• Visa allocation for highly skilled workers should improve visa processing
• Government will work with State Department so that all visas authorized by Congress will be issued to people who are eligible
• The wait time should be reduced
• Improve process for determining when visas are available
• Rules will be put in place so that priority dates will be preserved for people whoa re changing jobs

Raw Transcript:

Introduction: You ask we answer your immigration questions. Simple. And now your host immigration lawyer Jacob Sapochnick.

Jacob: Hello everybody, this is Jacob Sapochnick – Ask An Immigration Lawyer Podcast. Welcome back.

We got a lot of questions in the past few weeks about the new Obama executive action announcement and we broke it down into several parts. We talked about who may be affected before family immigration, undocumented immigrants and we wanted to cover today the employment base visas. What about people who are here right now working H1B visas, different visas what can they do with Obama’s announcement? Well, that’s some good stuff coming up right there.

Obama announced several proposed changes and following those changes a memorandum came from Department of Homeland Security secretary Mr. Johnson and that memo outlined some very interesting policies. Well, the first one we’re talking about visa allocations for highly skilled workers. The idea is to reduce the weight times from most of these employment base immigrant visas. Also improve the visa processing. As you know right now people from India, The Philippines and China they have to wait years in their line before they can get a green card and it’s just frustrating because they often just giving up and they want to leave the US. They don’t want to wait five, seven, ten years to get a green card.

And as far as the government system just happen so much the visas have gone unused due to processing issues. So the government is now … is going to work with the Department of State to make sure that all visas that are authorized by Congress must be issued to people that are eligible to get them. And so making more efficient now that if individuals are waiting in line they’re going to get their visas and the wait time will be reduced. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services also are going to work with the Department of State to improve the process for determining when immigrant visas are available to applicants during the year.

So this, again, will help speed up the process and also they should create some policy to make sure that people that are waiting, pending immigrant visas will not lose their line while they’re waiting if they lose jobs. So right now if somebody is going through an I-140 petition and they are going through a petition and they get fired often they have to restart the green card process. So it’s very important that there are going to be rules in place to make sure that priority dates are going to be preserved for people who are changing their jobs.

So, these are some of the main things that they announced as far as changes in the employment base visa as far as visa wait times and related allocation visas.

In the next part of this podcast I’m going to talk about what other benefits are going to be available for entrepreneurs part of Obama’s executive action announcement. So stay tuned. Next episode we’re going to talk about some of the other changes proposed by this executive action.

Again, if you have any more questions, feel free to email them to us. Go to askanimmigrationlawyer.com, place your question or leave them in the comments. Thank you so much.

Closing: Thank you for listening to the Ask My Immigration Lawyer Podcast, the show that’s dedicated to answering your immigration questions. Simple as that. See you next week for another round of questions and much needed answers.