“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

~ Yogi Berra

fortune tellerThe talk of the nation – at least that segment interested in U.S. green card benefits available to foreign investors – is about the welcome or feared changes likely to occur in the EB-5 employment-creation immigration investor visa program.  Scuttlebutt and divination have

DeadlineTwo hundred days ago President Obama stoked the hopes of immigration advocates with his announcement of wide-ranging executive actions to try — as far as his authority would carry him — to change America’s broken immigration system for the better.

Generating most of the media fanfare and Republican outrage were his plans to expand eligibility

earful.jpg[Blogger’s note:  For EB-5 stakeholders interested in learning more about the USCIS Listening Session, you can register for “EB-5 Immigrant Investor Update,”  a webinar presented by members of Seyfarth Shaw LLP’s EB-5 Immigrant Investment Team on May 13, 2014.  Topics include: 

• The April 23, 2014 USCIS’s stakeholders listening session

• FINRA’s recent

Business man hushing.jpgImagine you’re the general counsel of Coca Cola (or of any other company that takes great pains to safeguard the internal secrets that endow the organization with competitive advantages over other firms in the same industry).  On your desk lands a letter from a U.S. senator in the minority party asking that your company turn

Ellis Island photo.jpgHindsight, the armchair pundits say, is 20-20.  The year 2013 has proven them wrong.

The end-of-year’s rear-view mirror onto the world of U.S. immigration shows impenetrable fog.  Unsurprisingly, as filmgoers know, vapory views of the recent past tend to diminish the apparent significance of events occurring early in the year (“never has a film

India - Americans.jpgThe drums of war are pounding.  Prominent American companies, through a variety of business associations, are urging the Obama Administration and Congress to punish the Government of India for mounting hostile actions in a brewing trade war.

For its part, the Indian government cannot be pleased with the dramatically increased filing fees and restrictions

Voltaire 2.jpgFrench philosopher and aphorist, François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire, wrote in Italian that “Il meglio è l’inimico del bene [the perfect is the enemy of the good].”

The wisdom of this saying, championed by pragmatists everywhere, comes to mind upon reading a May 30, 2013 Policy Memorandum (PM)

Wild rabbit in the meadow.jpgWinston Churchill, whose mother was American (Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn), could just as well have been speaking about the components of comprehensive immigration reform.  Instead he was commenting on the Allies’ post-World War II plans for world governance when, in the summer of 1942 with the war yet unwon, he said:

I hope these speculative studies

year_2012.jpg

As we count out the final hours of 2012, let’s recall the highs and lows of the past year in America’s dysfunctional immigration ecosphere.

Nation of Immigrators is pleased to confer its third annual IMMI Awards. (Full disclosure: As in past years, these are my personal choices. If you disagree or believe I’ve missed an

Puck cover of the Senate.jpg“ And there took place . . . [in the U.S. Senate] so many “extended discussions” of measures to keep them from coming to a vote that the device got a name, “filibuster,” from the Dutch word vrijbuiter, which means “freebooter” or “pirate,” and which passed into the Spanish as filibustero, because the sleek