Gosh, I could not believe my ears! USCIS fee increases? We hear some rumblings from the USCIS director about another possible USCIS fee increase and I thought to myself, "You've got to be kidding!" How is this possible? If the USCIS were a regular American...
Immigration reform continues to loom as a giant question mark over the legislative horizon, and prospects for passage of a comprehensive overhaul of the immigration system remain clouded by the many other high-pressure issues that have interposed themselves on the legislative agenda - the economic...
The current immigration system is overtaxed, whether one looks at application backlogs for family-based or employment-based visas, or at the millions of illegal immigrants who stream across the border each year in search of jobs in the underground economy. Immigration reform is long overdue, and...
Anna Stepanova started learning immigration law before she ever set foot in law school. Arriving from Russia as a visitor, she first secured a student visa, then H1B status, before finally obtaining a green card through the National Interest Waiver process. Aside from working on...
As 2009 winds down, the health care reform debate still occupies center stage, and with mid-term elections approaching in the fall of 2010, it is difficult to predict whether Congress might take up an immigration reform bill before next November. A recent article by Scott...
Plans are afoot at USCIS to sharply increase onsite inspections of companies that hire foreign workers through the H1B visa program, according to a recent article in Computerworld. [See Feds plan 25,000 on-site H1B inspections, by Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld, Nov 17, 2009]. According to Computerworld,...
There was hopeful news in an October 2009 New York Times article that said the Obama administration has recommended political asylum for a Guatemalan woman, Rody Alvarado Peña, who suffered years of relentless abuse at the hands of her husband, a former soldier in Guatemala....
Something to keep in mind, when the immigration reform debate resumes on Capitol Hill, sometime in the coming months: the population at immigration detention facilities has doubled in the past decade, according to statistics released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research arm...
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have lifted a longtime rule that barred entry to the United States to people who test positive for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS. The original rule was adopted in June, 1987, a...
It is twenty years ago that the Berlin Wall came crashing down, amid wild celebration and a collective sigh of relief that the Cold War was at last coming to an end - not with a bang, but with music and dancing and noisy jubilation....
