On April 1st, the USCIS kicked off the filing season for H1B visa applications, and will now accept petitions for H1B employees who would begin work on or after October 1, 2011 - after the start of fiscal year (FY) 2012. (See FY2012 H1B Cap...
Although most people acknowledge that comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) is long overdue, few expect it to happen before the next election. Even President Obama, while announcing his continued support for CIR during a recent visit to El Salvador, nonetheless acknowledged that "It won't be easy,"...
If you believed the hype emanating from anti-immigrant fear-mongers, you might think that every immigrant was Latino, every Latino was undocumented, and that all of them had criminal records and was intent to do us harm - or at least to sponge government benefits. These...
Comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) continues to be one of the major political IOUs still outstanding, two years and counting into the Obama administration. As a candidate, Obama promised to introduce a comprehensive immigration bill in his first year, a promise still not kept, as of...
Back in January, a small army of state politicos was intent on making Arizona's S.B. 1070 the law of the land - one state at a time, if it came to that. As we have noted before, the ardor for this kind of legislation appears...
The Japanese government, with the help of international aid, is struggling to restore a sense of normalcy after the recent earthquake and tsunami left thousands homeless, and a death toll that continues to grow. The international community is rallying to provide humanitarian assistance to disaster...
As we have noted before in the MurthyBlog, there are times when our national conversation on immigration sounds less like a policy debate than a barroom brawl. People hurl insults and accusations like barstools, heedlessly saying things they may not mean, but may come to...
In recent months, several states have ventured onto federal turf, passing immigration legislation of their own, in the hope that local remedies will succeed where Congress fears to tread. For the most part, these state measures are all about enforcement, allowing local police to "step...
American immigration policy needs to change; on that much, most people would agree. Although consensus is elusive on the diagnosis - not to mention the treatment - of the ills plaguing our immigration system, there is a shared sense of frustration with the status quo....
For some reason, our national discourse on immigration tends to steeply discount the wealth of benefits we receive from the energy, brains, and brawn of immigrant workers, and that is unfortunate. If our perceptions are slightly askew from reality, a possible explanation may go something...
