Visa Lawyer Blog

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This will be useful to all our clients ready to schedule appointments in Ciudad Juarez. The following information was provided by Edward R. an AILA member in El Paso in response to one of AILA members in San Diego questions about the timing of and scheduling of InfoPass appointments in Ciudad Juarez:

“As to the pilot program in CJ [Ciudad Juarez] for 601s, the process is to book an INFOPASS appointment to submit the waiver filing after denial. This person [our chapter member] is trying to time the appointment so that the client will not have to wait long between denial and possible approval of the waiver. The pilot allows for 601s that are obviously approvable to be approved on the very day of the INFOPASS appointment. This results in the approved IV within a few days after that, if not the same day, and the applicant who was facing a long delay for waiver adjudication is suddenly just waiting in line for formal admission as LPR.

Problem is that everyone wants to do the same thing and the INFOPASS appointment schedule, which was the off the shelf solution for a DHS program, is not robust enough to handle the volume thrown at it. It creates a bottleneck and no one can get appointments. DHS knows about this and is trying to resolve the issue, but the more appointments they release, in theory, the demand will devour and all will end up in the same position down the line.

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It is always interesting to read what members of Congress think about key issues, in this case immigration.

Sen. Lott’s opinion was published in the Clarion Ledger, among other things he says:

As you know, I had hoped to pass a broader immigration reform bill this year. I saw the July immigration debate as an opportunity, not necessarily to get an ideal border security plan in place, but as a foundation on which to build Senate support for stronger border security than we now have.

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A few hours ago we got reports from clients and media outlets in Los Angeles, about the big raids conducted by ICE and the Border Patrol, rounding up thousands of illegal aliens and processing expedited removals. This is just the beginning and the government is planning further raids before the holiday season in December.

See more info here

Read more from the Herald Tribune here

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Recently the Department of Labor announced that the permanent foreign labor certification program’s backlog has been eliminated, with nearly 95 percent of cases completed and the rest awaiting responses from employers. The BECs have begun a transition and shutdown phase that will continue through December.

I can say that this is excellent news for many of our applicants that were waiting for so long for the DOL to get the files out with certifications. I am just hoping that we the free time on the DOL’s hands they might just expedite PERM processing and handling to make it really an online experience.

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It was actually a strange day for me today. After a hectic week trying to get most of our H2B visa cases ready for filing, I was actually dreaming about this at night. In my dream all H2B visas were gone on Monday morning and all the angry employers are burning tires in front of my office.

Well, when I arrived to the office on Monday, I realized that my dream has become a reality. No not the tires burning, but the H2B cap was reached. Many of the employers waiting so patiently to file for new temporary workers, will need to wait for April and loose million of dollars as a result. I was furious, but we need to start planning ahead and help the clients deal with this crisis.

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Every year I hear the same complaints from our farmer clients, there are just not enough workers in this country to keep with the demand. What choice do they have but to hire illegal workers.

According to the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, 53 percent of the hired crop labor force lacked authorization to work in the U.S. in 2004-05. Worker advocates and grower associations agree the actual figure is probably closer to 80 percent.

Three-quarters of the hired farm work force in the U.S. was born in Mexico. And more than 40 percent of crop workers were migrants, meaning they had traveled at least 75 miles in the previous year to get a farm job, the survey showed.

Now a growing immigration raids is making life more difficult for everybody. flurry of immigration raids has some farmers in upstate New York worried about their ability to harvest all of their fruits and vegetables.

The farmers blame a growing immigrant farm labor shortage on a dramatic rise in immigration enforcement at a time when national security restrictions have already sharply curtailed attempts by foreign workers to gain lawful seasonal employment in the United States.

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So verification systems are back. E-Verify (formerly known as the Basic Pilot/Employment Eligibility Verification Program) is an Internet-based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security in partnership with the Social Security Administration that allows participating employers to electronically verify the employment eligibility of their newly hired employees.

Few federal agencies are using the government’s own employment-verification system designed to prevent hiring illegal aliens, with just the Department of Homeland Security and a few other scattered offices having signed up.

That all changes next month, when the federal government takes the lead in trying to prove the system is user-friendly and works. Under a new directive, every new federal hire is required to be checked against E-Verify, the new name for a decade-old system known as the Basic Pilot Program that has become the backbone of many companies’ hiring process as they try to weed out illegal aliens.

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The Freedom of Information ACT allows every American Citizen the right to know what the government is doing. In my Immigration practice we often file FOIA requests to receive copies of clients older immigration files, to allow us to plan future filings more carefully. In recent years this tool has become a waste of time. FOIA applications are now pending for more than 12 months in some cases even years.

Congress is closer than ever to enacting the most important legislation to ensure open government and access to public institutions in over a decade — thanks to the perseverance of two leading members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sens. Patrick Leahy and John Cornyn.

The Senate approved the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act, or OPEN Government Act, and the House passed its own version of FOIA reform. Advocates are encouraging Congress to send a bill to President Bush as soon as possible.

The OPEN Government Act contains a number of important provisions, but three problems addressed by the legislation are worth highlighting.

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Non-citizens who reside in the U.S. for more than 183 days [generally] meet the definition of a ‘tax resident,’ or a ‘resident for tax purposes.’ They are subject to the tax laws as if they were citizens.

This appeared in the Wall Street Journal Today:

“… Illegal aliens probably pay very little state

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