The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) held a stakeholder meeting on January 29, 2008, the details of which were released recently. Questions were answered on receipting frontlogs and case backlogs, processing times, special circumstances in naturalization cases, religious worker cases, and other immigration matters....
The Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) recently dismissed the appeal of a petition for a Special Immigrant Religious Worker, finding that the beneficiary could not demonstrate that she had two years of paid employment prior to filing the petition. The AAO denied the petition for employment...
The Administrative Appeals Office (AAO), in a non-precedent case, upheld the denial of an I-140 petition for the multinational executive / manager of a restaurant, noting that a recitation of the beneficiary's vague and broadly-cast job responsibilities was insufficient to establish that she would be...
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently issued an announcement (PDF 40.6KB) that extends the suspension of premium processing services for religious worker (R-1) petitions for another six months, until July 8, 2008. A previous six-month suspension of such premium processing services was announced...
The USCIS provided some updated information on the many July and August I-485 Application for Adjustment of Status (AOS) filings, at an AILA conference held in late September 2007 at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. This information should prove useful to many MurthyDotCom and MurthyBulletin readers who...
The following questions and answers are based on those frequently posed to the attorneys at the Murthy Law Firm. We are sharing these to clarify information of concern to our clients and the entire immigrant community. MurthyDotCom and MurthyBulletin readers are reminded that these responses...
The U.S. Department of State (DOS) has announced that it will accept 2009 Diversity Visa (DV) Lottery applications from noon Eastern Time (ET) on October 3, 2007 to noon ET on December 2, 2007. The only acceptable way to apply is through the DOS online...
[See also, Part 1 of this NewsBrief.]As promised in our April 13, 2007 article, National Interest Waivers (Part 1 of 2), this week we share with readers some National Interest Waiver (NIW) case success stories from the Murthy Law Firm. These examples, approved over the...
[See also, Part 2 of this NewsBrief.]The NIW category falls within the employment-based, second preference category (EB2). In contrast to regular EB2 petitions, however, NIW cases are exempt from the labor certification and job offer requirement. This means that a person who does not have...
As a result of some recent litigation, the physician-specific National Interest Waiver (NIW) is now available to physicians in all specialties. This change, which was implemented nationwide in a memo dated January 23, 2007, is effective immediately. Background Prior to the litigation and the implementing memo, the...
