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 [...]
About the Six-Month Club Under U.S. law, every passenger who wishes to be admitted into the U.S. must have a valid passport while they are in the U.S. Furthermore, passengers must not only have a valid passport for the time they wish to be in the U.S., but also for an additional six months on [...]
Our office handles a substantial number of ETA Form 9089 – Permanent Labor Certification (“PERM”) applications and we are closely monitoring the current PERM processing times not only for the benefit of our clients but also to be able to predict longer-term trends in PERM processing. The Department of Labor (“DOL”) has provided an update [...]
After the significant forward movement in many of the family-based preference categories in the fall, the government has received a significant number of I-130 family-based immigrant petitions in a number of preference categories. In an effort to process these pending I-130 petition in a more efficient manner, in November 2010, USCIS transferred approximately 36,000 I-130 [...]
There have been rumors and speculation on this topic (which we did not report until we had final confirmation), but now it is official. USCIS has announced that they will start issuing a combined Employment Authorization Document (EAD) and Advance Parole (AP) card for some applicants for adjustment of status. The new combined EAD/AP card [...]
The U.S. State Department just released the March 2011 Visa Bulletin which is the sixth Visa Bulletin for the FY2011 fiscal year. The major headline in the upcoming month’s bulletin is the major (additional) retrogression in family-based second A preference visa numbers, accompanied by the continued slow forward movement across the employment-based categories. The retrogression [...]
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 [...]
Updated: February 16, 2011 Many of our readers are aware of the story about Tri-Valley University (recent Google News) and how it was shut down by federal authorities for allegedly defrauding students and helping them obtain F-1 student visas in violation of immigration laws. University Allegedly Committed Fraud and Violation of U.S. Immigration Laws According [...]