Visa Lawyer Blog

From time to time I will be posting about local updates and important changes that will affect clients and local readers of the Blog. In the past few weeks, the local Immigration offices started scheduling Marriage based adjustment of status interviews in the Downtown office in addition to the Chula Vista location. The office in downtown is located at 880 Front Street.

The USCIS officials that I spoke to reported this to be an attempt to ease the pressure from the Chula Vista office and perhaps expedite interviews this way. Traditionally, the downtown office was used for Naturalization and Citizenship interviews.

In addition the Application Support Center on El Cajon Blvd, is now officially closed. The Application support Center is a location where clients go to process fingerprints and biometrics as part of the adjustment of status process.

Guess what, New I-9 form released. On November 7th, 2007, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), Citizenship and Immigration Services (“CIS”) announced that it has released a new version of Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, as well at the M-274, Handbook for Employers, Instructions for Completing the Form I-9.

The revision of the Form I-9 seeks to achieve full compliance with the document reduction requirements of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (“IIRAIRA”), which reduced the number of documents that employers may accept from newly hired employees during the employment verification process.

This is huge for employers that were waiting for some substantial revisions since the 1996 legislation.

I read this morning about a new anti-illegal immigration law that has some farmers and agricultural businesses scrambling for laborers. With excessive enforcement in Oklahoma, no farm workers are to be found to do the job.

Read the full story here…

House and Senate appropriators are tentatively scheduled to convene a conference on Thursday, November 1st to combine the Defense, Military Construction-VA, and Labor-HHS-Education appropriations into one single bill.

One of the issues with which legislators will have to contend is whether or not to remove the Grassley-Sanders amendment (H.ADMT. 3396) from the Labor-HHS appropriations bill (H.R. 3043) which would add an additional fee of $3,500 to the H-1B visa program.

Looming over any progress made during the conference is the veto threat President Bush issued over most appropriations passed in the House and Senate this year, often citing spending levels as the reason.

How many time have you heard people blame immigrants, especially illegal, for all the crimes in the country.

The U.S. has 11.5 million illegal immigrants, about 4 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. There are cases where such immigrants get involved in criminal activity, still it is far less than our regular population.

Here is an interesting article from IL

I got this note from the AILA local chapter and the ACLU. It looks like the border patrol and the police have no mercy when it comes to illegal immigrants. Is this really a time to enforce immigration laws, or should we be fighting fires and keeping our citizens safe?

The ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties applauds the massive outpouring of resources, volunteers, evacuation sites, and official and community responses to the tragic series of fires that are wreaking havoc on our region.

We especially take note of the outstanding work of firefighters, rescue workers, law enforcement officers, other first responders, and of course the outpouring of community volunteers.

Many of our local clients, Tech, Bio Tech, and other technology firms ahve been closed for business since Monday. See Report from Computerworld.com

Many of the workers in such compnay are on visas, like H1B and TN visas. We have set up a special email address for workers and employers to write in with questions about status and anything else they might need while not working.

I am hoping by the end of this weekend, business will be as usual in the county.

The Schumer-Hutchison amendment (H.AMDT. 3404) to increase the domestic supply of nurses and physical therapists by recapturing unused green cards from the years 1996 and 1997 has been introduced. There are estimates of 61,000 extra visas to come. Before the Schumer-Hutchison amendment was passed, it was amended by a Durbin second-degree amendment (H.AMDT. 3449) which attempts to increase the number of nursing faculty and students in the United States, encourages global health care cooperation, and creates a $1,500 fee for a recaptured green card from the underlying amendment. The Durbin amendment also requires that the petitioning healthcare worker attest that he or she has satisfied any outstanding commitment to work in his or her home country.

While these amendments have been incorporated into the Senate’s version of the Labor-HHS appropriations bill, this version must now be reconciled with the House’s version of the bill which does not contain these provisions. A conference between House and Senate members to reconcile the differences has yet to be scheduled. There is also the possibility that this bill will be combined with other appropriation bills as part of an omnibus package.

If this will pass will are looking at another year or so of Nurse visas, this is still far from being perfect.

This is crazy, as if the cap problems with H1B visas are not enough, expect a fee hike legislation to pass soon.

The Grassley-Sanders amendment (H.ADMT. 3396), as modified, was added to H.R. 3043. The amendment would add an additional fee of $3,500 to the H-1B visa program which would be used to create a special education fund to promote studies in the fields of math, science and engineering.

Who will hire H1B workers now?