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It seems that the current H1B visa shortage is not enough for the anti immigration groups. Critics of the H-1B program have long argued that it has created unfair competition for jobs in America. A recent lawsuit claims that the administration’s extension of the time that foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. colleges with science or technology degrees can work on their student visas from one year to 29 months is unfair and illegal. They challenged this in court.But U.S. District Judge Faith Hochberg, who is hearing the case in New Jersey, is pushing back.

The student-visa extension is intended to take some of the pressure off of the annual H-1B cap. Demand for H-1B visas greatly exceeds the total of 65,000 visas that are available each year. The plaintiffs argued that increasing the number of job seekers in the same fields as plaintiffs will limit the opportunities open to U.S. tech workers. We will let the court decide.

Read the ComputerWorld article here

As we are coming close to the elections, with talk of a possible immigration reform, scams targeting immigrants will be on the rise. The latest is from my own city, San Diego. A Chula Vista man who posed as an immigration official, telling people he could quickly process their citizenship papers for a fee, was sentenced Friday to five years in state prison. He got lucky, people like that must be sentenced to longer jail time and be forced to pay back the fees.

If you were a victim of this scam, please let me know.

Read more about this story here

How many times in the past few months HAVE i been getting calls from clients tired of waiting for their employment authorization cards (EAD)? If I could get a penny for each call, I could retire tomorrow. Seriously, USCIS caused major delays in the processing of such work permits, and by doing so caused hardship to all the pending immigrants wishing to start working.

Pursuant to 8 CFR § 274a.13, USCIS must adjudicate EAD applications within 90 days from the date of USCIS receipt of the application.

The CIS Ombudsman has been receiving numerous inquiries from customers about EAD applications pending more than 90 days. Click on this link and see what the USCIS can offer to make things right. I can only hope it will help.

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Jim Harper reports on the latest new Bills from Congress. A new stupid new bill introduced this week. H.R. 6975 would require aliens to attest that they will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States as a condition of their admission to our country. What can we expect next, attesting to not having met any Muslims in the past 10 years of your life?
Read the article here

As the political debates between both candidates heat up, so does the vision on the core issues. A recent excellent article by Prof. Wayne A. Cornelius, touches on a very important point relating to the immigration debate. The McCain-Palin campaign has embarked on an effort to court Latino voters by trashing Barack Obama’s record on immigration reform.

Prof. Cornelius points out:

Beginning with his speeches to La Raza and other Latino groups last summer, McCain has also been trying to diminish Obama’s role in the crafting of comprehensive immigration reform. That’s another serious distortion of the record. Obama largely drafted the crucial Title III (work-site enforcement) section of the 2006 bill, which was the foundation for the same component of the 2007 comprehensive immigration reform bill.

Enforcement, Enforcement and more Enforcement is the message from the Government. Special agents executed federal criminal search warrants here yesterday at two area Chinese restaurants and two homes linked to the businesses’ owners as part of an ongoing ICE investigation into possible hiring and alien harboring violations.

The restaurants targeted during the operation were the King’s Buffet in Vacaville, Calif., and the

Empire Buffet in Vallejo, Calif. A second outlet of the Empire Buffet in San Pablo, Calif., is also under scrutiny in the probe, but it was not searched yesterday. In addition to executing four search warrants, agents conducted a consensual search at a fifth location, a home in Hercules, Calif.Besides gathering evidence related to the criminal case, ICE agents arrested 21 illegal alien workers on administrative immigration violations who were encountered at the search locations.

In the few weeks before the October bulletin was issued, readers and clients were speculating that the EB3 category will become current in October. We now know this is not true, yet there are some positive changes in this bulletin. Section D addresses Mexican F-2A visa availability and Section E addresses October Employment cut-off dates, which are earlier than those which applied during FY-2008. Little forward movement is expected in EB priority dates until the backlog of old priority dates can be determined. We will keep you posted.

Click here for the most recent bulletin

The recent raids on employers all across the country, and mostly the fate of illegal workers and their families caught in between, got us all talking about illegal immigration. A recent posting on NPR caught my attention as well.

Gloria Hillard reported on “The New Sanctuary Movement”, a faith based coalition offering aid and at times sanctuary to illegal immigrants. Activists on both sides of the immigration debate including an anti-immigration organization called, “Save Our State”, have been drawn to a small of church north of Los Angeles where an illegal immigrant facing deportation has been sheltered for more than a year.

Read the full NPR report here, I have a feeling this debate will get more emotional in the next few months.

Why do we have such a major immigrant visa backlog? According to the Immigration policy center each year, the Department of Homeland Security fails to issue all of the “green cards” allocated for that year. Under current law, the visa numbers do not “roll over” to the next year and the unused visas are lost. Unused or lost visa numbers result in longer delays for US citizens or legal residents to reunite with a close family member or in a delay for a US business to get a needed worker.

H.R. 5882 is a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by House Immigration Subcommittee Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). This modest piece of legislation would simply permit the “recapture” or use of visas that have gone unused in past years due to bureaucratic delays. The visas would be issued to qualified family-based or employment-based legal immigrants.

Read more here

This week it is all about the Democratic Convention taking place in Denver. As we follow what unfolds in Denver, the race seems to be getting tighter and tighter. In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Sunday night — after Obama announced Biden as his running mate, 47 percent of those questioned are backing Obama, with an equal amount supporting McCain.

The Obama/Biden team must be very clear on the issues that matter most to voters, and Immigration is going to play a major role in November. Obama created an offical page on his Immigration policy, you can access the page here…

He says: