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On December 3, 2012, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Alejandro Mayorkas noted on a stakeholder conference call that within four to six months, EB-5 responsibilities will be moved to Washington, DC, under a new EB-5 Program Office. The chief of the new office will report to the USCIS Deputy Director. According to unofficial… Read More

As of November 1, 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designated Taiwan for the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said the move was “a major step forward in our long-standing economic partnership with Taiwan.” Taiwan joins 36 participants in the VWP, which permits visa-free travel for eligible travelers visiting… Read More

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently answered a query about potential discrepancies related to special characters in foreign names when using the E-Verify system. For example, the biographic page of a passport does not recognize the German umlauted “ϋ” and will translate it to the machine-readable “ue,” whereas a DS-2019 or I-20 may translate… Read More

The Department of Labor’s PERM online system had outage issues from November 21-27, 2012. The Department issued the following alert: The PERM online filing and processing system was disrupted late Wednesday, November 21, 2012. This disruption was caused in the performance of necessary maintenance, which temporarily disabled certain parts of the system but not the… Read More

The Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) released a FAQ (PDF) in December 2012 on H-2A and H-2B iCERT implementation. The iCERT visa portal system is a Web-based filing and case management platform that provides access to program services across the foreign labor certification programs that OFLC administers. Among other things, the… Read More