USCIS calls it First Ten Areas of Focus for Agency-wide Policy Review, and I renamed it to the Top-10 Issues List.
This is a list USCIS compiled after conducting a survey three months ago asking your input on the areas that USCIS should review their policies and make changes first. It was an important study, and we called for actions in our community forum. Hopefully you had a chance to voice your opinion at that time.
After “nearly 5,600 stakeholders responded to the survey, representing current immigrant and non-immigrant visa holders, employers, immigration attorneys and advocates, among others, in addition to responses from approximately 2,400 members of the USCIS workforce,” the Top-10 list is quite extensive and other than a couple items, I think it hit the nail on the head:
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Some of you may have noticed that in our Immigration News section, certain outbound links may be pointing to something like:
http://goo.gl/nVat
What is that!? In case you’re wondering, it is actually the same address (URL) as this one:
http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.
5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=8c75d06dcebf9210VgnVCM
100000082ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=
68439c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD
I still receive 5 – 6 immigration newsletters on a regular basis. All of them are from immigration law firms. But I rarely read the content of those newsletters or bulletins any more: They all look similar to each other.
Here is a road sign you don’t see everyday: Green Card Dr.
I took the picture on a beautiful July 4th afternoon. You can see blue sky and palm trees in the background, traffic lights that happened to be green at the time, and a gas station located conveniently nearby. What a fitting image for Immigration Road!
Now, can anyone guess where this road is?
DV-2011 green card lottery entrants can now check the status of their applications online.
To use the Entrant Status Check (ESC) Web site, you need to have your Submission Confirmation ready. The confirmation page was displayed when you successfully submitted your Diversity Visa (DV) lottery entry. More specifically, it contained your Entrant Confirmation Number, Last/Family Name (or blank if none), and Year of Birth. You must have this information in order to log into the website and check the status of your entry.
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The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is aware of the fact that some private parties are selling free USCIS forms and Infopass appointments for profit. In a recent blog post, USCIS reminded immigrants of such activities, but fell short of calling them fraudulent.
These services are offered free of charge by USCIS, but they do cost money. To design all the
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The new green card comes with a bunch of enhanced features. Although most of them are designed for security purposes, the implementation of RFID – Radio Frequency IDentification – is rather for improving efficiency. In fact, if anything, RFID might have undercut an otherwise more secure green card.
With RFID embedded in the new green card, a CBP officer is now able to read your card while you are still standing in line at the airport. This, hopefully, can get you through a port of entry a bit faster. But the problem is, anyone with a sophisticated reader can read the same information as well, all from a distance without you even knowing it.
Before you push the panic button, however,
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After talking about NBA and the World Cup, it is time for … hockey! And it is related to immigration too.
E. J. Montini from The Arizona Republic wrote a story today about Tyson Nash, a former professional hockey player. He is a Canadian, and has been trying to secure a green card forever. Every time you hear the name of a pro athlete who happens to be from a foreign country, you may be thinking about his plays, his salary, his whatever, but rarely his immigration status. What is the legal status of Yao Ming, Pau Gasol, or the hundreds of Hispanic baseball players still playing in the MLB? O or P visa? Pending I-485? Many of you don’t have a clue – me either.
But apparently some athletes face the same immigration red tape just like we do:
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The FIFA 2010 World Cup is only a month away. I realized that not only I didn’t know the schedule yet, I couldn’t even name half the teams. To account for my lack of interest, I figure either I’m aging faster than I thought, or I’ve been living in the United States for too long. I still like soccer. In fact I still play twice a week, in a wonderful team that has a genuine international representation. So I kind of blame the American TV networks for turning me into a NFL/NBA fan instead. It is no secret that football, basketball, baseball, and even poker are placed ahead of soccer on your shiny LCD screen.
For one month, however, ESPN is changing priorities. All 64 world cup matches will be aired live and in high definition on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC.
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As a Lakers fan, I usually don’t applaud the Phoenix Suns — a rival in the West. But tonight I do. The Suns wore jerseys that read “Los Suns” while beating the San Antonio Spurs to take a 2-0 lead in the Western Conference semifinals. The team’s owner, Robert Sarver, wanted to send a message to the Arizona legislature:
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Ever since USCIS started releasing the pending I-485 inventory data last September, there has been skepticism all over the Internet. Some, including immigration attorneys, have gone as far as claiming the data being close to useless.
Well, I think that is too far.
Sure, the data is incomplete. But it is something we never had before. Prior to September of 2009, if you had a pending I-485, all you knew was that you were standing in line waiting for the next visa bulletin. Now, with the inventory, you can find out approximately how many people are actually ahead of you. Even if USCIS doesn’t count all the pending cases, you now have a general idea of how long the line is, and more importantly, what position you are in.
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“Do I have to carry my green card with me?”
Many people ask this question after becoming a permanent resident. The official answer is: Yes, you do. In fact, Form I-797 that came with your fresh new green card says:
When you receive your card you must carry it with you at all times if you are 18 or older. It is the law.
So there you go. The perfect answer.
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USCIS began accepting H-1B petitions on April 1, 2010. If approved, beneficiaries of these petitions may start working in H-1B status on or after October 1, 2010 – the first day of FY 2011 cap season. The following table includes major cap counts released by USCIS. The table will be updated on a regular basis to show the pattern of this year’s H1B filing.
| Date of Last Count | Regular Cap (65,000) |
Advanced Degree Exemption (20,000) |
| 4/8/2010 | 13,500 | 5,600 |
| 4/15/2010 | 13,600 | 5,800 |
| 4/22/2010 | 16,025 | 6,739 |
| 5/06/2010 | 18,000 | 7,600 |
| 5/14/2010 | 19,000 | 8,100 |
| 5/21/2010 | 19,600 | 8,200 |
| 5/28/2010 | 20,800 | 8,700 |
| 6/11/2010 | 22,200 | 9,400 |
| 6/18/2010 | 22,900 | 9,700 |
| 6/25/2010 | 23,500 | 10,000 |
| 7/02/2010 | 24,200 | 10,400 |
| 7/09/2010 | 24,800 | 10,600 |
| 7/16/2010 | 25,300 | 11,000 |
| 7/23/2010 | 26,000 | 11,300 |
See graph:
[AF, 04/01/2010] United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced at a news conference today that it has changed its name…to Google!. The change takes effect immediately.
The surprising move is part of a campaign to bring Google’s 1GB ultra speedy broadband Internet into the Agency. Alejandro Mayorkas, USCIS Director, explained during the formal proclamation:
In order to provide high-speed immigration services, we must have high-speed internet services.
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USCIS has recently launched The BEACON – the official USCIS blog. Unlike the DHS Leadership Journal, this one is all about immigration. It is also open for comments, which is a great way for readers (you) to get involved. For what it is worth, your comments will be read by someone at USCIS, because they have to review all of them.
However, it doesn’t mean you should vent your frustration on whatever post they publish, although we understand your urge to do so. What is a better way than posting on their own blog if you are unhappy with their services? But it doesn’t help anyone if most comments left by immigrants are essentially “USCIS sucks!” or something of that nature. In my personal opinion, we should give USCIS credit for starting a blog in the first place. And we want to encourage them to continue opening up more communication channels in the future. So if at all possible, please try to comment on relevant posts only, and offer constructive suggestions rather than simply demand for better services.
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