Dear Readers:

In this month's issue of Siskind's Immigration Bulletin we continue to report on the fallout of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. In our Legislative Update, we report on efforts to reverse the harshest provisions in the law. We also report on State Department and Immigration and Naturalization Service guidelines interpreting the new law.

We also present our regular features this month including Henry Chang's column "From Our Canadian Office," INS, State Department and Labor Department processing times, "University Corner," "Consular Focus: Shanghai, China," and our feature article, "Visa Spotlight: National Interest Waivers."

We are also happy to report on a few new important additions to our web site. First, now that we have more than 300 articles from past issues of our newsletter on our web site (www.visalaw.com), we felt it necessary to add a search engine to enable readers to more efficiently locate articles on particular subjects. We have added the search engine and it can be easily found on our site's front page. Our web site and e-mailed newsletter are two of the most popular immigration-related offerings on the Internet. The site was accessed more than 2,000,000 times in 1996 and more than 8,000 people subscribe to our newsletter. Our firm's Internet activities have been frequently reported in the press and we are often asked questions regarding the site's viewership and the demographics of the newsletter readership. We have added to our web site a much more detailed weekly site statistics report as well as a spreadsheet with the geographic breakdown of our newsletter's subscribers. Interestingly, of the nearly 1,000 persons who subscribed in the last two months, more than 20% are currently located in California or the New York/New Jersey area. Nevertheless, we added subscribers in 46 states and nearly 50 other countries. The more we learn about our readers, the better we can hopefully shape our newsletter's content to meet our readers' interests.

Sincerely,

Greg Siskind, Editor