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 … Read more
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.
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
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,
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:
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.
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:
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.
