Here is a profile done on the types of clients that I help obtain an H-1B Visa, and goes behind the scenes with one client in particular. Understanding the background of people who are struggling to stay in this country can help you better realize the importance of obtaining a green card, and why it is the only choice for some. This article also highlights the ways in which I try to stay creative during the process, so that my clients have a better shot when they qualify for the lottery. Read the article below for more information…
Vying for visas
By: John Golden Posted date: February 15, 2014 In: Featured, Government, Law, Small Business, Westchester
“I did my first DOMA case yesterday,” immigration lawyer Susan B. Henner said with a smile one recent morning at the small South Broadway office she shares with two associate attorneys and her husband’s criminal defense practice in downtown White Plains. Her client, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is seeking a green card for his same-sex spouse overseas since a key section of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that kept the couple apart was declared unconstitutional last year.
Henner, who is co-chairperson of the Westchester County Bar Association’s Committee on Immigration and Nationality Law, also does pro bono work on behalf of unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the U.S. and need legal representation here in the Safe Passage Project at her alma mater, New York Law School. About one-third of her work at the solo practice she opened in White Plains in 2001 involves individuals looking to bring family members into the U.S, she said.
Corporate clients account for another one-third of her work in the tristate area. Some of those clients want to retain or recruit foreign employees whose stay in the U.S. requires nonimmigrant visas, which grant temporary residence without the permanence and security, for both employer and employee, of a green card. The paperwork for those clients takes on special urgency this winter as an April 1 filing deadline approaches.
On that date, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services begins accepting petitions for a limited number of H-1B visas – 65,000 randomly selected from a general pool of applicants. Those visas allow foreign professionals to stay up to six years in the U.S. to work for specific employers. Applicants must possess at least a bachelor’s degree and must be sponsored by their U.S. employer.
The H-1B visa regulations also require employers to file a Labor Condition Application with the U.S. Department of Labor, whereby the employer agrees to pay the foreign worker a designated prevailing wage for the professional position.
Henner has seen the aftereffects of the federal government shutdown last fall in her filings for clients this winter. The Labor Department applications, which normally took four to five days to process, are taking four to five weeks to go through the agency’s backlogged system, she said.
Unable to access the federal agency’s website during normal business hours last month, “At one point we were going on in the middle of the night because we thought there would be less traffic,” Henner said.
For the H-1B visas, “Now is the time that businesses really need to start working on them to be ready by April 1,” she said.
In 2013, immigration officials, using a computer-generated selection system, reached the 65,000-visa cap in within the first week of April, Henner said. The agency sets a separate lottery cap of 20,000 visas for persons with master’s degrees. A total of 124,000 petitions for H-1B visas were filed last year, Henner said.
“The numbers (of H-1B applications) were down for a few years because of the recession, but now they’re going back up,” she said. In her practice, “We’re starting to see an upswing again,” with about 15 applications to be filed this spring, compared with 12 in 2013 and 50 more than a decade ago. “We’re starting to see people recognizing the need and they’re hiring again. Which is good – it’s good for our clients.”
Henner steers through the visa process both foreign workers and the companies hiring them for a range of occupations.
“We see a lot in the computer field, obviously,” she said. “I have a lot in the engineering field and a lot in the accounting field.” The attorney also works with many bilingual speech therapists from Colombia and other countries that will be placed in U.S. schools with Spanish-speaking students by speech therapy agencies.
A Brooklyn manufacturer of flexible packaging materials recruits engineers overseas “because they find they need a level of training that a lot of engineers here don’t have. So they’ll recruit in India, in Israel.”
In Rye Brook, a company with about 120 employees wants to secure an H-1B visa and hire as an account manager a foreign student who has been working at the company on an Optional Practical Training visa. That visa allows foreign students to remain in the country to work for one year after receiving a bachelor’s degree.
“The problem a lot of companies have is they don’t contact you on time” to meet the April 1 deadline and lottery for the longer-term H-1B visa for employees, Henner said. OPT visas run from June to June.
At Maid Brigade, a roughly 40-employee house cleaning business in Valhalla, office worker Petra Juraskova has retained Henner to handle her H-1B application this year, when her OPT visa expires. Maid Bridge owners Robin and Gary Murphy will create a position as human resources specialist for their valued employee if she is selected for a visa in the April lottery.
A native of the Czech Republic, where her family owns a plumbing contracting business, Juraskova came to the U.S. and Westchester County on a tourist visa in 2005.
“That was the last time I was home,” she said. Should she leave, U.S. immigration officials have advised her that she might be denied re-entry here “even if I followed the immigration law,” she said.
Once in the U.S., she obtained an F-1 student visa that had been difficult to obtain in the Czech Republic. She took English as a second language classes at Westchester Community College and earned an associate’s degree in marketing. In 2012, she received a bachelor’s degree from Iona College, majoring in business administration in international business at the college’s Hagan School of Business.
“It was always my dream to come to America,” Juraskova said at her desk at Maid Brigade, where her bookkeeping, payroll records and human resources work have expanded since her hiring nine months ago.
It is her dream now to eventually obtain a green card and stay here permanently. To get that, she must first obtain the H-1B visa, she said.
“We were really impressed with her performance,” Gary Murphy, the company’s operations director, said. “In a small business, we always need someone who can handle a lot of things thrown at them… She has the mindset for small business… In small business we’re always looking for talent. We want Petra to have a future here.”
“It just blows me away that at the end of the day it comes down to a lottery,” Murphy said of the visa selection system. “It’s a matter of luck. It comes down to some broken immigration policy in the country that really needs to be addressed.”
“It’s excruciating for Petra,” he added.
For those who do not emerge a winner in the H-1B lottery, “You’ve got to be creative,” Henner said. “A large law firm will just be like, ‘Too bad, too bad, go home.’” But there are several other options for obtaining nonimmigrant visas. “That’s what people fail to realize,” she said.
Juraskova has plans if she obtains her H-1B visa this year: a return visit and reunion with her family in the Czech Republic.
“After nine years, yes,” she said.
Susan B. Henner, Attorney at Law PLLC 