The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is delaying the effective date of the until Dec. 31, 2021. What this means is that USCIS will apply the regulations currently in place (i.e. random selection) to the initial registration period, and, any subseq...
On January 8, 2020, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that replaces the H-1B cap lottery system with a system that allocated H-1B visa numbers according to the Department of Labor's Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) four level wage system. The final rule would thereby prioritize foreign nationals whose offered salarie...
Last Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White's dismissed changes the administration announced in October 2020 to the H-1B visa program, which included salary requirements on firms that employed skilled workers from overseas and placed new limits on specialty occupations. As a result, the Department of Labor (DOL) on how the...
A federal judge threw out two rules by the Trump administration that limited the number of visas that are made available to skilled foreign workers. The Tuesday from U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, dismisses changes the administration announced in October 2020 to the H-1B visa program, which included salary requirements on f...
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is to the Federal Register to amend regulations that govern the process by which the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) selects H-1B cap-subject petitions. If this rule is finalized, USCIS would replace the random selection process (the "H-1B lottery") with a proce...
The Department of Labor (DOL) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have published two new interim rules, changing wage requirements for employment-based visas as well as regulatory criteria for adjudicating H-1B petitions. The first (wage requirements) will be effective October 8, 2020 – for both new and ...
The U.S. Department of State (DOS) will begin accepting online registrations for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Diversity Visa lottery beginning on Wednesday, October 7, 2020 at noon Eastern and ending on Tuesday, November 10, 2020 at noon Eastern. The Diversity Visa lottery program for FY 2022 will make up to 55,000 green card numbers...
On September 30, 2020 the President signed H.R. 8337, the Continuing Appropriations Act 2021 and Other Extensions Act, part of which seeks to address USCIS’s budget shortfall. Part of the act addresses Premium Processing fees. Note that while the law takes effect immediately, the increased fees and expanded availability of premiu...
As a result of COVID-19 and the closings of U.S. embassies and USCIS for long periods of time, the USCIS and DOS approved far fewer permanent residence applications (“Green Cards”) in FY2020. As a result, the start of the new fiscal year, FY2021, has heralded a unique window of opportunity for many clients to file an adjustment o...
On Friday, September 18, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that a lower court did not have the authority to enjoin the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from enforcing its public charge rule during the COVID-19 pandemic. This ruling is pursuant to a recent Supreme Court decision that DHS may enforce the...
