On June 9, 2011, the United States Department of State released its July 2010 Visa Bulletin (the “Bulletin”). Among other things, the Bulletin provided an update on the results of the 2010 Diversity Visa Lottery (DV-2011).

According to the Bulletin, the Kentucky Consular Center in Williamsburg, Kentucky has registered and notified the winners of the DV-2011 diversity lottery. The diversity lottery was conducted under the terms of section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act and makes available *50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Approximately 100,600 applicants have been registered and notified and may now make an application for an immigrant visa. Since it is likely that some of the first *50,000 persons registered will not pursue their cases to visa issuance, this larger figure should insure that all DV-2011 numbers will be used during fiscal year 2011 (October 1, 2010 until September 30, 2011).

Applicants registered for the DV-2011 program were selected at random from over 12.1 million qualified entries (16.5 million with derivatives) received during the 60-day application period that ran from noon on October 2, 2009, until noon, November 30, 2009. The visas have been apportioned among six geographic regions with a maximum of seven percent available to persons born in any single country.

During the visa interview, principal applicants must provide proof of a high school education or its equivalent, or show two years of work experience in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience within the past five years. Those selected will need to act on their immigrant visa applications quickly.

Applicants should follow the instructions in their notification letter and must fully complete the information requested. Registrants living legally in the United States who wish to apply for adjustment of their status must contact U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for information on the requirements and procedures.

Once the total *50,000 visa numbers have been used, the program for fiscal year 2011 will end. Selected applicants who do not receive visas by September 30, 2011 will derive no further benefit from their DV-2011 registration. Similarly, spouses and children accompanying or following to join DV-2011 principal applicants are only entitled to derivative diversity visa status until September 30, 2011.

Only participants in the DV-2011 program who were selected for further processing have been notified. Those who have not received notification were not selected. They may try for the upcoming DV-2012 lottery if they wish. The dates for the registration period for the DV-2012 lottery program will be widely publicized during August 2010.

The Bulleting is available here.

* The Nicaraguan and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) passed by Congress in November 1997 stipulated that up to 5,000 of the 55,000 annually-allocated diversity visas be made available for use under the NACARA program. The reduction of the limit of available visas to 50,000 began with DV-2000.

On June 18, 2010, the U.S. Department of State announced that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, along with four U.S. consulates general across China, will be opening on Saturdays over the next few weeks to accommodate thousands of Chinese travelers seeking visas to visit the United States.

Trade, commerce, people-to-people exchanges, and tourism between China and the United States have grown dramatically over the past couple years. In 2009, U.S. consular posts in China issued more than 487,000 visas to Chinese travelers. 66% of these visas were for business and tourism. Growth in 2010 has been even more dramatic.

China’s 2010 visa load is up 28% over the same period last year; this has resulted in longer than usual wait times. This program, known as the Super Saturday Visa Program, is intended to address this increased backlog.

According to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), as of June 11, 2010, approximately 22,200 H-1B cap-subject petitions were receipted. Additionally, USCIS has receipted 9,400 H-1B petitions for aliens with advanced degrees.

U.S. businesses use the H-1B program to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise in specialized fields, such as scientists, engineers, or computer programmers. The current annual cap on the H-1B category is 65,000. However, some petitions are exempt from the cap under the advanced degree exemption provided to the first 20,000 petitions filed for a beneficiary who has obtained a U.S. master’s degree or higher. Others are completely exempt from the numerical limits.

Please note that up to 6,800 H-1B numbers may be set aside from the cap of 65,000 during each fiscal year for the H-1B1 program under the terms of the legislation implementing the U.S.-Chile and U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreements. Unused numbers in this pool are made available for H-1B use for the next fiscal year.

On June 14, 2010, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) announced that a new version of the Application to Replace Permanent Resident Card (Form I-90), is available on the USCIS website. The new version of the form is dated August 10, 2009, and contains more user-friendly features.

USCIS will accept previous versions of Form I-90 for 45 days, until July 28, 2010. After July 28, 2010, USCIS will reject all previous versions of Form I-90 and will return incorrect applications with a note instructing applicants to refile using the correct version of the form.

As of June 11, 2010, United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (“USCIS”) has receipted 27,778 H-2B petitions, towards the 47,000 beneficiaries target for the second half of the fiscal year. This count includes 26,303 approved and 1,475 pending petitions. Beneficiaries target is the estimated number of petitions needed to reach the cap; it will always be higher than the actual cap.

The H-2B non-agricultural temporary worker program allows U.S. employers to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary non-agricultural jobs. There is a statutory numerical limit, or “cap,” on the total number aliens who may be issued a visa or otherwise provided H-2B status (including through a change of status) during a fiscal year.

Currently, the H-2B cap set by Congress is 66,000 per fiscal year, with 33,000 to be allocated for employment beginning in the 1st half of the fiscal year (October 1 – March 31) and 33,000 to be allocated for employment beginning in the 2nd half of the fiscal year (April 1 – September 30). Any unused numbers from the first half of the fiscal year will be made available for use by employers seeking to hire H-2B workers during the second half of the fiscal year. There is no “carry over” of unused H-2B numbers from one fiscal year to the next.

Generally, an H-2B worker who extends his/her stay in H-2B status will not be counted again against the H-2B cap. Similarly, the spouse and children of H-2B workers classified as H-4 nonimmigrants are not counted against this cap. Additionally petitions for the following types of workers are exempt the H-2B cap:

1. Fish roe processors, fish roe technicians and/or supervisors of fish roe processing
2. From November 28, 2009 until December 31, 2014, workers performing labor or services in the
Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands (“CNMI”) and/or Guam.

Once the H-2B cap is reached, USCIS may only accept petitions for H-2B workers who are exempt from the H-2B cap.

On June 7, 2010, Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that 100 percent of passengers traveling within the United States and its territories are now being checked against terrorist watchlists through the Transportation Security Administration’s (“TSA”) Secure Flight program—a major step in fulfilling a key 9/11 Commission recommendation.

Before Secure Flight, airlines conducted passenger watchlist checking.
“Secure Flight fulfills a key recommendation of the of the 9/11 Commission Report, enabling TSA to screen passengers directly against government watchlists using passenger name, date of birth, and gender before a boarding pass is issued,” said Secretary Napolitano. “This program is one of our many layers of security—coordinated with our partners in the airline industry and governments around the world—that we leverage to protect the traveling public against threats of terrorism.”

Under Secure Flight, TSA prescreens passenger name, date of birth and gender against government watchlists for domestic and international flights. In addition to facilitating secure travel for all passengers, the program helps prevent the misidentification of passengers who have names similar to individuals on government watchlists.

“We are quite pleased to see the positive outcome from the collaborative work that the Air Transport Association (“ATA”), its member airlines and TSA have invested in the development of the Secure Flight program,” said ATA President and CEO James C. May. “We are especially pleased that TSA phased program implementation to ensure that commercial airline travelers experience a seamless transition.”

99 percent of passengers will be cleared by Secure Flight to print boarding passes at home by providing their date of birth, gender and name as it appears on the government ID they plan to use when traveling when booking airline tickets. Individuals found to match watchlist parameters will be subjected to secondary screening, a law enforcement interview or prohibition from boarding an aircraft, depending on the specific case.

The Transportation Security Administration began implementing Secure Flight in late 2009 and expects all international carriers with direct flights to the U.S. to begin using Secure Flight by the end of 2010.

On June 9, 2010, the U.S. Department of State announced its new policy guidelines regarding gender change in passports and Consular Reports of Birth Abroad. Beginning June 10, when a passport applicant presents a certification from an attending medical physician that the applicant has undergone appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition, the passport will reflect the new gender.

The guidelines include detailed information about what information the certification must include. It is also possible to obtain a limited-validity passport if the physician’s statement shows the applicant is in the process of gender transition.

No additional medical records are required. Sexual reassignment surgery is no longer a prerequisite for passport issuance. A Consular Report of Birth Abroad can also be amended with the new gender.

As with all passport applicants, passport issuing officers at embassies and consulates abroad and domestic passport agencies and centers will only ask appropriate questions to obtain information necessary to determine citizenship and identity.

The new policy and procedures are based on standards and recommendations of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), recognized by the American Medical Association as the authority in this field.

There is broad consensus among economists that immigration has a small but positive impact on the average income of Americans over the long term. But far less analysis has been done on the impact of immigrants on the labor market in the shorter term, particularly when viewed through the lens of the recession and its lingering labor market effects.

In a new Migration Policy Institute report, The Impact of Immigrants in Recession and Economic Expansion, University of California, Davis economist Giovanni Peri finds that immigration unambiguously improves employment, productivity and income but that it also involves some short-term adjustments (such as worker retraining or adoption of new technology). It was commissioned to inform the work of MPI’s Labor Markets Initiative, which is conducting a comprehensive, policy-focused review of the role of legal and illegal immigration in the labor market.

The report, which examines short- and long-run impacts of immigration on average and over the business cycle of growth and contraction, finds that:

• Immigrants do not reduce native employment rates over the long run (10 years), while increasing productivity and average income for native-born workers. Immigration to the United States over the 1990-2006 period can be credited with a 2.9 percent increase in real wages for the average U.S. worker.
• The adjustment process, however, is not immediate. When immigration occurs during a downturn, the economy does not appear to respond as quickly as it would during economic expansions and there is evidence of modest negative impacts on employment and average income in the short run. These impacts dissipate over periods of up to seven years.
• During periods of economic growth, by contrast, new immigration creates jobs in sufficient numbers to leave native employment unharmed even in the short run. This holds true even for less-educated workers. Immigration during economic expansions has no measurable, short-term negative effect on income per worker.

“Adjustments to employment, productivity and income are more difficult during downturns,” Peri said. “This suggests that the United States would benefit most from an immigration system that better adjusts to economic conditions, allowing legal immigrant inflows to be more responsive to the economic cycle.”

In the report, Peri suggests allowing employers’ demand for work visas to play a stronger role in determining the number of visas issued annually, and that a share of the visas be allocated to less-skilled workers, particularly those who perform primarily manual jobs that native workers increasingly are much less interested in filling.

“This report offers further evidence yet of the need for the immigration system to become significantly more responsive to the U.S. economy’s constantly evolving labor market needs, so that the benefits of immigration can be captured more fully and any negative effects neutralized,” said MPI President Demetrios Papademetriou. “Establishing an independent executive-branch agency that would make regular recommendations to the president and Congress for adjusting employment-based immigration levels would inject a greatly needed degree of flexibility into the current rigid immigration system.”

MPI first articulated the concept for a Standing Commission on Labor Markets, Economic Competitiveness, and Immigration in 2006, and further fleshed out the proposal in a 2009 report, Harnessing the Advantages of Immigration for a 21st-Century Economy: A Standing Commission on Labor Markets, Economic Competitiveness, and Immigration.

The Peri report is available at www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/Peri-June2010.pdf.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) has announced that it has revised the Employment Authorization Document (“EAD”), or Form I-766, to incorporate the addition of a machine-readable zone on the back of the card. This update to the EAD is part of USCIS’s ongoing efforts to deter immigration fraud.

Starting May 11, USCIS began issuing the revised EAD cards. The machine-readable zone is compliant with International Civil Aviation Organization standards. USCIS also removed the two-dimensional bar code on the backside of the card and moved the informational box of text to just beneath the magnetic stripe on the card. The revised card retains all of its existing security features.

The front of the EAD card remains the same:

The back of the EAD card definitely looks different. The smaller image to the left is the old design and the larger image to the right is the new design:

According to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), as of May 21, 2010, approximately 19,600 H-1B cap-subject petitions were receipted. Additionally, USCIS has receipted 8,200 H-1B petitions for aliens with advanced degrees.

U.S. businesses use the H-1B program to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise in specialized fields, such as scientists, engineers, or computer programmers. The current annual cap on the H-1B category is 65,000. However, some petitions are exempt from the cap under the advanced degree exemption provided to the first 20,000 petitions filed for a beneficiary who has obtained a U.S. master’s degree or higher. Others are completely exempt from the numerical limits.

Please note that up to 6,800 H-1B numbers may be set aside from the cap of 65,000 during each fiscal year for the H-1B1 program under the terms of the legislation implementing the U.S.-Chile and U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreements. Unused numbers in this pool are made available for H-1B use for the next fiscal year.