Posts Tagged ‘USCIS’

Is your company prepared for Immigration audits?

Monday, February 7th, 2011

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (USCIS) has begun to target larger companies for the hiring of undocumented workers. Just recently, Chipotle Mexican Grill become the latest target of a U.S. government crackdown on companies that hire undocumented workers.

Approximately 60 Chipotle restaurants in Virginia and Washington, D.C. will be audited by federal immigration officials, who will look over employment and employee immigration records for each restaurant.

USCIS says the audits are a broader strategy of “attacking” companies that hire illegal workers

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H-1B Filings Begin April 1st 2010

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Beginning April 1, 2010, the United State Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) will begin accepting new H-1B petitions for employment commencing on October 1, 2010. The fiscal year cap for H-1B petitions for FY2011 is 65,000. In addition there are 20,000 H-1B petitions for those with a Masters Degree or higher in the U.S. The quota only applies to new H-1B visas and does not apply to those nonimmigrants who currently hold H-1B status.

While the H-1B cap was not reached

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Immigration Consequences of Mergers and Acquisitions

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Many companies and even corporate lawyers fail to perform the necessary due diligence of analyzing the immigration consequences of a merger and acquisition. All of the workers should be analyzed individually, to examine what immigration liabilities and responsibilities the surviving entity will take on. In some cases this may even effect how the deal will be structured. The immigration consequences of such a deal can have devastating effects on all the entities and individuals involved, and we cannot stress enough

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H-1B Visa Cap Reached!

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that it has received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to reach the statutory cap for fiscal year (FY) 2010. USCIS is hereby notifying the public that Dec. 21, 2009 is the “final receipt date” for new H-1B specialty occupation petitions requesting an employment start date in FY 2010.

The “final receipt date” is the date on which USCIS determines that it has received enough cap-subject petitions to reach the limit of

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A Founders Visa program to stimulate the Economy?

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Entrepreneur turned academic, Vivek Wadhwa, argues in the latest issue of BusinessWeek for a new visa targeted toward entrepreneurs with great ideas and start up capital to launch new enterprises and create US jobs. Under this founders visa program, investor-backed foreign entrepreneurs would be able to come to the US on a permanent resident visa and take on the risk of starting new companies and potentially build the next Google or Cisco Systems. Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the

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H-1B visas almost gone!!

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Last count shows that 61,100 of the 65,000 H-1B visas have been used up. Once this cap is reached, then no more H-1B visas will be available until October 1st, 2010. There has been a surge of filings in the last few weeks and we expect the cap to be reached any day now.

Companies may petition for an H-1B visa up to 6 months in advance. So, USCIS will begin accepting applications for the 2010 H-1B visas on April 1st,

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