The State Department has released a report showing the increasing number of people with approved immigrant visa petitions at the National Visa Center who are waiting for their visa numbers to be current. The number is about three and one-half million. Given that our immigration laws permit only 376,000 people to immigrate to the U.S. each […]
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate each passed health care legislation in 2009, and the Administration is hoping to craft a compromise bill which would extend health insurance to an additional 30-40 million Americans. Although the Congressional debate was extremely contentious, one important issue was never debated: How can our country provide health care for tens of millions […]
I listened intently to President Obama’s State of the Union speech yesterday. The man is clearly a gifted orator. He stressed the need for cooperation between Democrats and Republicans on the big issues facing our country: the economy, climate change, and health care reform, but where, oh where was immigration? Finally, after the President was over one hour […]
I am a strong supporter of Comprehensive Immigraton Reform (CIR). I have been on both sides of the fence. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was an attorney for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). I spent a couple of years representing the government in deportation proceedings, often conducted in Federal prisons. Are […]
Volume Fifteen, Number One Special Message: With increased privacy and security concerns around the inbox, mostly due to viruses and spam, delivering our monthly newsletter to your e-mail address presents many challenges. Sometimes you don’t receive our newsletter. However, if you add our e-mail address to your address book or safe list, this should insure […]
In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA), which severely restricts the ability of Federal Courts to review decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), especially those which are “discretionary” determinations. Many of these discretionary decisions involve whether “extreme hardship” or “extraordinary and extremely unusual hardship” exists in a specific case. We, therefore, are interested in […]
Congress created the EB-5 immigrant investor program in the early 1990s, and set aside 10,000 visas per year for this program, in order to encourage foreign-born persons to invest money in the U.S. economy and to create jobs for U.S. workers. The program requires persons to invest $1 million in a business and to hire […]
On arriving at my office on Monday, December 28, 2009, I was informed that one of my clients and her family were being detained by CBP Officers at an inland checkpoint. I immediately called her on her cell phone, and spent the rest of the day in an effort to explain to the CBP that both my client […]
On December 15, Representative Gutierrez (D-Ill.) introduced the Comprehensive Immigration Reform ASAP Act of 2009 (H.R. 4321) in the House of Representatives. To date, the bill has 92 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats. We link to the 644-page bill and to summaries of the bill from our “Immigration Legislation” page at: https://www.shusterman.com/legislationusimmigration/#3 The bill provides […]
A new bill to change family-based immigration has been introduced in the House of Representatives. Our current immigration system, which forces parents to be separated from their children and husbands to be separated from their wives for years at a time, is both cruel to immigrant families and unworthy of our country’s proud tradition as a nation […]
