Dear Readers:

Immigration was in the news in a big way this week – two items we expected and one we did not. The bigger headline was the surprise withdrawal of Bernard Kerik from consideration as Secretary of Homeland Security. This is the Cabinet Department that oversees the country’s three immigration agencies. Why did Kerik pull out of the process? An old familiar reason was offered – the employment of an illegal nanny in the Kerik household. Like Linda Chavez who withdrew from consideration as Labor Secretary four years ago, the White House felt that it could not defend his nomination when the position came with the responsibility of enforcing the country’s immigration laws.

The Kerik withdrawal once again illustrates just how seriously flawed our immigration system is. The Kerik family is no different than thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of families around the US who depend on foreign undocumented workers who help in their households. The anti-immigrants in our country will say that if these jobs just paid better, plenty of Americans would line up for them. That’s just ignoring reality. First, there are an estimated 14,000,000 undocumented workers in this country and only 8,000,000 unemployed Americans. Even if you could magically force every undocumented worker to leave and gave Americans the opportunity to fill all these jobs, there would still be millions of vacancies. Second, ask your average unemployed stockbroker or middle manager whether they’re interested in laundering soiled patient garments in a nursing home or cleaning dishes at the local diner and you’ll likely get a “forget it” in response. These ARE jobs Americans simply aren’t available to do.

And it turns law enforcement heroes like Bernard Kerik, admired jurists like Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, popular commentators like Pat Buchanan and countless others into lawbreakers. The self-righteous will say “Hey, employers should just do it the legal way instead of hiring people illegally. Well folks, there is no legal way. We don’t have a guest worker program in this country and getting a visa for a nanny and many other types of skilled and unskilled workers is usually out of the question. President Bush’s immigration plan would be an important step in the right direction. Hopefully, the one positive result of the Kerik mess is that it will help the President make the case that immigration reform is needed.

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The shocking news of the week for many, however, was the retrogression of the EB-3 employment green card category for skilled and unskilled workers. We new this was likely to come in early 2005 and we have been warning readers of the possibility. For the first time in several years, cutoff dates have been published in this category. For now, Filipino, Chinese and Indians are affected. But the remaining green card categories will likely start to roll back in the coming months. In this issue, we explain what the EB-3 cap means and how to deal with it.

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Another important development is that President Bush signed the H-1B and L-1 reform bill we described in our special newsletter issue a few weeks ago. At the time the bill passed, we were unsure how the USCIS would determine which of the two new fees went into affect right away. The USCIS has now said that the $1500/$750 worker retraining fee applies right away while the $500 fraud protection fund will not start until March 8, 2005. Note also that USCIS will not begin taking cases under the new quota until March either. We’ll report more on the new law as we learn of developments.

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As always, we remind readers that we're lawyers who make our living representing immigration clients and employers seeking to comply with immigration laws. 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