News Update - July 16, 2007

By Alan Lee, Esq.

Reports Circulating that U.S.C.I.S. About to Reverse Course in Visa Number Scandal

Reports coming out of Washington indicate that the government is set to make an announcement on the visa numbers scandal in which U.S.C.I.S. requested enough visa numbers by July 2nd for the Department of State to take the unprecedented action of revising the July visa bulletin and changing employment classes EB-1 through EB-3 from open to closed. That action (involving questionably legal means) was apparently taken to protect U.S.C.I.S. from losing hundreds of millions of dollars from applicants who could file I-485 adjustment of status applications before the agency's large fee hikes came into effect on July 30th. It is not clear at this time whether the announcement will put all potential applicants in the same position that they were in under the earlier visa bulletin of having the entire month of July to submit their visa applications - but anything less is certain to continue lawsuits and criticism of the agency. Stay tuned.


The author is a 26+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.

This article © 2007 Alan Lee, Esq.

 

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