Dear Readers:

This week we present a special issue covering the passage of HR 4337 in the US House of Representatives. The bill focuses entirely on enforcement and contains a number of controversial provisions that we discuss in this issue of the newsletter. The bill is frightening in many regards even though we expect cooler heads to prevail in the Senate and for this bill to be summarily rejected by the upper chamber of Congress.

The bill’s sponsors used the strategy of introducing and passing the legislation with lightning speed. Immigrant rights organizations had little time to organize and oppose the bill. The bill was introduced and passed in just over a week, a speed virtually unheard of in the history of immigration legislation.

The provision of the bill that is perhaps the most controversial is the criminalization of being out of status in the US. Furthermore, such a crime would be an aggravated felony barring the convicted criminal from ever legally entering the US again. This bill would actually make more than a million children in American criminals.

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While the House of Representatives was passing a truly frightening piece of legislation, it apparently also managed to derail inclusion of H-1B and Employment Based green card quota relief in a bill that had already passed the Senate and needed to be reconciled with a House version of the bill.

The Senate version would have freed up to 300,000 H-1B visas and 90,000 green cards and made other changes that would have reduced problems created by the backlogs in the non-immigrant and immigrant visa programs.

While the immigration provisions are not officially dead, they’re definitely on life-support and proponents of the legislation are already trying to find a new legislative strategy.

The bill did contain language that closed what little remaining access immigrants had to Medicaid health coverage. Since the 1996 Welfare Act, immigrants have been barred from most public benefits.

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In firm news, this past week I was a speaker at the annual meeting of the New York Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. I spoke on using the Internet in preparing immigration cases and used an H-1B case as a hypothetical. I received a number of requests for my outline for my presentation and would be happy to share it with any attorney readers who are interested. Just email me at gsiskind@visalaw.com.

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Readers who have subscribed to this newsletter for many of our 11 year history know that a few times a year our publication schedule becomes a little erratic. One of those times is around the end of the year when our staff tend to take off time for holiday travel. And we also know our readers are doing the same. We’ll be back at the beginning of January and wish all of our readers a happy holiday season.

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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