As we are completing this issue, the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives is in the middle of markup on the Smith Bill, a major immigration reform bill. The bill would create further restrictions in nearly every area of our immigration system. Unfortunately, efforts to remove the more onerous provisions in the bill are having very little success. This month’s issue reports on changes to the bill and discusses what lies ahead for immigration reform.
Immigration is being attacked on other fronts as well. Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala has launched a crusade to kill all of the federal agency programs connected with sponsoring physicians for waivers of the two-year J-1 Home Residency Requirement. Not only will this create serious problems for physicians seeking to remain permanently in the US upon conclusion of their residency programs, it could create serious problems for small communities across the nation which depend on foreign physicians to deliver primary health care.
One of the more frequent questions our firm receives concerns the ability to change employers when one has been approved for permanent residency on the basis of a national interest waiver and the person wishes to change employers. The INS has addressed this issue in a recent correspondence and we report on their analysis in this issue.
Our monthly columns for October 1995 include a review of consular procedures in Athens, Greece (a popular consulate for persons seeking to travel to the US from the Middle East) and a review of the requirements and procedures involved with E-2 Treaty Investor nonimmigrant visas. Please note that we are only including processing times for the Vermont Service Center this month since these are the only statistics released since our last newsletter.
As always, our firm tries to make our web site more and more useful to our regular readers. This month, we will be adding a few new additional features. We are compiling a master hypertext index of all of the articles from our current and previous bulletins. We will be adding a page which describes usage statistics for our web site and our newsletter. We believe we have the most popular law firm site in the country and our newsletter is circulated to more people than almost any other resource on or off the Internet. And we expect to add the complete text of the marked up Smith Bill as well as its counterpart in the Senate to our Documents Collection.
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.