Blog

The Employment-Based Third Preference (EB-3) category for the Philippines and all areas other than mainland China, India and Mexico have retrogressed for April 2009. The current priority date for these categories is now March 1, 2003 –over two… Read More

On March 4, 2009, CIS proudly announced that it had eliminated the backlog for FBI name checks pending more than six months. CIS worked in close collaboration with the FBI to reduce this backlog. FBI name checks are part of the security clearance pro… Read More

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) has confirmed in a recent communication with the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) that, if an H-1B petition “lottery” needs to occur for FY10 H-1B petitions, US CIS will again e… Read More

The State Department has announced that the 2009 Poverty Guidelines used for I-864, Affidavits of Support, went into effect on March 1, 2009. The I-864 is used for immigrant visa petitioners and joint sponsors. The guidelines are available here All c… Read More

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) announced on February 24, 2009 that some H-1B workers nearing the end of their sixth year of stay in the U.S. are eligible to expedite the processing of their I-140 petitions. Starting on March 2, 2009,… Read More

Due to the current state of the economy, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has recently advised that employers in some industries should expect to start receiving more supervised recruitment notices on PERM applications. A PERM application is an app… Read More

Effective May 21, 2009, federal contractors and subcontractors will be required to start using the E-Verify system to verify their employees’ eligibility to legally work in the U.S. The expansion of E-Verify. to federal contractors is the resul… Read More

CIS has announced that the new I-9 form that was supposed to go into effect on February 2, 2009, has been delayed until April 3, 2009. Employers or other individuals interested in commenting on the new form also have an extension to file their commen… Read More