US Immigration

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 AUTHOR:  Harry J. Joe.

 Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s efforts to obtain enhanced civil penalties against employers for Form I-9 violations has met with resistance from the Justice Department’s Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer (OCAHO) in two rulings issued on March 18, 2013.
 
In the first, United States of America v. Siam Thai

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The Senate’s immigration bill, S. 744, just voted out of the Judiciary Committee and sent for a vote by the full Senate, greatly increases potential penalties for employment verification related violations.   Under S. 744, the civil fine for a first offense of knowingly hiring or continuing to employ an undocumented worker ranges from $3,500 –

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AUTHOR:  Robert Neale.

As the comprehensive immigration reform bill moves from the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee to a full Senate floor debate, the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to introduce its own version of a comprehensive immigration reform bill soon. Unlike the Senate bill, no details of the possible House bill have been…

Following five days of hearings over three weeks and consideration of 300 amendments, the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 21, 2013, passed the immigration reform bill in a bipartisan 13-5 vote. Three Republican Senators, including Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and Jeff Flake (AZ) who helped draft the original bill, joined ten Democratic Senators to approve…

In a departure from prior interpretations of H-1B sponsorship, a New York state court ruled an H-1B work visa application established an employment contract sufficient to support the employee’s breach of contract claim. Kausal v. Educational Products Information Exchange Institute, d/b/a EPIE Institute, 2013 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 2491 (NY Apr. 17, 2013).

Nikhil Kausal…

The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor have issued a joint interim final rule that establishes a new methodology for calculating prevailing wages under the H-2B low-skilled, nonagricultural guestworker program. This is in response to a March 21 district court decision, in Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas v. Solis, vacating…

AUTHOR: Melina V. Villalobos.
 
As we previously blogged about on April 17th, a comprehensive immigration reform bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate, Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013.  While many critics have focused on the new pathways for legal migration to the U.S. contained in the 850-page bill…

AUTHOR:  Davis C. Bae.

The USCIS announced on April 8, a week after it began accepting H-1B petitions, that it has received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to reach the statutory cap for fiscal year (FY) 2014. It received approximately 124,000 H-1B petitions, including petitions for the advanced degree exemption. This likely will mean…