US Immigration News

The US State Department announced that all U.S. passports issued after October 2006 will have embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that carry the holder's personal data and digital photo.

The department will begin the program in December 2005 with a pilot, issuing these passports to U.S. Government employees who use Official or Diplomatic passports for government travel.

A recent report suggests that US employers are using the H-1B visa program to pay lower wages than the national average for programming jobs.

According to "The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers — F.Y. 2004," a report by Programmers Guild board member John Miano, non-U.S. citizens working in the United States on an H-1B visa are paid "significantly less than their American counterparts."

How do you prove you're a U.S. citizen if you can't even prove where you were born?

How do you get a Social Security number to get a job or a passport so you can travel? The Seattle Times looks at the story of a young Russian man fighting for his citizenship.

The US government would issue 30,000 more H-1B visas to high-tech and other skilled foreign workers each year and increase fees for those visas under a measure proposed by a Senate committee.

The move by the Senate Judiciary Committee comes as high-tech firms and other businesses complain that, for the third year in a row, they have already met the annual cap on the popular H1-B visas just 20 days into the government's 2005-06 fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

The US Department of Homeland Security frequently fails to follow up on leads that foreign visitors have overstayed their visas, the agency's inspector general says in a new report.

The result is an enforcement system that poses little threat for tourists, students and others who quietly turn into illegal immigrants, the report says.

Of the 301,046 leads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency received in 2004 on possible visa violators, the report says, only 4,164 were formally pursued, resulting in just 671 apprehensions.

US President George W. Bush sought support for his guest worker plan for foreigners, hoping to persuade conservatives by promising to fight illegal immigration. Bush and his advisers are caught between their business supporters, who believe the economy needs foreign workers, and conservatives whose priority is to get tough on illegal immigration.