WHAT LINE?

James Stacey Taylor writes about his immigrant success story in Reason— how he arrived in the U.S. with $97 in cash and ultimately earned a Ph.D. — but points out that the proverbial “line” that people say immigrants should wait in doesn’t actually exist. “There is an implication in the line metaphor that the current immigration system operates as it did at the time of Ellis Island,” but in reality, Taylor argues, “[t]here are vanishingly few paths to being legally able to live and work here.”

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/

#FREEMADDIE

A six-year-old girl named Maddie has been confined with her dad in Pennsylvania’s Berks County immigration detention center for almost six months, and it has led to a #FREEMADDIE campaign on social media calling her for release, Jeff Gammage reports for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Maddie’s lawyers say the duration of her time in detention is “the longest the federal government has held a child in any of its three family lock-ups. They say a sweet, shy girl once defined by a sparkling smile has become deeply depressed.”

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/

HELPING ASYLUM SEEKERS

Health care professionals and medical students from both sides of the southern border are volunteering to help keep asylum seekers safe and healthy while their lives are in limbo, Julie Watson reports for the Associated Press. The situation at the border “has thrust volunteer doctors into new and unusual roles where they often have to improvise while working with limited donated medications and equipment and dealing with non-medical issues. Besides giving patients a pill for pain relief, the doctors might need to direct them to legal help for their cases while offering a listening ear as a kind of therapist to a population suffering deep trauma from violence that forced them to flee their homelands.”

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/

USCIS Announces Implementation of H-1B Electronic Registration Process for Fiscal Year 2021 Cap Season

WASHINGTON—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services today announced that it has completed a successful pilot testing phase and is implementing the registration process in the next H-1B lottery. Employers seeking to file H-1B cap-subject petitions for the fiscal year 2021 cap, including those eligible for the advanced degree exemption, must first electronically register and pay the associated $10 H-1B registration fee.

The electronic registration process will dramatically streamline processing by reducing paperwork and data exchange, and will provide an overall cost savings to petitioning employers.

Under this new process, employers seeking H-1B workers subject to the cap, or their authorized representatives, will complete a registration process that requires only basic information about their company and each requested worker. USCIS will open an initial registration period from March 1 through March 20, 2020. The H-1B random selection process, if needed, will then be run on those electronic registrations. Only those with selected registrations will be eligible to file H-1B cap-subject petitions.

Historically, employers filed their full, and often voluminous, H-1B cap-subject petitions with USCIS, after which USCIS would select eligible petitions through a random selection process. This process resulted in unnecessary paperwork and incurred mailing costs for both petitioners and the agency.

“By streamlining the H-1B cap selection process with a new electronic registration system, USCIS is creating cost savings and efficiencies for petitioners and the agency, as only those selected will now be required to submit a full petition,” said USCIS Deputy Director Mark Koumans. “The agency completed a successful pilot testing phase, which included sessions with industry representatives, and implementation of the registration system will further the goal of modernizing USCIS from a paper-based to an online-filing agency.” 

USCIS will post step-by-step instructions informing registrants how to complete the registration process on its website along with key dates and timelines as the initial registration period nears. USCIS will also conduct public engagements and other outreach activities to ensure registrants and interested parties are familiar with the new registration system. The agency may determine it is necessary to continue accepting registrations, or open an additional registration period, if it does not receive enough registrations and subsequent petitions projected to reach the numerical allocations.

DHS formally created the H-1B registration requirement in the final rule, Registration Requirement for Petitioners Seeking To File H-1B Petitions on Behalf of Cap-Subject Aliens, published on Jan. 31, and effective on April 1, 2019. DHS intends to publish a notice in the Federal Register in the coming weeks to formally announce implementation of the H-1B registration system and provide additional details on the process.

On Nov. 8, 2019, DHS published a final rule establishing a $10 H-1B registration fee. The registration fee final rule is effective on Dec. 9, 2019, and will apply to registrations submitted during the initial and future registration periods.

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/

MORE COULD BE DONE

After being detained on May 19, 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez became the sixth child to die in U.S. custody in the last year. A top-notch team of ProPublica reporters “obtained video that documents the 16-year-old’s last hours, and it shows that Border Patrol agents and health care workers at the Weslaco holding facility missed increasingly obvious signs that his condition was perilous.” John Sanders, the acting head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who resigned soon after the incident, “recently faulted unprepared agencies and an unresponsive Congress for a tragedy that he said was both predictable and preventable. The deaths of Carlos and other children under his watch continue to haunt him. ‘I believe the U.S. government could have done more,’ he said.”

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/

USCIS Premium Processing Fee Increase Takes Effect Today

The USCIS final rule increasing the premium processing fee for Form I-129 and Form I-140 from $1,410 to $1,440 takes effect today, December 2, 2019. Applications postmarked on or after December 2, 2019, must include the new fee. See USCIS's announcement about the increase.

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/

FORT WORTH

Fort Worth mayor Betsy Price, a Republican, is urging Gov. Greg Abbott to continue allowing refugees to resettle in Texas, Sarah McConnell reports for The Texan. Price is the latest mayor to speak out following a Trump administration executive order that allows states to decide whether they will accept refugees. In a letter to Gov. Abbott, Price wrote: “I have witnessed the mutually beneficial impact of resettling almost 2,600 refugees in Fort Worth since 2016, I don’t want to risk fixing anything that is not broken.”

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/

Asylum Struggles

For the Dallas Observer, Meredith Lawrence profiles Michael, a Kurdish journalist whose story of seeking asylum in the U.S. highlights the numerous hurdles — including “miscommunication, red tape, government errors, and delays” — that can make the asylum-seeking process impossible to navigate. “Regulations require asylum seekers to wait six months after filing for asylum before applying for a work permit,” Lawrence writes. “But Michael has been waiting for his permit for years, tangled up in a system that has left him unable to support himself. … After two years in this country with no work permit and no way to earn a living legally, Michael ran out of money.”  

For more information, go to: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/