This past month, our firm’s five lawyers attended the American Immigration Lawyers Association (“AILA”) annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona along with 1,600 other immigration lawyers from across the US and from several other countries. The four day conference was an excellent forum for immigration lawyers to share valuable information and to listen to various government officials discuss policies and expected changes in their agencies’ operations. At the meeting, Henry Chang of our Toronto office was installed as the new chair of the AILA Canada chapter. Greg Siskind, of SSHC’s Nashville office was appointed to chair AILA’s Government Re-Engineering Task Force. One of the Task Force’s key goals will be to work with government agencies to incorporate modern technology into agency operations. For example, the Task Force will try to work with the Department of Labor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service in switching to an electronic filing system. The Task Force would also like to work with the various agencies in establishing home pages on the Internet to distribute important information.
Greg Siskind’s new book entitled THE LAWYER’S GUIDE TO MARKETING ON THE INTERNET is set for release on July 12th. The 250 page book is being published by the American Bar Association and will be distributed by direct mail and in book stores. In connection with the book, Greg has been speaking on the subject of the use of the Internet in a law practice at continuing legal education programs throughout the country. Recently, he was a panelist at programs in Chicago, Michigan, Memphis, Nashville and Lexington, Kentucky. He has recently accepted an invitation to speak on a 25 city tour across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
If you have viewed our firm’s web site in recent days, you may have noticed a number of changes. The most obvious one is the simplification of our home page. We have expanded our table of contents and removed most of the page’s descriptive text in order to speed downloading and to improve the overall look of the site. We now have separate pages for the description of our firm and to find out what is new at the site. A second key addition to the page is an index of more than 300 articles at our site from past issues of Siskind’s Immigration Bulletin. We believe the index will be a very useful tool for people seeking information on specific immigration topics. We also hope to add a search engine to the site in coming weeks. Finally, we have revamped our links page by taking out dead links and adding a number of new sites.
Now on to this month’s issue. As always, we cover legislative developments relating to immigration. Though the immigration bill is still stuck in the House/Senate Conference Committee, a number of important behind-the-scenes developments are worth reporting. We also report on several other important issues. The Board of Immigration Appeals has overruled an immigration judge and held that a female victim of genital mutilation is entitled to asylum status. The United States Information Agency (USIA) has decided to continuing allowing physicians who entered in J-1 visa status before June 1, 1996 to apply for waivers of the two year home residency requirement under the Conrad 20 State Waiver program. In our regular features, we include a Visa Spotlight on O Visas for those with extraordinary ability, a Consular Focus on the US Consulate in Bangkok, Thailand, a report from Henry Chang in our Canada office, INS processing times and more.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is provided as a public service and not intended to establish an attorney client relationship. Any reliance on information contained herein is taken at your own risk. The information provided in this article has not been updated since its original posting and you should not rely on it until you consult counsel to determine if the content is still valid. We keep older articles online because it helps in the understanding of the development of immigration law.