June 1998 marks the beginning of Siskind, Susser, Haas & Chang's fifth year on the World Wide Web. When our site went up, fewer than five other law firms in the world had web sites and we were the first immigration law firm with a web site. A few of our readers may remember those early days. Our site was little more than an online yellow page ad and most of our online activities were restricted to answering reader question in the USENET Newsgroups. But in October 1994, we launched this publication and the course of our firm's history changed dramatically. Traffic on our site increases by more than 50% every six months. Last month we had 725,000 hits on our web site, an increase of nearly 225,000 hits over the previous record (set only the month before). And our e-mail newsletter circulation has also increased dramatically. We now have more than 15,000 subscribers to this list (every one of whom specifically subscribed) and we are getting more than 30 new subscribers every day. All this has helped our firm establish ourselves as a major national immigration law firm and we thank you, our readers, for making this possible. We look forward to many more years of serving you and hope to continue to increase the quality of the information content we are making available to the online public.

As has been the case for the last several months, the predominant issue concerning our readers has been the freeze on the issuance of H-1B visas that began in early May. We have heard from many of you and know how difficult your predicaments are becoming. Unfortunately, we are not able to report yet that Congress has acted to resolve the issue. While a fairly decent proposal to lift the cap by 30,000 visa has already been passed by the Senate, the House of Representatives has not been as easy. The House version of the bill contains several highly onerous provisions that will require employers to be able to demonstrate that they have attempted to recruit for the positions and that they have not been laying off US workers. And, regretably, President Clinton has indicated that he will veto any legislation that does not contain the so-called worker protection provisions. Consequently, progress on the legislation has stalled while Congress works behind the scenes to resolve the differences.

While in theory one can say that the provisions are necessary to protect American workers, the reality is that the H-1B program would effectively end since the program could no longer be used by most employers to meet short-term critical needs. The push for these new worker protection provisions makes little sense given the fact that the US has one of the tightest labor markets in its history right now and companies are desperate to find employees. A number of clients of our law firm have already indicated that if the H-1B program becomes too burdensome and they cannot adequately meet their employment needs, they will consider closing their US operations and moving overseas where labor is much cheaper and readily available. The result will mean the loss of US jobs to overseas workers - hardly the result intended by the so-called worker protection provisions of the House H-1B bill.

Because of the need to keep readers up to date on a day to day basis on this story, we have created the H-1B Emergency Update Page on our web site at http://www.visalaw.com.

Last month, we announced that we are preparing the VisaJobs web site to help foreign nationals find jobs in the US. Progress continues on getting the site ready to go. We expect to have the employer data entry portion of the site available in the next few days. Recruiters and employers who have positions to offer that are specifically open to foreign nationals (i.e. willing to petition for a foreign national's visa), will be able to begin entering jobs into our database first. The portion of the site for job seekers will be ready shortly after that. In a nutshell, job seekers will be able to post their resumes and scan through listings of positions and employers will be able to advertise their jobs and scan through the VisaJobs resume database.

In a few days, all of the lawyers of our law firm will be making our annual trek to the yearly meeting of the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Houston, Texas. The program is a four day intensive continuing education program and it also serves as a mass forum for government officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, US Information Agency, State Department and Labor Department to communicate directly with AILA members. In our next issue, I will present highlights from the meeting.

In this month's issue, we include our usual features as well as news coverage of a number of significant INS losses in the courts, the immigration implications of Indian and Pakistani nuclear testing, the latest on the health care worker immigration situation, news on the tremendous backlog of naturalization applications and much more.

Finally, as always we remind readers that our twelve lawyers are able to serve immigration clients in any state or province in the US, Canada and now China. You are always welcome to call us toll free at 800-748-3819. We also provide full-scale consultations via telephone. Just complete the appointment request questionnaire at http://www.visalaw.com/intake.html. Most of our clients are located outside of the local areas of our offices so we are quite comfortable with using e-mail, telephone, fax, mail and our new intranet to communicate with clients.