The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently released a new version of the form for employment eligibility verification (I-9). Employers must use the I-9 form at the time when employees are hired in the United States, to verify employment authorization. While there is a...
Fiscal year 2012 (FY12) was the busiest year on record for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) audits of employers' employment eligibility verification (I-9 forms). Beyond just the number of investigations, fines and even arrests also grew dramatically during the past three fiscal years for...
The audit process is used by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to confirm that employers are complying with PERM requirements and that the attestations in PERM labor certifications are correct. Cases are sometimes selected for audit at random. In other cases, the DOL targets...
The I-94 card system is undergoing the automation process by he U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Eventually, this will lead to the end of paper I-94 cards for foreign national travelers. Delays in I-94 data entry are creating problems in the widely-used E-Verify system...
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has audited a significant percentage of PERM labor certification (LC or labor) cases since early 2012. The incidence of PERM audits became noticeably higher around February 2012. As explained here for the benefit of MurthyDotCom and MurthyBulletin readers, many...
The Murthy Law Firm has recently been contacted by a number of former University of Northern Virginia (UNVA) students facing immigration difficulties. Many of these problems are tied to the students having worked while on Curricular Practical Training (CPT). This issue arises when the former...
Parts 1 and 2 of this article examine some of the major immigration developments in 2011, and analyze the potential impact of those developments for 2012. We previously discussed the forward movement of the EB2 India and China cutoff dates in the visa bulletin. Here...
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced in November 2011 that it will be allowable to "bundle" together L-1 petitions for multiple employees when filed for identical positions by the same employer. The L-1 petitions may be bundled in order to streamline and improve...
H1B visa refusals have become common for those working within the IT consulting industry, as regular MurthyDotCom and MurthyBulletin readers are aware. These problems have made travel abroad by H1B employees risky, if a new visa is required for reentry to the United States. This...
Employers continue to weather ongoing economic problems in the United States, as well as immigration-related scrutiny, which has increased over the past few years. As U.S. companies consider their projections and proposals for 2012, their attention should also turn to matters that can facilitate smoother...
