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August 19, 2010 Thursday As we reported yesterday, USCIS did announce a news release today at 1PM Eastern Time, through a telephone conference regarding the implementation details of the “Border Security Act” or the H.R. 6080, now known as Public Law 111-230, and the following is the gist of the relevant points: - This new fee increase is effective IMMEDIATELY, meaning since August 14, 2010, the day after President Obama signed it into law on August 13, 2010. So, any applicable cases filed on or after August 14, 2010 will be affected;
- The count of the H or L holders are combined for calculating the applicability for the required 50%. In other word, the accounting of the percentage is to include ALL employees in both H and L status!
- Further, if the L status holders have any accompanying family dependents in L-2 status, those L-2 status holders will also be accounted for the calculation of the 50% purpose! (H-4 will not be accounted for as they are not authorized for employment under the regulation or incidental to status.)
- The increased fees will be treated similar to ACWIA fees which means:
- For applicable H-1B petitions: $2,000 more, in addition to the current base fees, making the filing fees for an H-1B as high as $5,320 in filing fees alone: $2,000 (new increased fee) + ($320 + $500 + $1,500 for the old base fee for employer with 25+ employees) + $1,000 (existing optional for premium processing).
- For applicable L petitions: $2,250 more, in addition to the current base fee structure, making the filing fees for an L petition as high as $4,070: $2,250 in new fee + ($320 + $500 in existing old fees) + $1,000 in optional premium processing fee).
USCIS is now working on a revised new petition form to reflect this change due to the new law and will make the new revised form available as soon as possible. If you have any questions about this article or wish to know more about this new law and its impact on your company or case, or if you simply have a comment or a question about US immigration laws in general, you may email your questions to us directly to:
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August 19, 2010 Thursday USCIS just released a new update on the FY 2011 H-1B Quota usage and based on the official count, as of Aug. 13, 2010, out of the total annual quota of 65,000, only 29,700 cap subject new H-1B petitions were receipted. Also, under the separate 20,000 annual quota for the advanced degree holders, only 12,300 cap subject new H-1B petitions claiming the advanced degree exemption as of the same cut-off date of Aug. 13, 2010. This means we still have over 54% or 35,300 unused H-1B regular cap subject quota available until the next year’s new annual quota starts accepting new filings on April 1, 2011. By the same token, there are still 38.5% or 7,700 H-1B quota available for dvanced degree holder beneficiaries for the current filing season. Also, regulations allow for no more than 100 aliens to be admitted as an H-1B nonimmigrant performing services related to a DOD cooperative research and development project or coproduction project in the United States at any one time. See 8 CFR 214.2(h)(8)(B). As of June 15, 2010, the count for this category of H-1B nonimmigrants as of the same cut-off date on Aug. 13, 2010 is only FIVE. All these figures especially so many quotas in all categories still available are both good and bad news. The good news is the H-1B quota for both the regular cap and the advanced degree holder cap are not reached yet and US employers can still file new cap subject H-1B petitions freely at this time. So, if you have not filed your H-1B petition, it is now still a good time to do so and the earliest starting time for employment is as soon as Oct. 1, 2010. The bad news is the fact the quota is available under both categories is exactly part of the problem or at least the indication of the real problem: employers are NOT hiring as aggressively and job market is still gloomy, because of the slow recovery of the overall economy! If you have any questions about this article or about H-1B visa or simply a comment or general question about US immigration law, you are encouraged to email us to:
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August 18, 2010 Tuesday
President Obama signed Bill H.R. 6080 into law (Public Law 111-230) on August 13, 2010 and this H.R. 6080 is now also known as the new "Border Security Act" which allocated increased funding to various government agencies to help secure our border. Under Title IV of the Act, some new filing fee hikes are also authorized for certain H and L visa petitions, as additional measures to raise money. Specifically, under the new law, the filing fees and the visa fraud prevention & detection fees for both L and H visa petitions are raised by over two thousand dollars for certain petitioners who have more than 50 employees in the US if more than 50% of the employees are on L or H-1B visas respectively. This will definitely impose greater financial burden onto certain small to medium sized businesses, especially in the high tech industries such as IT support and/or Telecommunication industries that heavily utilize, if not depend upon, foreign born engineers and programmers. The actual increases are:
- $2,250 more for L visa applicants; and,
- $2,000 more for H visa applicants.
- This fee increase is a temporary measure set to end on September 30, 2014.
USCIS is scheduled to release a public announcement at 1PM Eastern Time tomorrow (on Aug. 19, 2010) on the implementation details including the starting date of these two filing fee hikes as authorized by the Act. Yu, South & Associates will update you in real time when the information is available. If you have any questions about this article or the new law or you simply have a comment or a general question about the US immigration law, you are encouraged to email us directly to:
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Aug. 17, 2010 Tuesday The Obama administration said recently that the government is “on track” to deport a record number of illegal aliens this fiscal year, 400,000 of them. The number for the last year's removal of such illegal immigrants was close to 390,000. This surge in the removal of illegal aliens, especially those “who have already shown they will do harm,” were direct result of both technology advances and a special government program known as “Secure Communities.” Under this government program, local participating governments would require their law enforcement officers check an arrested suspect and/or convicted criminals in their prison systems against a federal database, thanks to advances in technology and information sharing among government agencies, to identify illegal or deportable aliens and, once a match is found, the Immigration & Custom Enforcement (ICE) authorities would be notified which will then determine if the alien should be processed for deportation. ICE now lists those undocumented immigrants convicted of the most dangerous crimes such as murder, rape, assault and drug or human trafficking as its top deportation priorities. According to the data released by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE is now on track to deport the target of a record of about 400,000 illegal immigrants by the end of the current fiscal year which will end on September 30. Among those deported, about 150,000 of them are convicted criminals and 16% of them are in fact those “top-priority violent criminals” who are also referred to as “Level 1” immigrants. If you have any questions about this article or wish to know more about deportation or removal proceedings or simply have a comment or general question about US immigration laws, you can send in your questions via email directly to us to:
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July 23, 2010 Friday 4:32PM US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency makes many arrests on a daily basis and those arrests involve both illegal aliens in various raids or stops as well as certain legal immigrants that are being processed for deportation or removal on various grounds. On average, there are about 30,000 immigrants, documented or undocumented, a day who are in the ICE custody or detention. Although ICE has its own facilities, many of those immigration detainees are actually housed in various jails and prisons around the country under contract with either local law enforcement or private facilities. There are over 250 immigration detention facilities around the nation that currently are holding immigration detainees and trying to locate a family member or a client among all those facilities has always been a headache and a challenge for both the families and the immigration lawyers. Not any more! ICE has recently created a search tool on its website similar to one used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) and users can search the immigration detainees either by name or the “A-number,” as an effort, schedule to be effective today, by the government trying to make the detention system more humane and transparent. The web link is here: https://locator.ice.gov/odls/homePage.do If you have any questions about this posting or need any assistance with someone in the ICE custody or recently arrested by the US Immigration, you can send your questions to us directly here:
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July 23, 2010 Friday 4:00PM Yu, South & Associates just learned from “The Daily Journal” of New Jersey that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have fined 13 employers in New Jersey nearly $640,000 for hiring undocumented workers, part of the Obama administration's increased focus on targeting businesses that fail to ensure their employees are eligible to work in the U.S. This amount averages about $50K in fines against each US employer for hiring illegal workers is about 14 times more than the fines levied in all of fiscal year 2009, when four employers in the state were fined $44,728 in total. ICE spokesperson Harold Ort in Newark said Thursday that the fines are part of the agency's focus on building cases against "egregious employers," and increasing enforcement of immigration-related employment law, without disclosing the names of the business. Ort said the agency conducts "silent raids" by checking forms that document a person's eligibility to work in the United States. The move is part of a nationwide push by ICE to create, as Ort said, "a culture of voluntary compliance among employers." "(Employers) need to understand that the integrity of their employment records is just as important to the federal government as the integrity of their tax files or banking records," he said. The “forms” that Ort referred to during the “silent checking” were probably the Form I-9 that is required to document and verify the new hires employment eligibility and personal identification under the immigration laws. If you have any question about this posting or have a question about I-9 compliance related issues or a general question about the US immigration law, you can email your questions to us at:
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