Labor Immigration Law

We wrote on Friday about the anticipated significant forward movement for EB-2 India.  The August 2008 Visa Bulletin is out now and it confirms our expectation.  In addition, EB-2 China has also moved forward significantly.  Both EB-2 India and China have a date of June 1, 2006 (from April 2004 previously).

Another important update related to the visa bulletin is the unavailability of visas in the “Other Workers” category – they are now unavailable (from April 2003 previously).  The visa bulletin explains that such unavailability is due to the numbers for the “Other Workers” category reaching their annual numerical limit.  It is expected that once the FY 2009 begins in October, the dates should return to April 2003.

The August 2008 Visa Bulletin is about to be released and we have reliable (based on past experience) information that EB-2 India will move forward by more than two years – from April 2004 to June 2006.

This is excellent news for applicants in the EB-2 India category.  Stay tuned as we wil update this post with more information as the official State Department Visa Bulletin is distributed.

Many of our clients and readers have asked us what kind of relief or changes they can expect once the new president takes office in January of 2009.  Although it is difficult to predict the exact type of policies they will implement once they take office, the Wall Street Journal created a helpful chart comparing Obama and McCain on immigration.

WSJ: Immigration – Obama v. McCain

As the chart suggests, both candidates are not very far apart on immigration.  Both support some part to legalization of illegal alient, both are for tougher penalties for hiring illegals, and both support increase in the number of visas, especially to reunite families.  Thus, we are hopful that the new administration will provide some long-expected relief for immigrants waiting in a processing backlog or waiting to be reunited with their families.

USCIS recently announced the launch of the online FOIA status check.  The system is designed to provide a secure way for FOIA petitioners to check the status on their request.

While the information provided by the system is not very detailed, it nonetheless is bound to eliminate a large number of status check calls to USCIS’s FOIA request service center. There are 110,000 annual FOIA requests and the amount of status request calls they generate creates a heavy burden on USCIS.

Customers can use the online service anytime by entering their assigned control number to receive an immediate response on the status of their FOIA request. The customer will then receive either a ‘pending’ or ‘processed’ response. A pending response indicates to the customer the position of their request relative to all other requests in the same processing track. A ‘processed’ request indicates that the request was processed and the customer will be provided that processing date. USCIS will make daily updates to the status information.