Insight, News, and Strategy on Immigration Matters Around the World
AUTHOR: Helen Pihlstrom.
Employers who have submitted cap-subject H-1B petitions should remember that additional actions may be necessary by their current employees who are working pursuant to F-1 Optional Practical Training employment authorization, or OPT. In many cases, an employee’s OPT employment authorization will expire in the spring or summer after an H-1B cap petition…
AUTHOR: Davis C. Bae.
E-Verify is a free online program for employers to verify Form I-9 data through government databases. Tentative Nonconfirmations (TNCs) are messages issued by E-Verify when information from an employee’s Form I-9 does not match data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) records. E-Verify will alert…
AUTHOR: Robert Neale.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) will begin accepting new H-1B petitions against the upcoming Fiscal Year 2015 H-1B quota on April 1, 2014. This year’s H-1B season is expected to be similar to last year’s, during which the 85,000 “cap” on new H-1Bs was reached in the first week petitions…
AUTHOR: Harry J. Joe.
The Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices is warning employers not to use forensic tools or techniques to assess the validity of any document presented for identification and employment authorization, or apply a different level of scrutiny based on the type of document presented by the…
The Acting Assistant Inspector General for Audits with the DHS Office of the Inspector General, Mark Bell, has made three recommendations for improving ICE’s implementation of its worksite enforcement strategy based on an audit of the agency (www.oig.dhs.gov). ICE is the DHS agency responsible for implementing the nation’s worksite enforcement strategy and protecting…
On February 10, 2014, the Department of State finalized its regulation removing the requirement that Mexican citizens submit a TN petition with and obtain an approved TN petition from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) when seeking visa classification under the TN visa category. Under the final rule, Mexican citizens may apply for a TN…
The CATO Institute, a public policy research organization, has released results from a series of Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) responses from the Verification Division of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) (the agency responsible for managing the E-Verify program) showing that as many as one-third of the TNC (tentative non-confirmation) responses from E-Verify could take at least…
A recent unpublished Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decision has revived the discussion of whether spouses of E visa holders are required to apply for separate employment authorization in order to work lawfully in the United States. Immigration lawyers have long debated whether the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and its regulations provide automatic work…
The National Prevailing Wage Center (NPWC) has acknowledged that the October 2013 government shutdown and the significant increase in wage survey-based prevailing wage requests from H-2B employers has delayed processing of Prevailing Wage Determination requests. These undue delays by the Department of Labor (DOL) and NPWC in adjudicating cases are prohibiting employers from filing their…
In a significant decision likely to have a major impact on H-2B employers, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Board of Alien Labor Certification (BALCA) has rejected the DOL’s attempt to apply supplemental prevailing wage determinations (PWDs) retroactively upon employers who use H-2B temporary foreign labor. The action came in an Appeals Board Decision rendered on…
