The most consequential change in legal immigration is receiving remarkably little attention. It is not a single executive order, policy memorandum, court decision, or rulemaking. It is the gradual transformation of legal immigration from a system built around discrete petitions or applications into one built around permanent records, continuous vetting, and expanding discretion.
For decades
Although the pace of President Trump’s Executive Orders (EOs) targeting border enforcement has slowed since Inauguration Day, the repercussions of these and more recent EOs on legal immigration have grown.
This article will outline and assess recent efforts by federal immigration officials in the Department of State (DOS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and component
The upcoming political transition to Republican control of the White House and Congress will no doubt bring significant changes to U.S. immigration policy and prompt an immediate call to action for mobility leaders.
Immigration policy changes historically occur swiftly after inauguration. Incoming administrations often use the first 100 days of a new presidency to take
Big-Picture, Clean-Slate Immigration Reforms
for the Biden-Harris Administration
By Angelo A. Paparelli and Stephen Yale-Loehr
As a new administration takes office on January 20, and the tantalizing prospect of enlightened immigration reforms looms on the horizon, an intriguing question has surfaced on Twitter:
“Is there a progressive version of Stephen Miller? Someone who has (1)
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week affirmed the truth of the Upton Sinclair maxim on just how hard it is get someone “to understand something, when his [or her] salary depends on . . . not understanding it.”
In this case, federal immigration bureaucrats have had three
[Author’s Note: This article was originally published on May 8, 2020 by the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., on Bloomberg Law, and is accessible here. It is reproduced with permission from The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) www.bloombergindustry.com. Copyright 2020] 
Covid-19’s impact is ongoing and Americans are eager to return to
President Trump’s October 9, 2019 overtures landed as music to the ears of many grizzled immigration lawyers who persistently suffer battle fatigue from the culture of virtually never. On that day the President released a double album, each with artfully penned liner notes:
The State of California won and lost bigly last July 4th. But what if the state’s biggest loss could be salvaged because the primary federal immigration enforcement agency performing worksite visits – the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) – has never been lawfully authorized
The pattern by now is all too familiar. With the Trump Administration fully ensconced, the rollback of President Obama’s eight-year legacy continues. This time it involves the International Entrepreneur Regulation — an imperfect and burdensome rule that would have become effective last month had the Administration not imposed a delay. The Obama-era rule created a
Memes, apocrypha, obfuscation, head feints, hand-wringing, and supposition: These are the misleading and unreliable stuff of the Interweb. To a great extent, alas, they also infect the EB-5 ecospace. This article will avoid conjecture and look at the few hard facts we know about Trump Administration appointees and the positions they will hold, while encouraging