John Valdez’s Legal Blog

Some reports predict that there will be a shortage of as many as 1 million nurses in the U.S. by the year 2020; yet immigration quotas make it very difficult for foreign nurses to gain U.S. permanent residence.  The House will soon vote on a bill to help hospitals and other health organizations petition for foreign nurses […]

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I can remember in the not-too-distant past when interior immigration enforcement was very rare.  Those times are truly fading.
Raids of restaurants, factories, meat plants, farms, and a variety of other businesses are hitting the news was astonishing regularity.  The latest example of this trend was reported this May, when the USCIS announced it had raided Agriprocessors, a […]

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Many foreign nationals are misinformed about immigration terms and processes.  As a practicing immigration attorney, I often witness clients struggling to understand commonly used terms.  Two words my clients often use incorrectly are “visa” and “status.”  
A U.S. visa is a document placed in a foreign national’s passport by the U.S. Department of State, at a U.S. Embassy.  […]

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In the past several years, I haven’t seen Congress pass any major, positive immigration reform, but the government has made some administrative changes that benefit foreign nationals.  Recently, the government proposed new, beneficial TN rules.
On May 9, 2008, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new regulation that would expand the maximum allowable period of admission for TN nonimmigrants and their families from one to […]

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Immigration enforcement has become the number one priority of immigration agencies.  The most recent example of the government’s focus on enforcement involves the restaurant industry.  Last week, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (”ICE”) announced that it arrested 63 undocumented workers at 11 El Balazo restaurants around the Bay Area in California.
The El Balazo arrests are […]

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