News Update - May 11, 2010

By Alan Lee, Esq.

H-1B Cap Outlook And New Bill To Strip Away U.S. Citizenship

It may interest potential employers to know that the H-1B cap count as of May 6, 2010, is 25,600 petitions filed against an overall cap of 85,000.  That means that there is much room for new H-1B petitions for employment beginning on October 1st.  Although we believe that the H-1B quota will last for a number of months, it is always best to begin new H-1B petitions as soon as the candidates are identified.  We have begun to hear murmurs that job hiring is picking up, especially in the IT sector.  The IT sector is largely seen as the leading user of H-1B visas. 

Who can forget incidents like the security guard in Atlanta mistaken for a bomber at the beginning of the Olympic Games in that city, the South American mistakenly gunned down by British police on suspicion of being a subway bomber, or the Middle Eastern student in a hotel near the World Trade Center mistakenly accused of using a radio to guide the 9/11 attacks on New York? Yet under the Terrorist Expatriation Act co-sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-Ct.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Americans suspected of allying themselves with terrorists could have their citizenship status revoked.  The bill would allow the State Department to revoke the citizenship of people providing support to terrorist groups or who attack the United States or its allies.  In practice, a diplomatic or consular official prepares a certificate of loss of citizenship and forwards it to the State Department, which then makes an official determination.  If it concludes that renunciation was effective, the person has one year to appeal the loss of citizenship.  This is hasty and ill thought legislation and a knee-jerk reaction to the attempted New York Times Square bombing last week.  And what about persons contributing to charities that they believe are legitimate, but turn out to funnel some funds to fronts of terrorist organizations? They would be vulnerable under the bill's inclusion of persons "Providing material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization".  Further any American providing a one night crash pad for someone later labeled a terrorist could be included under the same rubric. There does not appear to be justification for stripping away U.S. citizenship from "suspects" who may ultimately be vindicated if given the chance to defend themselves in a U.S. court of law.  U.S. citizenship is a precious right, and the constitutionality of the law is certainly questionable in light of Supreme Court rulings that expatriation requires the individual's assent before citizenship can be relinquished and that in the last analysis, expatriation depends on the will of the citizen rather than on the will of Congress and its assessment of his conduct.


The author is a 30+ 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 © 2010 Alan Lee, Esq.

 

Copyright © 2003-2012 Alan Lee, Esq.
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