US Immigration News

A new study released by the Brookings Institute finds that highly skilled migrants in the United States have started to outnumber lower skilled immigrants.

According to the report, The Geography of Immigrant Skills: Educational Profiles of Metropolitan Areas, one in seven US residents are immigrants, and constitute about one in six workers.

Michigan state governor Rick Snyder has a new initiative to attract foreign investors and entrepreneurs to help boost the US state's ailing economy.

The Global Michigan initiative is a scaled-up version of an earlier initiative that the governor implemented on a more local level in the city of Ann Arbor.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has recently proposed significant improvements to the USCIS Immigrant Investor Program, the EB-5 Program. This should lead to faster processing of immigrant investor applications.

There are 10,000 immigrant visas available each year under the immigrant investor scheme. You can come under the EB-5 immigrant investor scheme if you create at least ten jobs in the US and invest US$1 Million or invest US$500,000 in Targeted Employment Areas and/or Rural Areas.

The US Department of State has voided the results of the 2012 Diversity Visa (Green Card) Lottery it posted to its website due to a programming error which resulted in incorrectly selected winners in the Lottery scheme.

"The results were not valid because they did not represent a fair, random selection of entrants, as required by U.S. law," the State Department said in a statement.

On 1 April 2011, the United States began accepting Fiscal Year 2012 (FY 2012) H-1B petitions from US employers wishing to hire overseas workers in specialty occupations. The overseas workers are mainly in professional level jobs that require you to at least have a bachelors degree. The earliest start is 1 October 2011. While capped at 65,000 petitions per year, currently only 5,900 have been lodged.

From 1 April 2011 you can again apply for an H-1B visa. However, the earliest employment start date is 1 October 2011.

Recently Business leaders asked a congressional subcommittee to reduce the amount of red tape required to obtain an H-1B visa. However an academic claimed that the H-1B visa program makes it easier for employers to hire cheaper foreign labor.