Congress raised concerns about the rising delays and unjustified denials of various visa types at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), during a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on July 16, 2019. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, specifically highlighted inefficiencies regarding changes in processing, noting their impact on students experiencing significant delays for Optical Practical Training (OPT).
Read moreBloomberg Law: “Businesses Challenging Visa Denials Seeing Early Successes”
Around mid-2017, many immigration attorneys noticed a shift in treatment of H-1B visa petitions, the only visa type specifically named in President Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” executive order. Requests for Evidence (RFEs) and denials by US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) dramatically increased by the end of fiscal year 2017, according to an analysis of USCIS data. Last year, some immigration attorneys adopted a new strategy: suing the government over visa petition decisions and RFEs. Now, it looks like those efforts may be paying off for some employers. According to immigration attorney H. Ronald Klasko, the majority of complaints he filed in the last year to a year and a half have resulted in decisions in favor of the employer. Klasko argues that litigation is now a necessary part of the practice of immigration law, especially in regard to H-1Bs.
Read moreNational Foundation for American Policy: “H-1B Denials and Requests for Evidence Increase Under the Trump Administration”
H-1B denials and Requests for Evidence (RFEs) increased dramatically in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017 soon after President Trump took office, according to a report by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) that used data from US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). The report by NFAP, a non-profit and non-partisan public policy research organization, includes data showing that H-1B petition denials increased by forty-one percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of the 2017 fiscal year. Additionally, RFEs issued in the first three quarters of the 2017 fiscal year came to 63,599 combined, almost equaling the total number of RFEs—63,184—issued in the fourth quarter of the 2017 fiscal year.
Read moreOPINION: How the Immigration Landscape Changed in 2017
When Donald Trump won the election, many immigrants and their advocates feared the worst. Now that President Trump has been in office for over a year, I wish I could write that everyone’s fears were overblown, but that simply isn’t true. The administration’s actions have met and in some cases exceeded the worst fears of many immigrants and immigration practitioners.
Read moreOPINION: L-1B Careful: the Difficulties of the Specialized Knowledge Visa
If there is anything a seasoned immigration lawyer is sure of, it is to tread carefully with the L-1B visa petition. The L-1B visa is for intra-company transfers of employees who have been working for the foreign parent, subsidiary, or affiliate branch for at least one year. The transferee must be coming to the US branch office of the company to work in a position that requires “specialized knowledge” (whereas an L-1A is for an executive or manager). What exactly “specialized knowledge” means has been a subject so frequently discussed in immigration case law, US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) memoranda, lawyer forums, conferences, and office water cooler chats, that a person could read for days straight and end up just as confused as they were when they started. After all that, the reader may see no correlation between what they just read and how USCIS currently adjudicates L-1Bs.
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