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Archive for the ‘Green Cards’ Category
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Four immigration programs that were set to expire on September 30th have been extended for another month to allow Congress to complete work on the Department of Homeland Security spending bill.
The four programs include:
1. The EB-5 Regional Center Program, which allows immigrant investors seeking a greencard to invest $500,000 in a USCIS approved regional center;
2. E-Verify the internet-based Employment Eligibility Verification System run by USCIS that allows employers to electronically verify the employment eligibility of certain employees;
3. The Conrad 30 J-1 program which allows state health agencies to annually hire up to 30 foreign physicians to practice in rural and inner-city communities that often have difficulty recruiting physicians. The sponsored physicians are released from their two year home residency requirement if they work for a minimum of three years with the medically underserved population; and
4. The EB-4 Religious Worker Program which provides up to 5,000 permanent immigrants visas for religious workers which include ministers, professionals working in a religious vocation, and other workers in religious vocations.
Tags: Conrad 30, E-Verify, EB-4 religious workers, EB-5, J-1 Waiver
Posted in Agency Updates, EB-5 Investor Visas, Green Cards | Click Here To Comment »
Friday, September 18th, 2009
The Department of State has issued the visa bulletin for the new fiscal year beginning on October 1, 2009. As predicted, retrogression in many categories continues with some dates being pushed back even further than they were before numbers became unavailable earlier this year. Last year, we explained why the Department of State keeps priority dates early at the beginning of the fiscal year and then advances them later in the year.
The employment based first preference (EB-1) category will remain current for all nationalities. Cut-off dates in the EB-2 category will advance by two weeks for India, to January 22, 2005, and just over 2 months for China, to March 22, 2005. The EB-2 category will remain current for all other countries.
The EB-3 category remains severely backlogged but will once again be available with cut-off dates of June 1, 2002, and even earlier dates for Indian (April 15, 2001), Chinese (February 22, 2002) and Mexican (May 1, 2002) nationals. The cut-off dates for the EB-3 other worker category have been set at June 1, 2001 except for Indian nationals who will have a cut-off date of April 15, 2001.
The EB-4 religious worker category and the EB-5 immigrant investor categories also remain current. While these pilot programs are set to sunset on September 30, 2009, it is expected that Congress will extend them for an additional period of time.
Tags: Green Cards, Greencard, immigrant visa numbers, Visa Retrogression
Posted in Green Cards | Click Here To Comment »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Employers who rely on foreign nationals to provide needed expertise in their workforce – from technical programmers to biochemists to wind turbine engineers – should take notice of three troubling trends which are becoming clearer as the discussion about employment-based immigration reform gets drowned out by the ongoing debate about comprehensive immigration reform.
The first trend is captured in this blog post by Vivek Wadhwa, a professor at Duke University who has studied high-tech entrepreneurship extensively. Current backlogs in the employment-based immigration categories trap foreign workers in the original job for which they were sponsored, meaning their companies cannot promote them to positions where their experience and skills can best be used. Nor can the workers take the initiative to start their own companies – while a small company may be able to sponsor one of its owners as an H-1B, a green card is much less likely in that situation. Wadhwa points out that eliminating the green card backlog (a major part of which consists of cases trapped by bureaucratic delays that should have been approved in past years’ quotas, which do not carry over from year to year) would free an enormous amount of human capital to innovate and create the next generation of companies that will drive economic growth in the US. (more…)
Tags: CIR, immigrant visa numbers
Posted in Green Cards, News & Politics | Click Here To Comment »
Monday, June 15th, 2009
On June 10, 2009 the Department of State (DOS) issued an update on the number of employment based visas that will be available for the remainder of the fiscal year. The government’s fiscal year runs from October 1, 2008 until September 30, 2009. Each fiscal year there are a total of 140,000 employment based immigrant visas available across five preference categories.
As the result of a recent surge in applications in the employment based fourth preference (EB-4) religious worker and employment based fifth preference (EB-5) immigrant investor categories a cut-off date could be established at the end of the year. Moreover, usage of the EB-4 and EB-5 categories impacts the entire pool of visa numbers, as past practice has been to transfer unused number in these categories to meet demand for visas in the employment based first (EB-1) and second preference (EB-2) categories. This is particularly significant for nationals from China and India, as it permitted cut-off dates to advance further than it would have been possible if these categories were subject to only their annual limits.
The long term implications of EB-4 and EB-5 usage are that EB-2 China and India applicants will likely experience even longer delays in obtaining permanent residence status than they currently do. Both India and China have an annual limit of 2,800 EB-2 numbers plus any leftover EB-4, EB-5 and EB-1 visa numbers. Therefore, without legislative relief, the waiting time for Chinese and Indian EB-2 applicants may be many years or even decades, according to DOS.
DOS has indicated the following figures for the remainder of fiscal year 2009 per category:
EB-1 will remain current for the rest of the fiscal year. However, EB-1 applicants from China and India could be subject to cut-off in August or September if demand remains high.
EB-2 India and China have 1/1/2000 cut-off dates for July 2009 and may become unavailable in August or September 2009.
EB-3 worldwide will remain unavailable for the rest of the fiscal year. EB-3 cut-off dates for the next fiscal year beginning on October 1, 2009 will have cut-off dates from 3/1/2003, and EB-3 applicants can expect extended delays in this category.
EB-3 visas for India, China and Mexico applicants will be unavailable for the remainder of the fiscal year. It is estimated, based on current demand for visa numbers that as of the 2010 fiscal year, the following cut-off dates could be established: China will be March 1, 2003; India will be November 1, 2001; and Mexico will be March 1, 2003.
Tags: Department of State, Visa Retrogression
Posted in Agency Updates, Green Cards | Click Here To Comment »
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
Yesterday, the Department of State issued its May Visa Bulletin. The surprising news was that USCIS has managed to use up all of the visa numbers available in the EB-3 category (professional, skilled and other workers) by granting adjustment of status cases, so that they will have to suspend processing of pending EB-3 cases until October. (For a more complete explanation of priority dates and how they work, see our Client Alert.)
Fortunately, there is no hint that worldwide first preference, or second preference (except India and China), will become backlogged or run out this year. More on the EB-3 unavailability after the jump. (more…)
Tags: Green Cards, immigrant visa numbers
Posted in Green Cards | Click Here To Comment »
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
I was just down in Washington for AILA’s Spring Seminar, where government officials speak about the current state of affairs in their agencies. The DOL’s representatives released their current “processing time” report for labor certification applications filed through the PERM system, and while the results aren’t pretty, at least we know which cases are outside the Department’s “normal” processing time.
(more…)
Tags: labor certification, PERM
Posted in Agency Updates, Green Cards | 1 Comment »
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