Dear Readers: 

This month will be remembered as the time when many important changes in employment-based immigration. First, a new $500 fraud prevention and detection fee kicks in today, March 8^th, for all H-1B and L-1 cases. The controversial fee was pushed by critics of both visa programs and is designed to fund the investigation of suspicious cases.  

Another H-1B change that was supposed to kick in today was the implementation of the new bonus quota of 20,000 H-1Bs for graduates of US graduate programs. However, the USCIS released a memorandum last week indicating that it was not going to make the deadline set by Congress and that it would not accept applications until it issued application guidelines. There have been vocal grumblings across the immigration bar and the wider H-1B community. Many people remember previous instances where the USCIS failed to issue regulations and guidelines carrying out Congressional mandates – the physician national interest waivers and the VisaScreen rules for nurses are two cases that come to mind – and there is concern that we could be looking at a similar problem that will only be resolved in the courts. I have heard from at least one source within USCIS that guidelines will be issued within a few days so all of this worrying is, hopefully, unwarranted. But people are understandably nervous and we will watch this issue closely.  

The third critical change that will occur at the end of the month is the implementation of the PERM labor certification program. PERM is the new electronic filing system for labor certification-based green cards and is expected to dramatically speed up processing on these cases. In most cases, according to the Department of Labor, processing will take just a few weeks as opposed to several years as is currently the case in many parts of the country. The PERM rules are significantly different in many key areas from the current labor certification rules and immigration lawyers, employers and workers are advised to be very cautious about complying with the new rules when filing these cases.  

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This week we are running a commentary from my friend immigration lawyer Angelo Paparelli. Angelo is a highly respected Southern California immigration lawyer and is a noted author on many immigration law topics. In this column he takes on Lou Dobbs, the country’s most vocal critic of immigration. Dobbs claims he is only against illegal immigration, but in his almost nightly coverage of immigration for the last two years, it is hard to remember any positive stories about immigrants and he regularly criticizes legal immigration programs as well as predictably criticizing illegal immigration and any efforts to confer legal status on these folks. 

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Finally, 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