News Update - March 15, 2008

By Alan Lee, Esq.^†‡

H-1B Rumors

Rumor is that U.S.C.I.S. in the next week will release a directive that duplicate H-1B filings will not be accepted and that the duplicates will invalidate both petitions. This is in response to actions by some petitioners last year who filed two H-1B petitions to have added chances of obtaining one of the H-1B cap numbers. Because of the novelty, where both petitions were selected last year, U.S.C.I.S. accepted both, cancelled the first, and adjudicated the second.

Charles H. Kuck, incoming president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said at a seminar in New York on March 3, 2008, that he expected all H-1Bs to be finished on April 2nd. This reflects pessimism that the H-1B quotas for bachelor's and U.S. master's degrees will last after the first day, April 1st. U.S.C.I.S.'s rule is that if the quota is filled up on the first day, the agency will accept second day filings, put them with the filings of the first day, and randomly select cases to fill the cap numbers electronically from the first and second day filings.

† 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 © 2008 Alan Lee, Esq.

Copyright © 2003-2012 Alan Lee, Esq.
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