-set/process, such as: a refresh of curriculum at schools; dynamic teaching processes to prepare students and professors for the future, focuses on unlearning outdated material and learning new technologies and new material (this is not to say that all old learnings should be forgotten, but rather to say that they should be refreshed at a more rapid pace); and, more classes emphasizing how technology is rapidly being employed to change the face of the world. For example, I can count on one hand the number of classes at my MBA program that even mention technology, much less emphasize it. In a job market where only people who understand technology are in high-demand, academia cannot afford to neglect incorporating more technology-focused courses and learnings into its curricula.

This gap is extending and unless checked there will be a huge void between the required skill sets demanded by employers. I would go so far as to say that this gap might hamper and curtail the progress of the digital infrastructure. I wonder if we can somehow make use of the same technologies and support passionate people who are taking the leap of faith to ensure they remain educated, and at the same time needed in the workforce (for example, corporate outreach in the form of technology course sponsorship, etc)? Unless this happens the unemployment rate will, at best, stagnate, at worse increase to a level never before seen in the past 50 years.

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This is a tough questions to answer isn’t it? On a 1999 fishing trip, two bullies threw a third man into New Jersey’s Sandy Hook Bay, knowing he couldn’t swim. The drowning death of Michael Augulis was ruled an accident, and it stayed that way until a Lebanese immigrant came to cops with the truth seven years later. Police and prosecutors say the tip from Charbel Chehoud, who wasn’t involved in the drowning, was so critical to solving the case, he should be allowed to stay in the United States. The feds disagree.

The S visa is granted to those who act as witnesses or informants to federal or state government agencies. The S visa holder is a person providing information regarding crimes and terrorism.

S visas are granted to individuals who possess critical and reliable information concerning criminal or terrorist organizations. Foreign nationals who are holders of an S visa are willing to share this information with federal or state authorities. S visas are also granted to individuals whose presence in the United States is critical to the success of a criminal investigation or prosecution.

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There is no doubt that there is a clear connection between our Immigration policy and how well our economy is doing.

Immigration increases the overall size of the U.S. economy. Of this there is no question. In 2009 immigrants accounted for 15 percent of all workers. More workers and more people mean a bigger GDP. Immigrants are 15 percent of U.S. workers. They likely account for about 10 percent of GDP or more than a trillion dollars annually. However, this does not mean that the native-born population benefits from immigration.

Basic economic theory shows that the overwhelming majority of this increase in economic activity goes to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and other compensation. It is important to understand that the increase in the size of the economy is not, by itself, a benefit to the existing population. Moreover, immigrants who arrived in the last 10, 20, or 50 years are without question earning and living better on average then they would be had they remained in their home countries.

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The cost of hiring illegal workers can be great, local bakery owners will have to pay a high price. A La Jolla, Calif., bakery, along with its owner and manager, were sentenced in federal court last week on charges stemming from a four-year probe by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) that the business hired illegal alien workers.

U.S. District Judge Thomas J. Whelan ordered The French Gourmet, Inc. to forfeit $109,200 in illicit proceeds gained from the illegal hiring practices and pay $277,375 for its felony conviction of employing more than 10 illegal alien workers in a 12-month period.

The company owner and president Michel Malecot, 59, was sentenced to five years of supervised probation after pleading guilty earlier this year to knowingly employing numerous illegal alien workers over an extended period of time. Malecot was also held liable to pay the total financial penalty of $396,575.

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As we return to work on this Jan 2, 2012, one can only wonder what will 2012 be like for Immigration. 2011 will be remembered as the year Alabama enacted HB56, the most unreasonable immigration law in U.S. history. The bill was passed to go into effect Sept. 1 before a series of legal challenges from civil rights organizations, churches and the federal government delayed implementation for weeks. A federal judge put portions of the law on hold to consider the challenge, while allowing some aspects of the law to move forward.

The National Conference of State Legislatures reported recently that in 2011, there were 1,607 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees introduced in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, significantly up from a little more than 1,400 in 2010. Bolstered by the relative success of SB 1070, even as parts of the law remain hung up in court, immigration restriction-minded legislators in many states banded together, working with the same legal teams to help them draft immigration crackdown bills.

Interestingly, in spite of the bill-filing fury, 11 percent fewer of these state immigration bills became in 2011 than in 2010. Among those that didn’t get anywhere were a series of bills intended to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants, written with the aid of the same legal counsel behind SB 1070 and introduced in states like Arizona, Indiana and Iowa. Also voted down was an Arizona “omnibus” bill that would have denied public services to undocumented immigrants, similarly to California’s ill-fated Proposition 187 in 1994, and an Arizona bill requiring that hospitals check for patients’ immigration status.

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Despite that fact that the law is written broadly enough that most foreigners from the developing world could be refused for a visitor’s visa as “intending immigrants,” non-immigrant visa issuance rates are still shockingly high. In 2007, 74 percent of the more than five million foreign nationals who applied for visitor’s visas were approved. This figure is particularly startling when one considers that citizens from the world’s most prosperous countries — including most of Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand — do not need visitor’s visas to enter the United States. Two-thirds of Mexican applicants were issued visitor’s (B1/B2) visas (or border crossing cards), four-fifths of Chinese applicants were issued visas, 88 percent of Russians were granted visas, and more than half of Haitian and Dominican applicants were successful.

Still, More than a decade after the federal government strengthened travel requirements after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, foreign visitors say getting a temporary visa remains a daunting and sometimes insurmountable hurdle.

The tourism industry hopes to change that with a campaign to persuade Congress to overhaul the State Department’s tourist visa application process.

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A ruling from U.S. District Judge Richard M. Gergel, has temporarily enjoined three provisions of South Carolina Act 69 and found a fourth provision likely to be overturned in future proceedings. The ruling makes South Carolina the sixth state—after Arizona, Indiana, Georgia, Utah, and Alabama—to see major parts of a punitive immigration law blocked in federal court.

Following its enactment last June, South Carolina Act 69 was challenged in court by both the federal government and a coalition of civil rights groups. In a 42-page opinion, Judge Gergel entered temporary injunctions against the following provisions, finding each to be preempted by federal immigration law:

Section 4, which makes it a state crime to transport or harbor undocumented immigrants, or for undocumented immigrants to allow themselves to be transported or harbored.

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A recent New York Times article highlights the fine line between medical care for individuals that need it and the difficulties that come because of immigration status. The story talks about an illegal immigrant from Mexico living in New York City whose kidneys are failing. His siblings are donors, but the cost of the surgery requires the need for surgery. The man was a waiter in his early 30s, a husband and father of two, so well liked at the Manhattan restaurant where he had worked for a decade that everyone from the customers to the dishwasher was donating money to help his family.

When his younger brother volunteered to donate a kidney to restore him to normal life, they encountered a health care paradox: the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 a year, but not for the $100,000 transplant that would make it unnecessary.

For nearly two years, the brothers and their supporters have been hunting for a way to make the transplant happen. Their journey has taken them through a maze of conflicting laws, private insurance conundrums and ethical quandaries, back to the national impasse between health care and immigration policies.

Doctors sought a transplant center that would take him. Hospitals in the city receive millions of taxpayer dollars to help offset care for illegal immigrants and other uninsured patients. But at one hospital, administrators apparently overruled surgeons willing to waive their fees. At another, he was told to come back when he had legal status or $200,000.

A last resort is a return to Mexico, where the operation costs about $40,000. But to pay off the necessary loans, the and his brother, a deli worker, would have to sneak back in through the desert. If they failed, they would be cut off from their children in Brooklyn, who are United States citizens.

Bellevue performs no transplants but, as a trauma center, often supplies organs harvested, with family consent, from illegal immigrants fatally injured at work.

“Here’s the paradox: he could donate, but he can’t receive,” Dr. Manheimer said, calling the imbalance troubling. Organ registries do not record illegal status, but a study estimated that over a 20-year period noncitizens donated 2.5 percent of organs and received fewer than 1 percent.

To those focusing on immigration enforcement, however, the inequity runs the other way. “They should not get any benefit from breaking the law, especially something as expensive as organ transplants or dialysis,” said Representative Dana T. Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who contends that care for illegal immigrants is bankrupting American health care and has sought to require that emergency rooms report stabilized patients for deportation unless they prove citizenship or legal residence.

“If they’re dead, I don’t have an objection to their organs being used,” Mr. Rohrabacher added. “If they’re alive, they shouldn’t be here no matter what.”
To Ruth Faden, the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the brothers’ case, like the transplant statistics, illustrates how quickly firm principles on both sides unravel in practice. “We tie ourselves up in knots,” she said, “because we’ve accepted as a country and in international human rights law that if someone shows up in extremis in your emergency room, the nurses and doctors and technicians are morally obligated, and legally obligated, to provide that life-saving care.”
How to begin refusing care, she added, becomes a dilemma for “real people in real time.”
This dilemma shows just how personal and difficult it is where the line in providing health care for those in need gets mired by the legal situations a person is in. Balancing the humanitarian side of medicine with the rule of law has become a focal point in a discussion where those that want reform on the immigration enforcement side appear unfeeling towards the plight of illegal immigrants who’s suffering have an impact on U.S. citizen children. The other side is that those who appear soft on immigration enforcement minimize the other concerns regarding the costs that come with trying to increase the enforcement and how it is a drain of taxpayer resources.

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In a recent Reuters article, a report showed that immigrants founded or cofounded almost half of 50 top venture-backed companies in the United States for 2011, a new study shows, underscoring some of the high stakes in potential immigration reform.

The venture capital community argues the study, completed by research group National Foundation for American Policy, proves the need to overhaul rules governing how entrepreneurs can immigrate to the United States to spur job development.

“It’s a gamble whether an entrepreneur should stay or leave right now, and that’s not how the immigration system should work,” said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, on a call with reporters. “What we need is legislation that helps these entrepreneurs from outside the United States.”

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