Immigration

The UK Home Office has announced plans to offer an optional premium service for requests made through the Sponsor Management System (SMS). This service will allow Sponsors to pay a fee of £200 for expedited processing of certain types of requests including Certificate of Sponsorship allocation and Level 1 user appointment.

Practice Chair, Susan Cohen was quoted in the Law360 article, Rule for Foreign Startup Founders Seen as Helpful Stopgap in which she explains the nuances of the UCIS’s proposed entrepreneur rule, which will allow immigrant startup founders to temporarily stay in the U.S.

As foreign national employees come back from summer vacations and travel abroad, one of the most overlooked immigration documents and pitfalls is Form I-94.

Today USCIS released the text of a proposed rule to be published in the Federal Register shortly, that provides temporary immigration relief to qualifying foreign entrepreneurs whose presence in the U.S. would be a public benefit to the country.

Late this spring, two lawsuits were filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) seeking information about and challenging the administration of the H-1B visa lottery process.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection ("CBP") Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske released the agency's summer travel tips for international travelers.

The Department of State released the visa bulletin for August 2016 and set cutoff dates for employment-based first preference Chinese and Indian chargeable applicants as well as second preference categories for “all other” nationalities.

I appreciate the guidance you have provided regarding the documents the company needs to have in place when sending an employee on an assignment abroad.

Practice Chair Susan Cohen and Of Counsel Bill Coffman have published annual guidance on travel for F-1 students who are the beneficiaries of H-1B petitions with change of status requests.

The United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Island) went to the polls June 23rd and voted to leave the European Union. Some pro-leave "Brexit" campaigners argued for the ability to limit migration of EU workers as an important issue in the run-up to the referendum.

Thank you again for all your help over the past few weeks as we address our concerns with employees going abroad. We previously talked about offer letters and employment agreements.

Thanks again for your guidance over the past several weeks. Now that we’ve tackled updating our offer letters for employees working abroad, I’d like to look at our employment agreements.

In this short series on the new STEM OPT rules, Susan Cohen, Chair of Mintz Levin's Immigration Section will examine the top takeaways for students and their employers. The third post will focus on the eligibility and requirements for employers.

In this short series on the new STEM OPT rules, Susan Cohen, Chair of Mintz Levin's Immigration Section will examine the top takeaways for students and their employers. The second post will focus on the expansion of the regulation and related changes and reporting requirements for students.

In this short series on the new STEM OPT rules, Susan Cohen, Chair of Mintz Levin's Immigration Section will examine the top takeaways for students and their employers. The first post will focus on the timing rules related to the new regulation.

The diversity visa green card lottery has been an important part of U.S. immigration law for the last 20 years. It allows 55,000 foreign nationals to immigrate each year and was implemented to fulfill the worthy goal of increasing the diversity of immigrants in the U.S.

USCIS announced that it completed the lottery for the new fiscal year's H-1B cap cases. The agency also released the final (approximate) count of cap-eligible H-1B cases filed for FY2017; a new record of 236,000 cases were filed.

As promised, I am following up on my email from last week regarding some additional resources for employees working abroad.

In a welcome move, on March 18, 2016 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released policy guidance for its officers to help them decide "green card portability" cases.

Although I have been writing offer and assignment letters for more than 15 years, I’m curious as to what are today’s best practices for preparing these documents as our company extends its global reach.