Dear Readers:

This has been a sad week, of course, with the loss of America's oldest active space shuttle. By now most of us know the life stories of the seven astronauts. It is hard as an immigration lawyer not to think about one astronaut in particular. Kalpana Chawla was born Indian and died a naturalized American. She entered the US in the 1980s the same way millions of other naturalized Americans have - as a student. While most people did not know Ms. Chawla until her untimely death, she has, for many come to symbolize the American Dream. Ms. Chawla is said to have dreamed of going into space while still a child in India. Like millions before her, she came to America to realize that dream. And her pursuit of that dream enriched her new country as well. Those who paint a picture of immigrants as the source of America's problems should be reminded of Kalpana Chawla and asked whether America would have been better off without her.

There is a lot of other immigration news this week and it comes on a variety of fronts. First, one of the most important trials ever concerning a company's hiring of illegal workers started this week. Tyson Foods, one of America's largest companies, has been indicted on several counts relating to, among other things, alien smuggling. The company is accused of giving its blessing to a scheme where Tyson managers arranged for Mexican workers to be smuggled to the US to work at Tyson plants in the southern US. The INS announced this week that it believes that more than seven million illegal aliens reside in the US. California announced this week that more half of the newborns in the state are Hispanic. The INS believes it has nabbed six terrorists as a result of the special registration process, a fact, if proven true, that will no doubt bolster the arguments of those supporting the controversial program. And there is much more news as well that we cover this week. We also have our regular features as well.

This week we also are pleased to announce that Siskind, Susser, Haas & Devine's web site was selected as the best web site in the nation in the 2003 IMA awards for law firm web site design. We normally don't write stories about ourselves in our newsletter, but this is not a typical event so we're going to bend our usual rules.

By the way, we hope you like the look of this week's issue. We are now publishing the newsletter in two formats - formatted HTML and plain text. If you are receiving this week's issue in HTML we hope you find the format more attractive and readable. If you are getting this in text and want to switch to HTML, you can go to www.topica.com and log into your subscription page for our newsletter and change the format.

As always, we remind readers that we're lawyers who make our living representing immigration clients. We would love to discuss becoming your law firm. Just go to http://www.visalaw.com/intake.html to request an appointment or call us at 800-748-3819 or 901-682-6455.

Regards,

Greg Siskind