Dear Readers:  

This past week I spent time in Washington , D.C. working on various immigration legislative measures. Comprehensive immigration reform does not seem to be a realistic possibility in the near term, but there are a number of smaller measures that could have a decent chance of passing this year including  

a.      The DREAM Act

b.      AgJobs

c.      Nursing and physician immigration relief

d.      Arts and sports immigration technical fixes

e.      Employment-based green card number increases

f.       The SKIL Act for professional workers

g.      Tougher immigration enforcement

h.      Relief for Iraqi refugees

All still face substantial fights, but they each stand a better chance on their own than they would as part of a comprehensive bill. The conventional wisdom used to be that a comprehensive bill would stand a better chance because it would bring together a lot of allies to work together for a larger bill. But it also makes it easier for opponents who only have to work to defeat a single piece of legislation and can kill a bill with many good things by focusing on a small number of controversial measures.  

The first measure to watch for is the DREAM Act which could come up as early as this week.  

If you want to keep up with these changes, aside from this newsletter, I recommend checking in on my ILW.com blog at http://blogs.ilw.com/gregsiskind.  

I also had the opportunity to attend a lobby day and rally organized by Immigration Voice. IV is an organization of high skilled immigrant workers who are fighting for improvements in the employment-based immigration system, particularly in categories utilized by workers in the professions. IV has really done a tremendous job in getting organized and they have shown the power of the web. Their web site, www.immigrationvoice.org, has been the engine driving their activity and they organized an extremely successful event. I was honored to be allowed to participate and was happy to liveblog from the event. You can see some of my photos on the ILW.com blog.  

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In firm news, I was named this month to the annual Best Lawyers in America list in the category of Immigration Law.  

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Finally, as always, if you are interested in becoming a Siskind Susser Bland client, please feel welcome to email me at gsiskind@visalaw.com or contact us at 800-748-3819 to arrange for a telephone or in person consultation with one of our lawyers.

Regards,

Greg Siskind