[Blogger’s Note:  Many thanks to my talented co-author, Tieranny Cutler] Beware the Employer Risks Nesting in President Biden’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill By Angelo A. Paparelli and Tieranny L. Cutler At the urging of President Biden, two members of Congress – Senator Robert Menendez and Representative Linda Sanchez – introduced companion 353-page bills last month in the Senate and the House entitled the “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021.” Presented as a comprehensive modernization of our nation’s…

“America is back, the trans-Atlantic alliance is back.” – So declared President Biden on February 23, 2021.  Apparently, however, Antony J. Blinken, the newly installed U.S. Secretary of State (DOS), didn’t get the memo.  On March 2, 2021, he “rescinded the previous national interest determination regarding categories of travelers eligible for exceptions under Presidential Proclamation (PP) 10143 [relating] to the Schengen Area, United Kingdom, and Ireland.” As DOS’s announcement of the rescission noted, PP 10143,…

Big-Picture, Clean-Slate Immigration Reforms  for the Biden-Harris Administration By Angelo A. Paparelli and Stephen Yale-Loehr As a new administration takes office on January 20, and the tantalizing prospect of enlightened immigration reforms looms on the horizon, an intriguing question has surfaced on Twitter: “Is there a progressive version of Stephen Miller? Someone who has (1) put in the time to understand how the immigration system works in great detail, (2) relentlessly committed to changing the…

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week affirmed the truth of the Upton Sinclair maxim on just how hard it is get someone “to understand something, when his [or her] salary depends on . . . not understanding it.” In this case, federal immigration bureaucrats have had three decades to comprehend the delicate legislative balance of business needs and labor protections that produced the H-1B visa category for…

We’ve seen this movie before. Scene 1: The President issues a proclamation in reliance on his authority to restrict the entry of certain noncitizens under Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) § 212(f) so long as he asserts that allowing them in would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Scene 2: The proclamation creates exceptions to the entry bans based on  the national interests of the United States (among other grounds). Scene 3: …

In the wake of recent losses in the federal courts, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — on June 17, 2020 — issued a memorandum that rescinds two agency policies which, for more than ten years, had forced employers of H-1B (Specialty Occupation) workers stationed at customer worksites to submit voluminous and burdensome evidence.  Thankfully, under the new interpretation such evidence will no longer be required. The June 17 memorandum also provides partial guidance on…

Much like patient vintners, federal immigration agencies often take time to offer up a grand cru.  One such agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Homeland Security component that administers the legal immigration system, just produced a long-awaited, delectable quaff. On May 5, it issued a policy memorandum that anointed as binding precedent an administrative appellate decision which at long last blesses modern practices in business transformations. USCIS will now allow eligibility for employment-based…