Former INS Attorney Carl Shusterman has been writing an immigration blog on a regular basis since 1996.
A brief description of our week volunteering at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas: We Arrive at the Dilley Detention Center In late August, 4 of us from Los Angeles flew to San Antonio and then drove to Dilley, Texas to join other volunteers in representing unaccompanied women and children from Central America and […]
The June 2015 Visa Bulletin contains a bit of good news for persons in certain employment-based (EB) categories. However, for others, like Chinese investors, the news is mostly bad. For Filipino professionals and Mexicans and Filipinos in some of the family-based (FB) categories, the news is downright ugly. The Good The worldwide EB-3 category (professionals, skilled and […]
The USCIS approves applications for form I-765 Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) submitted by certain H-4 spouses of H-1B professionals. What follows is a list of answers to the most frequently asked questions about this policy: 1. Which H-4 spouses are eligible for EADs? H-4 spouses of H-1B professionals with approved I-140 visa petitions or who […]
During the first week of April, the USCIS received 233,000 H-1B petitions from companies in the US seeking to employ foreign-born professional workers. This exceeds the number of H-1B petitions received last year by over 60,000. Under current law, only 85,000 of these petitions can be approved, about 36%. Most of the other 64% of […]
In 2014, when over 172,000 petitions were filed for 85,000 visas, immigration lawyers had the following advice for the H-1B lottery losers: Look for a cap-exempt H-1B employer; Get a TN or an E-3 visa if you are eligible; Extend your OPT if you are a STEM graduate; Go to graduate school on an F-1 […]
On January 13, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced the Immigration Innovation (“I-Squared”) Act of 2015. The Act would create a much-needed overhaul of our broken legal immigration system. It would dramatically raise the H-1B cap, and would provide much-needed reforms of the employment-based preference system for green cards. It would also raise the per-country […]
Fantastic news for those in the EB-3 category in the February 2015 Visa Bulletin! Two years ago, the wait for those in the EB-3 category was almost 6 years to get a green card, even more for persons born in the Philippines (as well as China and India, which is a problem yet to be […]
A bipartisan group of Senators lead by Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is trying to pass a bill which would raise theH-1B cap from 85,000 to 135,000. The I-Squared bill would do this by raising the general cap from 65,000 to 115,000 while leaving the master’s cap at 20,000. Does this bill stand a chance to be […]
On November 20, 2014, President Obama announced his long-awaited changes to our broken immigration system. None of the changes will take place immediately, and some hoped-for changes like recapture of lost EB numbers and counting only principals toward the 140,000 EB cap were not included in the new policy. Nevertheless, for 4-5 million persons, most […]
Have you ever heard the term consular non-reviewability? When our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and established the doctrine of separation of powers, they did not carve out an exception for consular nonreviewability. This came about much later as a result of ignominious laws and rulings which excluded Chinese immigrants from […]
