In recent years, despite the U.S.’s rich history as a haven for ambitious immigrants, many foreigners looking to work in the U.S. have had to cope with increasingly restrictive immigration policies. As a result, the number of immigrant-founded startups in Silicon Valley, to take an example, has declined from 52.4% in 2005 to 43.9% in [...]
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) launched earlier today Preparing for the Oath: U.S. History and Civics for Citizenship, a Web-based learning tool designed to help immigrants prepare for the civics portion of the naturalization test. Designed as a self-study tool, Preparing for the [...]
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 [...]
Our office has fielded numerous calls from a number of foreign nationals who are in the U.S. temporarily and whose departure plans have been disrupted by the infamous Icelandic volcano ash. For many in the U.S. whose departure travel arrangements were closely related to their I-94 expiration date, the disruption and delay in departure travel [...]
Over the past months we have written extensively about the issues raised by today’s Wall Street Journal article “Slump Sinks Visa Program” but it is still an interesting read. Most of our readers are aware of the current H-1B quota and the fact that a substantial number of H-1B visas still remain available (for comparison, [...]
We wrote in September about the gap in expected revenue by USCIS following the filing fee increase of Summer 2007. We noted that the agency has a $282 million shortfall in expected revenues. As a result of the announced 2007 fee increase, USCIS saw a surge in applications and hiring in 2007, ahead of a hefty [...]