After the recent earthquakes and tsunami in Japan, our office is receiving a number of inquiries by Japanese nationals regarding relief options and alternatives in various U.S. immigration situations. USCIS has also indicated that they would provide relief in a number of situations understanding that a disaster may affect the ability of an individual to [...]
The Kentucky Consular Center (KCC) is a centralized processing facility for petition-based nonimmigrant visa programs and for the Diversity Visa program (also known as "green card lottery"). Located in Williamsburg, Kentucky, KCC serves a variety of important functions affecting many visa applicants and foreign nationals who are selected under the Diversity Visa lotttery. There are [...]
The U.S. State Department just released the April 2011 Visa Bulletin which is the seventh Visa Bulletin for the FY2011 fiscal year. The major headline in the upcoming month’s bulletin is the slow forward movement in FB2A (after few significant backward movements), the significant retrogression in the FB1 preference visa numbers, accompanied by the continued [...]
Our office has established a reputation as one of the premier practices for handling appeals with the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) and we often receive inquiries not only about 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 [...]
About Forms AR-11 and AR-11 SR The law requires that most non-U.S. citizens residing in the U.S. to report a change of address within 10 days of moving by completing a Form AR-11, Change of Address. Similarly, AR-11 SR is a form which requires non-U.S. citizens who are subject to "Special Registration" to update their [...]
The Department of State announced yesterday that effective March 3, 2011, the U.S. consulate in Mumbai, India would limit the number of applicants it can process due to the building's aging infrastructure. While a new multi-million dollar facility is under construction (scheduled to open later this year), the current facility of the consulate seems incapable [...]
In early January we wrote about a USCIS proposal to create a pre-registration system for new H-1B cap cases in order to make the H-1B cap application process more efficient and to eliminate waste associated with H-1B cap petitions which are filed on or shortly after April 1st (when the H-1B cap filing window opens) [...]
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) is set to begin accepting H-1B visa applications pursuant to its Fiscal Year 2012 (FY2012) quota. The first day on which USCIS will accept new, cap-subject H-1B petitions, is April 1, 2011. About the H-1B Program and the Annual Cap The H-1B visa category was created in 1990 [...]
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 [...]
Do you need to have a brief immigration question answered? Are you confused by thousands of confusing (and conflicting) Internet forum and blog postings on a specific immigration subject? Do you want to chat with an immigration attorney about specific immigration regulations or general immigration policy? Immigration Live Chat Launches on March 3, 2011 at [...]