Insight, News, and Strategy on Immigration Matters Around the World
On Thursday, August 23, 2012, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has published a revised version of the new Form I-9 for comment. The comment period runs through September 21, 2012.
Some of the key revisions to the new form include:
• Maiden Name is changed to Other Names Used
• Includes clarification…
AUTHOR: HARRY J. JOE
Employers that use the H-2B non-immigrant visa program to obtain unskilled workers from outside the U.S. may need to increase their budgets for these workers following a federal judge’s decision upholding the Department of Labor’s authority to issue a new wage order. U.S. District Court Judge Legrome D. Davis has upheld…
A federal appeals court in Atlanta has struck down portions of Georgia’s controversial “Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act” (H.B. 87) prohibiting the transportation, concealing, or harboring of illegal aliens. Relying heavily on the recent, highly publicized Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. United States, the Circuit Court found that Section 7 of the measure…
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that employers should continue using the Form I-9 currently available in the forms section of http://www.uscis.gov until further notice.
All employers should use the form even after August 31, 2012, when the current OMB control number expires. USCIS will provide updated information about the new version…
The Center for Immigration Studies has published a detailed analysis of state-level E-Verify policies. Sixteen states require E-Verify in some form. According to the CIS report, South Carolina’s audit process has been the most robust, making the compliance rate with its law high and more effective than laws in states that do not have an…
A plaintiff has no claim for breach of contract or a Fifth Amendment “taking” for the detention and damage of his laptop computer by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Federal Circuit has ruled. Kam-Almaz v. U.S., 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 12581 (Fed. Cir. June 20, 2012).
Majd…
The U.S. Supreme Court has issued its much anticipated decision on Arizona’s controversial immigration statute, Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (“S.B. 1070”). In so doing, the Court affirmed, in a 5-3 decision, the Ninth Circuit of Appeals, agreeing that the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) had established a likelihood of success…
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) has announced that Semafor Technologies LLC in Norcross, Georgia, has agreed to pay 73 employees $741,288 in back wages following an investigation by the WHD. The June 12, 2012, announcement is the result of an investigation that found the company failed to pay 54 foreign…
The DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) is a bipartisan bill that has failed in Congress time and again since its initial proposal in 2001. The basic tenets of the Act would provide conditional temporary residency to certain illegal immigrants if the individuals are of good moral character, have graduated from U.S.
In early 2005, USCIS created the Benefit Fraud and Compliance Assessment (BFCA) program. The program was developed to “evaluate the integrity of various nonimmigrant and immigrant benefit programs” by reviewing petitions and applications for factors related to fraud.
The BFCA completed an assessment of the H-1B program in 2008. They reviewed 246 H-1B petitions drawn…
