In late January 2011, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that they would begin testing their new Validation Instrument for Business Enterprises (VIBE) tool. About VIBE VIBE is a tool designed to enhance USCIS’s adjudications of certain employment-based immigrant and non-immigrant petitions such as I-140 and I-129. VIBE uses commercially available data to validate [...]
USCIS released the weekly FY2011 information on the numbers of cap-subject H-1Bs filed since April 1. As of January 7, 2011, USCIS has received approximately 58,700 H-1B petitions counting toward the 65,000 cap (an increase of 1,500 over the last week). Also, as of December 24, the U.S. Masters cap (with its 20,000 limit) has [...]
USCIS released the weekly FY2011 information on the numbers of cap-subject H-1Bs filed since April 1. As of December 31, 2010, USCIS has received approximately 57,300 H-1B petitions counting toward the 65,000 cap (an increase of 1,500 over the last week). Also, as of December 24, the U.S. Masters cap (with its 20,000 limit) has [...]
We have previously written extensively about the January 2010 Neufeld Memorandum and the lawsuit filed earlier this year challenging its validity. This lawsuit has been of great interest to most of our clients as the Neufeld memorandum created some new requirements applicable not only to IT consulting companies but to most, if not all, H-1B [...]
Now that the H-1B quota has been reached (as of December 21, 2009), we are receiving an increasing number of inquiries by both cap-subject employers and prospective employees about the alternatives for work authorization between now and October 1, 2010, when the new fiscal year's H-1B quota would begin (as a reminder, April 1, 2010 [...]