Immigration Update with Lin Walker

As we mentioned last week, the overall odds of being selected for an H-1B visa was approximately 30% in last year’s cap, as USCIS received approximately 275,000 registrations for 85,000 H-1B visa numbers.

So what are U.S. employers to do if they wish to hire a foreign national, but are not selected in this year’s H-1B cap?

The podcast this week is dedicated to describing some of these alternative employment-based nonimmigrant visa classifications that U.S. employers may utilize to recruit and hire foreign nationals for professional positions in the U.S.

There were several major announcements in the H-1B visa classification this week.

Today we are going to talk about two of these announcements that we see as positive developments.

According to USCIS, there were ten common reasons the Agency issued RFEs.

In this podcast we’d like to focus on the two of the most common RFEs that we received for H-1B petitions during 2020.

We will give you a taste of the language that USCIS uses in these RFEs, our legal analysis and finally we'll offer some strategies for preventing and responding to those RFEs.

On his very first day in office, President Biden announced plans to send a progressive and bold immigration bill to Congress in the coming weeks that will embrace immigrants as an essential part of our society, instead of criminalizing and marginalizing them, as has been the situation in the last four years.

There are 2 reforms we’d like to talk about specifically that struck us as most meaningful, because they promote family unity and common sense immigration reform.

Welcome to the Meyner & Landis Immigration Update Podcast for January 18, 2020 And it’s a doozy.

Written by Meyner & Landis partner Lin Walker, this podcast is going to try to summarize for you the recent rule that will change the prevailing wages for nonimmigrant visa classifications.

We are providing some charts that may help to clarify some of the changes to come on LinkedIn, but as you will see, this is a very complex issue.

If you are a nonimmigrant foreign national who has been admitted to the United States, this episode is for you. There is one form that is very often overlooked by busy people traveling back to the United States from abroad that, if forgotten, can cause serious problems with your immigration status

With this podcast, we hope to provide some guidance on what is essential to controlling one’s lawful status in the United States and what to do if a foreign national finds that they have failed to maintain their lawful nonimmigrant status.

In this special edition of the M&L Immigration Update Podcast we explore the new rule entitled “Modification of Registration Requirement for Petitioners Seeking to File Cap-Subject H-1B Petitions,” which ends the H-1B lottery as we know it and instead establishes a wage-based selection process.

The H-1B registrations will be selected based on registrations listing the highest offered wage which equals or exceeds the prevailing wage as established by the Occupational Employment Statistics (“OES”) for the relevant Standard Occupational Classification (“SOC”) code in the area of intended employment.

Meyner & Landis has been following these developments closely and we’ve distilled about 200 pages of information to bring you this 12 minute summary

We have some good news to start off the new year! We explain why USCIS has been prohibited from increasing their filing fees, as they have been trying to do.