Our office just came back from a discussion session here in Washington, DC with Charles Oppenheim. Mr. Oppenheim is the Chief of the Visa Control and Reporting Division at the U.S. Department of State. For many, he is simply known as the person responsible for the monthly and annual visa number allocations for family- and [...]
USCIS has announced that effective October 30, 2011, it would issue redesigned Employment Authorization Document Cards (also known as “EAD” or "work permit" cards ) The redesign is mainly driven to incorporate new security features to deter counterfeiting, tempering and document fraud, generally. Design Samples of the front and back are shown below: No Changes [...]
USCIS just released the information on the numbers of cap-subject FY2012 H-1Bs filed since April 1. As of October 21, 2011, USCIS has received approximately46,200 H-1B petitions counting toward the 65,000 cap (an increase of 2,900 over the previous week). Similarly, as of October 21, there were 20,000 H-1B visas filed subject to the U.S. [...]
Our office handles a substantial number of H-1B work visa petitions for a variety of U.S. employers and we often share our direct experiences with the H-1B work visa program. This article is intended to share our experience with H-1B work visa petitions where there is a change of the job location once the H-1B [...]
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced yesterday that for the fiscal year 2011 (FY2011) which ended September 30, 2011, ICE has deported a record number of individuals. In FY 2011 ICE's Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations removed 396,906 individuals — the largest number in the agency's history. Of these, nearly 55 percent or [...]
USCIS just released the information on the numbers of cap-subject FY2012 H-1Bs filed since April 1. As of October 14, 2011, USCIS has received approximately43,300 H-1B petitions counting toward the 65,000 cap (an increase of 2,300 over the previous week). Similarly, as of October 14, there were 19,500 H-1B visas filed subject to the U.S. [...]
USCIS just released the information on the numbers of cap-subject FY2012 H-1Bs filed since April 1. As of October 7, 2011, USCIS has received approximately41,000 H-1B petitions counting toward the 65,000 cap (an increase of 4,700 over the previous two weeks). Similarly, as of October 7, there were 19,100 H-1B visas filed subject to the [...]
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 U.S. State Department just released the November 2011 Visa Bulletin which is the second Visa Bulletin for the FY2012 fiscal year. The major headline in the upcoming month’s bulletin is the significant forward movement in EB-2 India and China and the forward movement in FB1. Summary of the November 2011 Visa Bulletin – Employment-Based [...]
Many of our clients and readers are asking us on updates regarding the Department of Labor's (DOL) prevailing wage determination process. We are happy to report that according to DOL reports and according to our first-hand experience, prevailing wage determinations are issued and they are (slowly) starting to return to normal. Background on the DOL [...]