Okay, Okay! We know we're late. But we have a good excuse. On October 21st, the President signed a 4,000 Omnibus Budget Bill that contained a number of incredibly important immigration provisions. The relevant provisions include a lifting of the H-1B cap and a revamping of the H-1B requirements, amnesty for nearly 50,000 Haitians, enactment of the UN Convention Against Torture, a delay in the implementation of the entry/exit control system at the nation's borders and a massive funding increase for INS citizenship processing. Highlights from the bill are in the Documents Collection of our web site at http://www.visalaw.com/docs and all of these issues are discussed in this issue.

This month's issue also marks our fourth anniversary and, fittingly, is our largest ever. Aside from the provisions in the budget bill, we also report on the long awaited health care worker regulations that will finally allow nurses, therapists and others to complete their permanent residency processing, several important court cases and the new web-based consular appointment-booking service. Finally, be sure to read our report on some potentially illegal methods used by the INS to adjudicate National Interest Waiver cases.

On to other subjects. The developing news on the H-1B legislation has had an interesting impact on our firm's web site. Many of you have been following our H-1B Emergency Update at http://www.visalaw.com/h1b.html since it was launched in March. That page has been one of the most up-to-date resources available to the public - on or off the net - for information on this crucial legislation. The interest in that page has translated into more traffic on our web site than at any time in the four and a half years we have been online. This month we are on track to have more than one million hits, well in excess of our previous record of 827,000.

The firm's tremendous success on the web has been recognized again. Founding partner Greg Siskind has recently delivered a number of American Bar Association-sponsored lectures on the subject of the Internet and the legal profession. The speeches have been presented in Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills, Chicago, New York, Boston and Dallas. He has also been invited to do more presentations in the next few months in Los Angeles, North Carolina, Chicago and Memphis. The site is also catching the attention of the media. In the last few weeks, partner Greg Siskind has also been interviewed by media organizations like the BBC, New York Newsday, the National Law Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.

Last month marked the debut of our new free newsletter, Siskind's Immigration Professional. The newsletter provides notices of job openings, reporters seeking story leads, conference announcements, book and software reviews and other announcements that will be of interest to immigration lawyers, paralegals, foreign student advisors and anyone else who handles immigration matters for a living. If you wish to be added to our email distribution list, just email us at immigration.professional@visalaw.com and be sure to tell us a little bit about what kind of work you do and where you work. More than 400 of our readers who are immigration professionals have already subscribed. We only include professionals on this list so it is important to specify the type of work in which you are engaged.

As always, we remind readers that this publication is put out by Siskind, Susser, Haas & Devine, an immigration law firm, and we are available for telephone or in-person consultations to answer immigration questions and discuss our representing individuals and employers in immigration matters. If interested, please go to http://www.visalaw.com/intake.html.