Between May and June 2015, a lot has changed on the Department of State Visa Bulletin. This document is updated every month and reflects the length of the wait period for different categories of people who are pursuing permanent residence in the U.S. through both employment and family relationships.
Rose Hernandez was a finalist in the 29th Annual Hands on Nashville Strobel Volunteer Awards. She was nominated by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) for her work as a volunteer with the group’s Citizenship Clinic, where she serves as supervising attorney.
Rose Hernandez was also named to the board of the Nashville Chapter of the Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA).
Previously available only in 21 states and the District of Columbia, USCIS recently announced the expansion of myE-Verify services nationwide. While the general E-Verify system is used by participating employers to verify the employment authorization of newly hired workers, myE-Verify was designed for individual workers and job seekers.
Here are the latest developments with the new May 2015 edition of the U.S. Department of State Visa Bulletin, including our analysis and comments.
On April 7, 2015, only five days within a hectic H-1B filing season, USCIS announced that they have received enough H-1B cases to reach the statutorily authorized limit for the 65,000 regular quota and also the 20,000 U.S. master’s degree quota. As it turns out, USCIS actually received a total of approximately 233,000 H-1B petitions. While most everyone expected that the cap would likely be reached soon after the filing season opened, the sheer volume of filings in just five days is astounding. The number of cap-subject H-1B cases this year increased by almost 60,000 (30% increase) as compared to the number of cap-subject H-1B cases submitted last year.
The roller coaster ride continues for those of us closely watching the court battle over the immigration remedy President Obama announced last November – Deferred Action for Parents (DAPA) and expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The action is taking place right now in two different courtrooms – in the courtroom of Federal District Judge Hanen in Brownsville, Texas, and at a higher court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
In December 2014, the immigration service announced that they reached the 10,000 U visa statutory cap for fiscal year 2015. Note the fiscal year 2015 began on October 1, 2014, so all 10,000 numbers were used up in two months. We are left with a long wait list of people who applied for U status, the government agreed they qualify and should be approved, and they are pre-approved and placed in deferred action status.
The immigration service will issue more final U visas in October 2015.
We learned at a Tennessee Bar Association immigration committee liaison meeting this April that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is planning to open a full-fledged Field Office…read on
The April 2015 visa bulletin was published on March 11, 2015, and all of the major developments with cut-off date movement, along with our analysis, are summarized below: EB-3…read on
Rose Hernandez was quoted in the Washington Post regarding a lawsuit filed yesterday against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency for failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act…read on
