USCIS Is Reissuing Receipt Notices to Certain EAD Renewal Applicants

Beginning February 16, 2017, US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) began reissuing receipt notices (Form I-797) to individuals who applied to renew their Employment Authorization Document (EAD) between July 21, 2016 and January 16, 2017, and whose applications remain pending in the following categories: 

  • (a)(3) Refugee;
  • (a)(5) Asylee;
  • (a)(7) N-8 or N-9;
  • (a)(8) Citizen of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, or Palau;
  • (a)(10) Withholding of deportation or removal granted;
  • (c)(8) Asylum application pending;
  • (c)(9) Pending adjustment of status under section 245 of the Immigration and Nationality Act;
  • (c)(10) Suspension of deportation applicants (filed before April 1, 1997), cancellation of removal applicants, and special rule cancellation of removal applicants under NACARA;
  • (c)(16) Creation of record (adjustment based on continuous residence since January 1, 1972);
  • (c)(20) Section 210 Legalization (pending Form I-700);
  • (c)(22) Section 245A Legalization (pending Form I-687);
  • (c)(24) LIFE Legalization; and
  • (c)(31) VAWA self-petitioners;

The reissuing of these receipts was necessitated by the change in USCIS regulations on January 17, 2017, when USCIS started automatically extending certain expiring EADs for up to 180 days while renewal applications were pending. The automatic extensions  apply only to certain applicants who properly filed for a renewal EAD before their current EAD expired, whose EAD renewal is under a category that is eligible for an automatic 180-day extension, and when the category on the applicant’s current EAD matches the “Class Requested” listed on the Notice of Action. 

USCIS is reissuing the receipt notices since some of the notices sent out before that date did not contain the applicant’s EAD eligibility category and in order to ensure EAD applicants have proof of their status for I-9 purposes. The reissued receipt notices will contain: 

  • The applicant’s EAD eligibility category;
  • The receipt date, which is the date USCIS received the EAD renewal application and which employers must use to determine whether the automatic EAD extension applies;
  • The notice date, which is the date USCIS reissued the receipt notice; and
  • New information about the 180-day EAD extension.  

To satisfy requirements for Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, EAD applicants may present the reissued receipt notice with their expired EAD to their employer as a List A document.

Additionally, it should be noted that applicants with an EAD based on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) who filed their EAD renewal applications before January 17, 2017, already received a six-month extension through the Federal Register notice that extended their country’s TPS designation. These applicants therefore will not receive a reissued receipt notice. All renewal applicants who filed Form I-765 applications on or after January 17, 2017, including TPS renewal applicants, will receive Form I-797 receipt notices that contain eligibility category information and information about the 180-day EAD extension.

All about E-Verify

Since 1986, employers in the United States have been required to confirm work authorization and verify the identity of their employees whether they are US citizens or foreign nationals. To do so, employers and employees must complete the Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification—which has recently been revised and updated—within the first three business days of the commencement of employment. E-Verify, launched in 1997, was created to add another level of verification. E-Verify is a voluntary (for most) and free, Internet-based system that compares information from an employee's Form I-9 to data from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) records to confirm employment eligibility. Over 600,000 companies are currently enrolled in E-Verify with more than 1,400 new participating companies every week.

Read more

ABC News: "Without immigrants, the US economy would be a 'disaster,' experts say"

Economic experts tell ABC News that the US economy and workforce would be a "disaster" without immigrants. "If all immigrants were just to disappear from the US workforce tomorrow, that would have a tremendous negative impact on the economy," Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, an economic research think tank based in Washington, D.C., tells ABC News. "Immigrants are overrepresented in a lot of occupations in both low- and high-skilled jobs. You'd feel an impact and loss in many, many different occupations and industries, from construction and landscape to finance and IT."

Although US-born workers could fill some of those jobs, Costa claims, there would nevertheless be large gaps in several sectors that would cause a decline in the economy. Immigrants earned $1.3 trillion and contributed $105 billion in state and local taxes and nearly $224 billion in federal taxes in 2014, according to the Partnership for a New American Economy and based on analysis of the US Census Bureau's latest American Community Survey. In 2014 immigrants had almost $927 billion in consumer spending power. "Immigrants are a very vital part of what makes the US economy work," Jeremy Robbins, the executive director of the Partnership for a New American Economy, a group of 500 pro-immigrant Republican, Democratic, and independent mayors and business leaders, tells ABC News. "They help drive every single sector and industry in this economy,” he says. “If you look at the great companies driving the US as an innovation hub, you'll see that a lot of companies were started by immigrants or the child of immigrants, like Apple and Google,” he notes, referring to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, whose biological father was a Syrian refugee, as well as Google (now Alphabet) co-founder Sergey Brin, who was born in Moscow.

Although immigrants make up about thirteen percent of the US population, they contribute almost fifteen percent of the country's economic output, according to an Economic Policy Institute 2014 report. "Immigrants have an outsized role in US economic output because they are disproportionately likely to be working and are concentrated among prime working ages," the EPI report says. "Moreover, many immigrants are business owners. In fact, the share of immigrant workers who own small businesses is slightly higher than the comparable share among US-born workers." David Kallick, the director of the Immigration Research Initiative at the Fiscal Policy Institute, says that immigrants do not “steal” jobs from Americans. “It may seem surprising, but study after study has shown that immigration actually improves wages to US-born workers and provides more job opportunities for US-born workers," he tells ABC News. "The fact is that immigrants often push US-born workers up in the labor market rather than out of it." Kallick adds that studies he has done found that "where there's economic growth there's immigration, and where there's not much economic growth, there's not much immigration." 

Meg Wiehe, the director of programs for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says undocumented immigrants also contribute a substantial amount in taxes. "Undocumented immigrants contributed more than $11.6 billion in state and local taxes each year. And if the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants here were given a pathway to citizenship or legal residential status, those tax contributions could rise by nearly $2 billion." Additionally, she says, the “vast majority” of undocumented immigrants pay income tax using the I-10 income tax return form.

To raise awareness and demonstrate the impact of immigrants in the American economy, many cities across the US last week held “A Day Without Immigrants” protests, when immigrants refused to go to work, attend school, and shop. The protests were held in response to President Trump’s anti-immigrant executive orders to increase deportations of undocumented immigrants, build a wall along the US-Mexico border, and conduct "extreme vetting" of immigrants from seven predominately Muslim countries. Hundreds of business owners in Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities participated. But not everyone supported the protesters. Jim Serowski, founder of JVS Masonry in Commerce City, Colorado, fired his foreman and thirty bricklayers who failed to show up for work. "If you're going to stand up for what you believe in, you have to be willing to pay the price," he tells CNN. Others feel that support for undocumented immigrants is misplaced.  “Of course, nobody wants to do without immigrants—they are what made America,” Sarah Crysl Akhtar from New Hampshire tells the New York Times. “But there is a difference between legal immigrants and illegal aliens.” The latter, she says, “bring down the quality of life for everyone.”

While the economic impact of the Day Without Immigrants protest is not clear, many recent anti-Trump boycotts and protests have raised awareness and put pressure on lawmakers and the Trump administration. For Andy Shallal, an Iraqi-American entrepreneur who closed all six locations of his D.C.-area performance venue chain Busboys and Poets, it was a chance to call for "humanistic" immigration reform. "I want to make sure that immigrants, such as myself and others, don’t live in fear," he says. He adds: "There are times when standing on the sidelines is not an option. This is one of those times."

Trump’s Executive Order "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States" – A Sign of Things to Come, or Business as Usual?

In the same week that President Trump issued his now infamous executive order suspending refugee admissions into the US and temporarily barring entry to passport holders from seven predominantly Muslim countries, he also issued two other executive orders that affect immigration. These other two orders—“Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” which, among other things, directs the immediate construction of a border wall, and "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States"—did not receive quite the same level of media attention as the “travel ban,” which has been the subject of already extensive federal litigation. Still, both may have a very broad impact on immigration and immigrant communities in the US. Trump's other executive actions signed early February—including "Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking," which among other actions aims to increase prosecutions for immigration and visa fraud, and "Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety," which will set up a task force to develop "strategies to reduce crime, including, in particular, illegal immigration"— may also signify that the scope of individuals likely to be targeted and deported is widening.

Read more

New York Times: “Japan Limited Immigration; Now It’s Short of Workers”

Japan’s strict stance on immigration—it has very little illegal immigration and is officially closed for those seeking low-skill labor—has led to worker shortages in many industries. Similar to the United States and other developed countries, Japan has had a difficult time finding workers for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the food, manufacturing, healthcare, and restaurant industries, and these labor shortages have helped put a brake on economic growth:

That is prompting Japan to question some fundamental assumptions about its labor needs. The debate is politically delicate, but changing realities on the ground—in Japan’s factories and fields—are forcing politicians to catch up. Japan’s total foreign-born labor force topped one million for the first time last year, according to the government, lifted in part by people entering the country on visas reserved for technical trainees.

While the government has incredibly strict immigration policies, lawmakers created immigration loopholes, most notably a “trainee” program, to allow hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers from such countries as China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Cambodia, fill empty jobs. As the Japanese population shrinks, in the last five years the trainee program has doubled in size, to over 200,000, according to official data, and there are plans to expand it. The “trainee” designation is not entirely accurate, since apart from a short period of language study, most trainees “receive little or no instruction that would distinguish them from regular manual laborers,” specialists and participants say. “The system is like calling a crow white,” Yoshio Kimura, a member of Parliament from the governing Liberal Democratic Party who heads the party’s labor committee, tells the New York Times. “What we’re really doing is importing labor.”

Because of decades of low birthrates, the number of working-age Japanese has been falling since the mid-1990s. Official census figures confirmed recently that Japan’s population shrank by nearly a million during the last half-decade. Nationwide unemployment is at three percent. The situation is serious in some industries with three to four positions open in nursing care and construction for every person who applies, according to government surveys.

Despite its popularity and critical function it plays because of the declining population, the trainee program is full of abuse. Nobuya Takai, a lawyer who has represented foreign trainees in labor disputes, explains that since companies do not hire the trainees directly, but through a myriad of government and private-sector middlemen, most trainees end up thousands of dollars in debt to pay broker fees before they even arrive. Moreover, since trainees cannot easily switch jobs, they do not have the option to leave a bad or abusive employer. “They can’t change jobs, and they lose money if they go home,” Takai says. Complaints about unpaid labor are common. Liu Hongmei, a Chinese worker, quit her Shanghai clothing factory job because she was promised wages three times her $430-per-month Chinese wage. “It seemed like a big opportunity,” she says. She arrived in Japan in debt after paying brokers $7,000 to arrange her visa, and found difficult working conditions and lower-than-promised pay. Her bosses, she says, “treat us like slaves.” In 2011, an American State Department report on human trafficking indicated the trainee program had inadequate protections against “debt bondage” and other abuses.

Some argue that Japan’s anti-immigrant stance and worker shortage problems may be a warning for other developed countries as they make possible changes to immigration policy. Present Trump campaigned on calls for a crackdown on undocumented  immigrants, saying they “compete directly against vulnerable American workers.” He also promised to cut back legal immigration with new controls to “boost wages and ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first,” although a study last year found, with few caveats, that immigrants do not take Americans’ jobs and in many cases create jobs.

Japanese parliament has approved the creation of a new agency to oversee the trainee program last year, in response to criticism over worker abuse. Additionally lawmakers plan to bring in more workers, and allow more kinds of businesses to hire them, including nursing homes and cleaning companies for offices and hotels. Kimura and some other lawmakers want to establish a formal guest worker system, though it would still not open a path to permanent stays. “If we want economic growth in the future, we need foreigners,” Kimura says.