The Department of State has announced the DV-2025 Diversity Visa (a.k.a. “green card”) lottery dates. The dates for electronic entry submission for this year’s lottery are between noon, Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) (GMT-4), Wednesday, October 4, 2023, and noon, Eastern Standard Time (EST) (GMT-5), on Tuesday, November 7, 2023. Applicants may access the electronic Diversity [...]
Our office handles many ETA Form 9089 Permanent Labor Certification (“PERM”) applications and one of the most common questions is what is an overview of the entire PERM process and how long it would take. Below we are [...]
Starting October 1, 2023 USCIS is removing the biometrics requirement (and fee) for all I-539 applications seeking to change of extend status. As a reminder, the biometrics requirement and fee were created in 2019 and in 2021 USCIS removed [...]
Unlawful presence is defined in Section 212(a)(9)(B)(ii) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to mean that an alien is deemed to be unlawfully present in the U.S. if the alien is (1) present after the expiration [...]
Many of our clients and readers have been anxiously awaiting news from Washington, DC regarding the funding of the federal government and the threat of shutdown and how it would impact immigration processing. We are providing an overview [...]
The U.S. State Department has released the October 2023 Visa Bulletin which is the first Visa Bulletin for the new fiscal year. The headline in the upcoming month’s Visa [...]
With the recent increase of remote or hybrid work arrangements, and the return to office to third-party client sites, we would like to provide a reminder of the relevant H-1B rules for compliance when changing (or having already [...]
Many of our readers are aware of the extraordinary demand for first-time H-1B "cap" registrations over the past few years and especially after USCIS introduced a pre-registration system during the 2021 fiscal year. Under the previous H-1B "cap" filing system, a petition would have to prepare and submit a full H-1B petition (with [...]
USCIS has just completed the second round of the H-1B cap selection lottery and notified the selected applicants. The August 2023 selection round was due to the fact that a (significant) number of H-1B cap registrations [...]
In a world where remote work has become a prevailing norm, traditional processes are evolving to adapt to this new reality. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has recognized this shift and recently introduced a groundbreaking policy that allows for remote document inspection in the Form I-9 verification process. This policy not [...]
