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Released Feb. 9, 2012

Temporary Non-Agricultural Employment of H-2B Aliens in the United States. The Department has placed on the table for publication in the Federal Register a Final Rule amending the regulations governing the labor certification process for the temporary employment of H-2B foreign workers in the United States, codified at 20 CFR part 655, and enforcement of employer obligations under the H-2B program, codified at 29 CFR Part 503. The new regulations will be published in the Federal Register on February 21, 2012, and will go into effect on April 23, 2012.

Wage and Hour Division (WHD)

WHD H-2B Side-by-Side Comparison of the 2009 and 2012 Rules

February, 2012

USCIS Announces Outreach to Chinese Immigrant Community
February 6, 2012
1:00 pm ET

Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. All participants will be in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session. To ask a question at that time please press star then 1.

Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time.

And now I’d like to turn the meeting over to Miss Edna Ruano, Chief of the Office of Communications for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) today announced that Self Check, a free online service of E-Verify that allows workers to check their own employment eligibility status, is now available in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands.

February 15, 2012, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Director USCIS, testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement.

Please check the attachment to read Testomony.

USCIS’s Lockbox provides filing tips for Forms N-600, N-600K, and N-336, to help stakeholders ensure that applications are properly accepted at the Lockbox facility.

PERM statistics from DOL’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification for year-to-date FY2012, including total number of applications received, total number of applications processed, PERM processing priority dates, and breakdown of active PERM cases at the DOL.

Interpreting recent trends in I-94 nonimmigrant admissions has been complicated by more complete recording of entries into the United States. Beginning in 2005, at selected Southwest border crossings, the Department of Homeland Security installed new technology to record land admissions previously excluded from I-94 data systems; by 2010 this technology was installed at nearly all pedestrian crossings and vehicular lanes along the Southwest and Northern borders.

[Federal Register Volume 77, Number 33 (Friday, February 17, 2012)]
[Proposed Rules]
[Pages 9590-9591]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2012-3725]


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Proposed Rules
Federal Register

Proposed Rules

[[Page 9590]]

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
8 CFR Part 1292
[EOIR Docket No. 176]
RIN 1125-AA72
Recognition and Accreditation

The “tenant-occupancy” methodology seeks credit for job creation by independent tenant businesses that lease space in buildings developed with EB-5 funding. USCIS continues to recognize that whether it is economically reasonable to attribute such “tenant-occupancy” jobs to the underlying EB-5 commercial real estate project is a fact-specific question. Each case filed will depend on the specific facts presented and the accompanying economic analysis.

The Department of Labor is amending its regulations governing the certification of the employment of nonimmigrant workers in temporary or seasonal nonagricultural employment and the enforcement of the obligations applicable to employers of such nonimmigrant workers. This Final Rule revises the process by which employers obtain a temporary labor certification from the Department for use in petitioning the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to employ a nonimmigrant worker in H–2B status.

This Final Rule is effective April 23, 2012.

As Congress considers addressing some of the problems in the nation’s immigration system, the detention of noncitizens in the United States may be an issue as Congress may chose to reevaluate detention priorities (i.e., who should be detained) and resources. Under the law, there is broad authority to detain aliens while awaiting a determination of whether the noncitizen should be removed from the United States. The law also mandates that certain categories of aliens are subject to mandatory detention (i.e., the aliens must be detained).