US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) announced last week a “new strategy known as eProcessing” in order to “accelerate USCIS’ transition to a digital business model.” L. Francis Cissna, the current USCIS director who just announced he is resigning effective June 1, 2019, says in the press release: “eProcessing modernizes USCIS’ work to create a paperless solution that is more effective for applicants, our officers, and our partner agencies.” According to USCIS, eProcessing will be a “complete digital experience” that will include everything from applying for a benefit to communicating with USCIS to obtaining a decision on a case.
Read moreMerit
Silent Agitator
Silent Agitator by Scottish artist Ruth Ewan is a clock sculpture located off 24th street on the High Line. The “monumental” sculpture is based on an illustration originally produced by labor activist Ralph Chaplin for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union. The illustration, a reference to the union’s round-the-clock organizing work and importance of the clock in labor negotiations including the fight for eight hour workdays, was one of many images that appeared on “stickerettes” (known as “silent agitators”) and distributed by union members. Ewan’s intention with the piece is to “provide a gathering space on the High Line, evoking the private vs. public separation of space and time we experience in capitalism, and a possible future where people gather together for their reclamation.”
The Aftermath of the H-1B Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 Visa lottery: Next Steps and Alternatives
US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) have announced the lottery results for this year’s H-1B cap (Fiscal Year 2020) with USCIS reporting that it received 201,011 H-1B petitions. Additionally, the agency announced last week that they completed data entry for all FY 2020 H-1B cap-subject petitions selected (including master’s cap cases), which means they will be sending receipt notices for those cases selected and returning those cases not selected.
Read moreThe Guardian: "Frances Tiafoe—‘I want to use my story to inspire others, you can’t make it up.’ "
Frances Tiafoe, the son of immigrants to the US, overcame the challenges of his early years in America to become one of the most promising and talented players in the world of international tennis. Born into a family of West African immigrants, Tiafoe’s father, a diamond mineworker from Sierra Leone, escaped the civil war-torn country and found his way to America.
Read moreAn American Story
NYCxDESIGN 2019
NYCxDESIGN, New York City’s yearly festival of design, highlights the unique creative, cultural, educational, and economic opportunities in the city. The festival showcases over a dozen design disciplines through exhibitions, installations, trade shows, panels, product launches, and open studios that in total will engage more than five million visitors and residents. This week we stopped by a few of the festival’s exhibit locations. At the Design Pavilion in Times Square, the headquarters for the festival, the highlight for us was “Chairousel,” a collaborative art piece by the students from the School of Visual Arts’ (SVA) 3D Design and Interior Design Departments that features a collection of chairs — each of which is a representation of what inspires each design student — that spin around on a refurbished 1960s carousel, on top of which is a twenty-six-foot high chair. At the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), we stopped by two exhibits. The Graduating Student Exhibition is a culmination of each artist’s unique experience as a student of FIT, and The Future is in the Making exhibition reveals both the “processes of thought and ideation” behind artwork that took several years to create along with the final artwork itself.
Think Immigration: “But the Royal Baby Actually is a U.S. Citizen…”
Last week, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, announced the birth of their first child. Given that Prince Harry is, of course, a (rather famous) British citizen, and Meghan is a US citizen waiting for her British citizenship to be approved, immigration attorney John Manley examines the very important question of what citizenship the child has. While Manley notes that in general the “automatic acquisition of US citizenship at birth by a foreign-born child is actually pretty complicated,” thankfully for Harry and Meghan’s royal baby the question of his citizenship is simpler…
Read moreMy First Country
Viewfinding
Viewfinding is a public art installation and queer poetry collaboration by Sarah E. Brook, a New York-based artist whose work utilizes “translucency, layering, color gradients and architectural references to investigate the relationship between expansive external and internal (psychic) space.” Located off the 68th Street Entrance to Riverside Park South, the interactive light sculpture is comprised of five wooden trapezoidal panels within which are strips of cast acrylic painted in colors from rich blue to fiery pink, all meant to reference the sky at sunset. Twenty-six poems by queer poets are attached to the bench below the panels. Through her art, Brook invites the viewer to explore “how vastness can dismantle limiting narratives of being” and “offers viewers the opportunity to seek their own resonant orientation to the work through chosen sightlines, alternately illuminating, obscuring and revealing corridors of visibility.”