Dear Readers:

This week’s announcement of the reaching of the cap of 66,000 H-2B workers went largely unnoticed by the national media. That’s for a variety of reasons. First, many journalists really don’t understand the difference between the H-1B visa and the H-2B visa. Though the two sound alike, they are quite different. The H-1B is for educated professionals in jobs like teaching, computer science, engineering, etc. The H-2B is for any kind of worker needed for a job that is temporary or seasonal in nature. Think resort workers, construction sites and other places where lots of workers are needed, but not on an indefinite basis.

Second, the media probably is not as concerned about the H-2B because it is not as “sexy” of an issue as the H-1B. H-2B employers need to go through an extensive process of documenting attempts to recruit American workers. There are no protests that H-2Bs are taking American jobs. These are the jobs President Bush had in mind when he proposed his guest worker plan earlier this year – the jobs that Americans simply don’t want to fill. Make no mistake – H-2B jobs are not the ones we WANT Americans doing. They are of a limited duration so they tend not to pay well and usually don’t have very many benefits such as health insurance or a pension plan. When politicians speak about creating GOOD jobs for Americans, they’re usually not speaking about the ones being filled by H-2B workers.

Third, the H-2B cap has never been reached before and even immigration lawyers were caught off guard when we learned a few weeks ago that we were running out of visa numbers. No one has been out there lobbying for or against the H-2B visa and journalists probably no very little about this problem. For the 200+ journalists who subscribe to this newsletter, we’re probably the first organization from which you are hearing about this. The organizations that will really be hurt by this – America’s construction and hospitality companies – are also largely unaware yet of this problem so they have not yet been able to get organized to advocate for change.

This week we include an ABCs article providing background on the H-2B visa and the cap. Now you can add this visa to the H-1B and L-1 visas as well as the physician J-1 visa as hot topics for Congress this year.

In firm news, Siskind Susser was listed as the twelfth largest immigration law practice in the United States in a Top 25 ranking published by IndUS Business Journal (www.indusbusinessjournal.com), the national business newspaper for Indian-Americans. The odds against having grown so successfully were formidable. Our firm has not even turned ten yet and we’re headquartered in Tennessee, hardly thought of as the center of American immigration. Of course, the news is not really that surprising. Our firm is probably the best-known immigration firm in America because of this publication and our successful web site Visalaw.com. We’re now getting three million hits every month and we’ll be celebrating the tenth anniversary of the site in June (it is the world’s third oldest law firm web site by the way).

And Tennessee is the perfect place to operate a global immigration law practice. Just ask our town’s major employer – Federal Express. We’re right in the middle of the country and our operating costs are less than half of firms in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.  Most immigration filings are now made by mail or electronically and in the age of the Internet and cheap telecommunications, most of our clients are very happy to communicate with us from a distance.

Kudos also goes to Arda Beskardes, an attorney in our Memphis office. Arda gave two speeches, including the opening speech, Friday at a conference in Atlanta entitled “Turkey: Traversing Tradition and Modernity” sponsored by NAFSA: The Association for International Education. Arda is a Turkish native and knows this subject from a variety of perspectives – as a former Turkish student in the US, as a foreign student advisor for a large university with a number of Turkish students and now as an immigration lawyer.

Finally, as always, we remind readers that we're lawyers who make our living representing immigration clients and employers seeking to comply with immigration laws. We would love to discuss becoming your law firm. Just go to http://www.visalaw.com/intake.html to request an appointment or call us at 800-748-3819 or 901-682-6455.

Regards,

Greg Siskind