The U.S. House of Representatives passed yesterday (August 1, 2012) by a voice vote a proposed bill which seeks to restrict the ability of certain schools, colleges and universities to sponsor students' F-1 visas. H.R. 3012 (bill tracker, text of bill) was introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and seeks to amend the F-1 student [...]
The Department of Labor (DOL) has proposed substantial revisions to Form 9035 (and its instructions), Labor Condition Application, which is used to support a number of employment-based visas, including H-1B, H-1B1 and E-3. The proposed changes to the form are significant in many respects -- the government now requires all LCA beneficiaries (up to 10 [...]
USCIS has released an updated set of processing statistics for petitions filed under the fifth employment-based preference category (EB-5) for foreign investors. It is interesting to note that the number of I-526 applications (for initial EB-5 green card) have more than doubled compared to 2010 (4,156 compared to 1,955) while the approval rate has remained [...]
Our office has established a reputation as one of the leading practices for handling appeals with the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) and we often receive inquiries not only about the procedural aspects of an AAO appeal but also about the current processing times for AAO cases. The AAO processing times are published monthly, at the [...]
The Department of Labor has provided some updates (as of July 2012) on their processing of employment-based cases and we are happy to share them with our clients and readers. This kind of information is generally available, but is rarely combined in one place while it is still fairly recent information. DOL Processing Statistics [...]
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) has announced the creation of a separate office which would be tasked with overseeing the EB-5 immigrant investor program. Yesterday, July 18, 2012, USCIS Director Mayorkas announced that his agency has and will continue to increase the number of staff dedicated to the EB-5 immigrant investor program. This [...]
We have been monitoring developments around the H.R. 3012 legislation aimed at removing the per-country annual limits for the immigrant visa categories. We have written extensively in the past and many of our clients and readers are very interested in any developments with H.R. 3012 because of its wide (and significant) impact on employment-based immigrant [...]
The Brookings Institute has completed and released an interesting report (PDF document, accompanied by interactive charts) on the H-1B program. The report aims to provide a deeper analysis of the H-1B program and to understand the issues and the competitive advantages (or lack thereof) of one of the H-1B work visa which is the most [...]
The U.S. State Department has just released the August 2012 Visa Bulletin which is the eleventh Visa Bulletin for the FY2012 fiscal year. The major headline in the upcoming month’s bulletin is the continued unavailability in the EB-2 India and China categories (which is expected to continue for at least one more months), the unchanged [...]
Our office closely monitors developments here in Washington, DC on the proposal to lift the per-country limitations on immigrant visas (green cards). Throughout the past couple of weeks, there have been significant developments on this proposal and we wanted to update our clients and readers. H.R. 3012 Background H.R. 3012, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants [...]