US Has No Visas?

The U.S. State Department surprised the immigration law establishment in June of this year when it announced that employment based visas would be "current" as of July 1, 2007. According to prominent Los Angeles immigration attorney Carl Shusterman, this meant that thousands of applicants finally would be able to file for employment based immigration benefits, some of them after having waited five years or more for backlogs to clear.

"The State Department's announcement set off a visa gold rush," Shusterman notes. "Lawyers and their clients were pulling all-nighters to get applications in by July 1."
All for naught, Shusterman says. As of Monday, July 2, the State Department had posted a small press release on an obscure section of its web site announcing that employment based numbers were not current after all. As it develops, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was able to process 60,000 employment based visa applications in the last 30 days, so that no more employment based visas are available. The next filing period is October 1, 2007, but Shusterman said there are bound to be backlogs and that it is anyone's guess when employment based visa applications will next
be current.

"We're right back to square one, with scientists, engineers, teachers, and healthcare workers having to wait in endless lines for employment based visas," he observes.

Meanwhile, what will become of the thousands of applications that were filed to meet the July 1 deadline? Shusterman says they will all be sent back to the applicants, despite whatever effort or cost they were put to. Why did the State Department create great expectations only to have the Immigration Service dash them? Shusterman says we may never know.

"Apparently, it was two federal agencies playing a game of yes, we have no bananas," he notes. "It's disappointing." -The Law Offices of Carl Shusterman