Dear Readers:  

I spent the latter half of last week in Washington, DC walking the halls of Congress discussing with members of Congress and their staff the prospects for immigration reform. I’d love to be able to tell you the real story on 

• When immigration reform will come up in the legislative session?

• What will be included in the reform package?

• What are the real chances for success this year?

There does seem to be a sense that we’ll see an effort put forth this year and I did speak to at least one person who is actually in drafting. But there is still a great deal of uncertainty. The Los Angeles Times reported this week a possible plan to pass a great deal of the responsibility for determining employment based green card numbers to an independent commission. Unions are said to be pushing the proposal, a major departure from past reform proposals, but it is not clear how serious this proposal is or why the plan would benefit holders of any one particular view on the appropriate number of visas.

In any case, my message was the same – it’s time to finally deal with immigration reform. We’ve made great progress on enforcing immigration laws – even anti-immigrant groups would agree with this – and conservative members of Congress can go to their constituents and accurately tell them that we are enforcing our laws and now we can move on to the next phase of immigration reform – dealing with putting the 10 million illegally present immigrants on a path to legal status and also dealing with a dysfunctional legal immigration system. 

I also spent a day working on one particular bill – S.628. This bill would permanently reauthorize the Conrad 30 J-1 program and also allow physicians training on H-1B visas the opportunity to get an exemption from the H-1B cap in exchange for committing to work several years in a medically underserved American community. I, along with several other immigration lawyers from across the country, have been working for a long time on this bill with Senator Conrad’s office and we’re hopeful that this is the year we see this important legislation pass.  

Finally, I visited USCIS’ headquarters with a couple of colleagues at other firms that handle health care immigration matters and we had a very productive meeting with several policy officials at the agency and discussed some of the most pressing problems affecting health care employers.  

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In firm news, I will be a panelist on an ILW.com panel on physician immigration Thursday at mid-day. If you are interested in signing up, you can register at www.ilw.com.  

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I’m writing this Openers on March 31, 2009 and our office is scrambling to get our last H-1B cases out before the new quota opens tomorrow. No one knows yet what will happen, though H-1B usage is a good barometer of national economic conditions. Not surprisingly, we are expecting a major reduction in filings, but we’ll have to wait and see. 

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Finally, as always, we welcome your feedback. If you are interested in becoming a Siskind Susser client, please call our office at 901-682-6455 and request a consultation. We are a national immigration law firm and work on a broad range of immigration matters for clients locating across the country.

Kind regards,