Visa Lawyer Blog

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Now the J1 Visa is on the spot, and for a reason. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered an “extensive and thorough review” of a foreign exchange program that has been used by U.S. businesses as a source of cheap labor and exploited by criminals to import women to work in the sex industry.

The J1 Work & Travel Program offers overseas university exchange students a challenging opportunity to intimately experience life and culture in the U.S. during their summer holiday period.

Work & Travel J1 provides international university students the chance to work at entry-level, seasonal jobs in the United States for up to 4 months on a J-1 Visa. Participants are entitled to work, earn money and travel at the end of the work assignment.

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How much do you know about the 10 plus Million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States? How long have they lived among us, who are their parents and more? The Pew Hispanic Research Center released some interesting stats and we are sharing below.

Nearly two-thirds of the 10.2 million unauthorized adult immigrants in the United States have lived in this country for at least 10 years and nearly half are parents of minor children, according to new estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

The characteristics of this population have become a source of renewed interest in the wake of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s recent endorsement of a proposal to create a path for unauthorized immigrants to gain legal status if they have lived in the country for a long period of time, have children in the U.S., pay taxes and belong to a church. Several of Gingrich’s opponents for the Republican presidential nomination have criticized the proposal as a form of amnesty that would encourage more immigrants to come to the U.S. illegally.

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Today we bring an article posted on NPR from their series titled “In Limbo”. The series of articles focuses on those who are between being legal and being illegal. This article is about Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa. Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosagrew up in the small village of Palaco, Mexico. As a bright young man, he wanted to become a teacher. But he had to overcome many obstacles first, including hunger. “I am not talking about hungry for success; I was literally hungry for food. My stomach was empty,” he says.

Dr. Quiñones- Hinojosa was determined to put food on the table for his family, so he did the only thing he could possibly think of: he literally jumped over a fence between his native Mexico and the United States and became a farm worker in southern California. He started by picking tomatoes, corn and broccoli. Later, he operated dangerous machinery in the fields. But things changed for him after a conversation with his cousin. “The critical portion that got me out of the fields was my own cousin telling me that I was going to spend the rest of my life working as a migrant farm worker,” Dr. Quiñones- Hinojosa says.

He could not imagine that life. He left the fields and headed north. To pay for community college, he shoveled sulfur and scraped fish lard from tankers — an excruciating job that almost cost him his life. His journey then took him to University of California, Berkeley, and later Harvard Medical School. After 10 years, since first jumping over that fence into America, he became a U.S. citizen. Now, Dr. Alfredo Quiñones- Hinojosa is a respected brain surgeon who directs the Brain Tumor Program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital. He says more needs to be done to help those who can follow in his footsteps. “Among people who come to the United States today — whether they come from privileged backgrounds or humble backgrounds — is our next Einstein, is our next Nobel laureate, but we just have failed to identify,” he says.

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Next week, the Department of Homeland Security will roll out a pilot program intended to speed up the deportation of immigrants with criminal records by weeding out low-priority cases. It’s a sensible plan, and one that could restore some sanity to a deportation system that wastes time with harmless immigrants and thereby allows dangerous ones to escape its attention.

Under the pilot program, teams of prosecutors in Baltimore and Denver will review all pending immigration cases in those cities and then decide whether to issue temporary reprieves to the elderly, students, children, victims of domestic crimes and those with a close relative who is a U.S. citizen. Reprieves would be limited to those without criminal convictions. If all goes well, the program would be expanded nationwide in January.

Until recently, government attorneys were required, with rare exceptions, to treat immigrants convicted of serious crimes with the same urgency as those who are merely here illegally. The new guidelines will allow them to place the high-priority cases — those involving criminals — on a fast track for a hearing before a judge. At the same time, this could help free up overburdened immigration courts by reducing dockets.

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Another victory for our office appealing a tough H1B denial, consistency pays eventually. This article was prepared by attorney Ekaterina Powell from our office.

H-1B is a “specialty occupation” work visa. Traditionally, occupations in law, medicine, sciences and engineering are considered specialty occupations. However, the statute and the regulations contain provisions that allow other professions to be considered specialty occupations if certain conditions are met. For example, if a baccalaureate in a specific specialty (or its equivalent) is normally the minimum requirement for entry into the particular position, then the position should be viewed as a specialty occupation.

USCIS uses the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), a publication of the Department of Labor in its analysis on whether a particular position can be classified as a specialty occupation. Unfortunately, USCIS continues to use its overly restrictive interpretations of the H-1B regulations when it comes to the occupations in marketing, public relations, or management and business related professions.

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Immigration services scams are getting so sophisticated that fraudsters now advertise online with websites that perfectly mimic those of official government agencies, federal officials said Thursday as they rolled out a nationwide awareness campaign meant to combat such practices. Officials from several federal, state and local agencies, as well as immigration lawyers and advocates, met in Newark on Thursday to expand nationwide a campaign that started in seven pilot cities. It focuses on enforcement, education and inter-agency collaboration.

“They are not just high-tech scams, they are people in the neighborhoods: people who know people, people who are out there shaking hands,” said Kelvin Chen, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission, as he spoke about the need to increase awareness among immigrants who are often preyed upon by members of their own communities.

The campaign is aimed at educating legal and illegal immigrants to avoid everything from unlicensed service providers to websites that mimic those of government agencies. Most scams involve people who pretend to be able to provide legal aid or other services for immigrants, take victims’ money and fail to deliver.

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A few updates for our Italian Investor clients, Effective December 1, 2011, all E visas applications will be processed in Rome. Therefore, all new E1 Visa and E2 visa applications submitted after December 1, 2011 should be sent to the E Visa Section in Rome following the directions on the web. (http://italy.usembassy.gov./visa/vis/vis-6-en.html) All cases will be processed in the order received. All pending cases sent to Milan prior to December 1, 2011, will be processed to conclusion in Milan, in the order they were received.

In a Small Business Administration (“SBA”) study, the report found that, “Immigrants are nearly 30 percent more likely to start a business than are nonimmigrants, and they represent 16.7 percent of all new business owners in the United States.” This SBA report also found that nearly 30 percent of all new business owners per month in New York, Florida, and Texas, are immigrants. In addition, business owners from Europe constituted a growing share of immigrant business owners.

The E Visa for those unfamiliar with the opportunity, provides nonimmigrant visa status for a national of any of the countries with which the United States maintains an appropriate treaty of commerce and navigation, who is coming to the United States to carry on substantial trade, including trade in services or technology, principally between the United States and the treaty country, or to develop and direct the operations of an enterprise in which the national has invested, or is actively in the process of investing substantial amount of capital.

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Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (HR 3012), legislation introduced several months ago by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). The bill eliminates per-country caps on employment-based green card numbers and increases the per-country limit on family-based green cards from 7 percent to 15 percent. If enacted, the bill will reduce the green card wait times for employment-based immigrants from high-volume user countries, such as India and China.

Though the bill has been passed by the House of Representatives, it is not yet law and must still pass the U.S. Senate and be signed into law by the President. We hope this will become a reality soon. We will keep our readers posted.

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Sad Sad Story, but this is our reality. A talent illegal-immigrant student in Texas killed himself the day after Thanksgiving and left letters saying he felt trapped by his lack of opportunities.

High school senior Joaquin Luna, 18, of Mission, shot himself in the bathroom of his house on Friday. His brother Diyer Mendoza said Joaquin left letters telling of his despair at the chances of the federal Dream Act, which would legalize illegal-immigrant students and young adults, becoming a reality.

The purpose of the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors Act, also called the DREAM Act, is to help those individuals who meet certain requirements, have an opportunity to enlist in the military or go to college and have a path to citizenship which they otherwise would not have without this legislation. Supporters of the DREAM Act believe it is vital not only to the people who would benefit from it, but also the United States as a whole. It would give an opportunity to undocumented immigrant students who have been living in the U.S. since they were young, a chance to contribute back to the country that has given so much to them and a chance to utilize their hard earned education and talents.

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A recent article on Ars Technica has shed some light on an important issue going on in the U.S., the ability to get work visas. Some of the Silicon Valley’s most important companies, including Intel, Google, and Yahoo, were cofounded by immigrants. Yet America’s ponderous immigration system makes it difficult for talented young people born outside of the U.S. to come to the Bay Area. There have been various proposals to make it easier for immigrant entrepreneurs to come to the United States, but that has not made much progress in Congress.

A new company called Blueseed is seeking to bypass the political process and solve the problem directly. Blueseed plans to buy a ship and turn it into a floating incubator anchored in international waters off the coast of California.

An interview by Ars Technica talked to Blueseed founder Max Marty. He acknowledged that it would be better for America to reform immigration laws and thereby make his company unnecessary. But in the meantime, Marty and his team are hard at work tackling the practical obstacles to making their vision of a floating, year-round hack-a-thon a reality. Within the next year, they’re hoping to raise a venture capital round large enough to lease or buy a ship with space for around a thousand passengers. If Blueseed’s audacious hack of the immigration system is successful, it will not only open up Silicon Valley to a broader range of entrepreneurs, it will also shine a spotlight on the barriers American law places in the way of immigrants seeking to start businesses in the United States.

Blueseed is trying to overcome the limitations of American immigration law, but its business model also depends in critical part on the goodwill of American immigration officials. That is because a key part of the Blueseed sales pitch is that residents will be able to make regular trips to the mainland.

Immigration law makes it difficult for many would-be immigrants to get permission to work in the United States. For example, there’s an annual cap on the number of H1-B visas available for American employers to hire skilled immigrant workers, a cap that was recently met. However, permission to travel to the United States for business or tourism is much easier to get.

Marty pointed to the B-1 business visa as a key part of his company’s strategy. With a B-1 visa, visitors can freely travel to the United States for meetings, conferences, and even training seminars. B-1 visas are relatively easier to get, and can be valid for as long as 10 years.

Blueseed plans to provide regular ferry service between the ship to the United States. While Blueseed residents would need to do their actual work—such as writing code—on the ship, Marty envisions them making regular trips to Silicon Valley to meet with clients, investors, and business partners.

With the ship only 12 miles offshore, it should be practical to make a day trip to the mainland and return in the evening. A B-1 visa also permits overnight stays, making it useful for extended business related visits.

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