Last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced The Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 2164), which would require all U.S. employers to use the federal database known as E-Verify to electronically verify the employment authorization of prospective employees before hiring. Should the bill become law, mandatory participation in E-Verify would be implemented on a rolling basis. The largest employers, with more than 10,000...
Read MoreForeign accounts have become a hot button for the IRS in the past few years. The current situation started with the investigation of the large Swiss bank, UBS. The accusation was that UBS made it a business to assist US taxpayers with the use of offshore banking accounts to avoid paying US tax. The Internal Revenue Service served what is called a “John Doe” summons on UBS in an attempt to obtain the names of the owners of 52,000 US account...
Read MoreOn June 14, 2011, Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) introduced the Immigration Driving Entrepreneurship in America (IDEA) Act of 2011. The proposed legislation aims to spur U.S. job creation, economic growth, and innovation through sweeping reform of U.S. employment-based immigration. Included in the bill are provisions that would create a fast track to U.S. permanent resident status for STEM (science, technology, engineering and...
Read MoreThe U.S. Department of State (DOS) has published the July 2011 Visa Bulletin. Priority cut-off dates for the most common employment-based categories are provided below.
Employment-based, first preference (EB-1):
Employment-based, second preference (EB-2):...
Read MoreIn recent years, Arizona and several other U.S. states have enacted laws which mandate the use of the otherwise voluntary federal E-Verify system and increasingly impose sanctions for knowingly or intentionally employing unauthorized aliens. The U.S. Chambers of Commerce organization challenged Arizona’s law -- the Legal Arizona Workers Act of 2007 -- on the grounds that federal law should preempt state law in matters of immigration....
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