IMMIGRATION ISSUES: EMPLOYMENT AND FAMILY [LAW ] SYLLABUS FOR THE FALL 2014 SEMESTER (TOPIC SCHEDULE AND READING ASSIGNMENTS)

Transcription

1 IMMIGRATION ISSUES: EMPLOYMENT AND FAMILY [LAW ] SYLLABUS FOR THE FALL 2014 SEMESTER ( SCHEDULE AND READING ASSIGNMENTS) ADJUNCT PROFESSOR: Nancy M. Lawrence CONTACT INFORMATION: nancy.lawrence@ofplaw.com Of Counsel, Odin, Feldman & Pittleman, PC 1775 Wiehle Avenue, Suite 400 Reston, Virginia (703) As an adjunct professor, I am only on campus on Thursday afternoons (usually after 2:30 pm). If you need to speak with me, you can always call my office in VA ( ); the best times to reach me are between 10:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. You can also me at the above address. GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE : For many people, the term "immigration law" brings to mind the areas of asylum and deportation (now known as "removal"); however, immigration law encompasses many additional areas. In certain circumstances, an employer can sponsor a foreign national for a nonimmigrant visa and/or a green card - this is generally referred to as employment-based immigration. Some foreign nationals can qualify for "green cards" (aka immigrant visas, aka permanent resident status) through sponsorship by certain close members of their families. Within the field of immigration law, we refer to this as "family-based immigration". This course, Immigration Issues: Employment and Family, focuses, as you might guess, on these specific facets of immigration law. We will explore, in a very detailed, practiceoriented way, the issues and procedures involved in handling these kinds of immigration cases. My goal is to have a very informal class setting that can be open to lots of discussion. CLASS SCHEDULE: The class meets on Thursdays from 3:00 pm to 4:50 pm. The first day of class is Thursday, August 28, 2014; the last day of class is Tuesday, December 2, 2014 (WCL's official make-up day for the class we will miss on Thanksgiving Day). The final exam will be a take-home exam (see below for more information about the final exam). REQUIRED COURSE MATERIALS: I have been unable to find a casebook that gives adequate coverage to the employment and family aspects of immigration law. I have therefore put together a course pack (1,000+ pages) that contains relevant cases, immigration forms, hard-to-find information, my own checklists and sample correspondence, some hypotheticals, and some examples taken from client files. The course pack, entitled A Key to the Golden Door - A

2 Guide to Family- and Employment-Based Immigration Law (Seventeenth Edition) is required for the course, and should be available before our first class. As you know, the WCL Copy Center converts all course packets into electronic documents. You will have access to an electronic.pdf version of the Guide; it will be posted on the MyWCL Course Site. You may want to consider printing out a hard copy of the Guide (mostly for final exam review/taking purposes); in the alternative, you can purchase a two-sided hard copy of the Guide from the Copy Center. Purchasing the hard copy typically requires ordering the set from the Copy Center ahead of time (it is safest to do this at least 24 hours before you intend to pick it up). The Copy Center will provide this in a 3-hole punched version (divided into 3 volumes). You must have access to the appropriate section of the Guide for each class either in hard copy or electronically - since we refer to the Guide's contents often during the course of each session!! You will see that at the end of certain chapters, there will be sections entitled "Items Selected from My Case Files" many of these sections relate to clients' disastrous attempts to file application packages pro se. You are not required to read through these "Items Selected..." sections prior to class in fact, I prefer that you refrain from reading them, because they will probably be fairly confusing to you if you do. We will be going over these sections together in class. From time to time, you may need to access 8 Code of Federal Regulations - Aliens and Nationality. The practice of immigration law involves fairly frequent references to these regulations; however, it is neither necessary nor recommended to purchase 8 C.F.R. If, for some reason, you ever need to access 8 C.F.R., you can use the Law Library s edition, or you can access a particular 8 C.F.R. section on-line through the USCIS website ( using the Laws link. EVALUATION / GRADING METHOD: (1) Final Exam: This is a take-home (short-answer), open book exam course. I will arrange for the final exam to be posted on MyWCL on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 (the first day of the exam period), and you will be required to post your answers (anonymously) on MyWCL by 11:59 pm on Saturday, December 20 (the last day of the exam period). Note that even though I am giving you the full 12-day exam period to prepare your exam answers, it should only take 2 or 3 hours to complete the exam. I will be instituting a limit on the length of your answers (for example, one answer might be limited to 3 sentences, while another might be limited to 2 paragraphs). (2) Class Participation and Attendance: I have chosen 20+ cases (designated below in the Syllabus) to discuss during the course of the semester. Some of these are precedent decisions, and some are not. In general, the cases have been selected because they are instructive on relevant issues and/or are illustrative of how the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (formerly Immigration and Naturalization Service) applies the regulations. Some have been chosen because they demonstrate how the attorney could have done a better job!

3 I will be asking each week for volunteers to adopt specific cases. The following week, the student will give a very brief summary (limited to 10 minutes) of his/her assigned case. Depending upon our final class enrollment figure, there should be at least one case available per student. This class participation will result in a single grade-step increase in the final exam grade (e.g., a B will become a B+, an A- will become an A, etc.). Obviously, I expect each of you to read ALL of these cases - even the ones you are not presenting - since I will be asking questions of the other members of the class during a student s presentation! CLASSROOM POLICIES: (1) Attendance: I will be taking attendance at each class. For classes meeting once a week, as ours does, WCL policy limits the number of excused absences to 3. The Adjunct Faculty Manual states: Any student who has been absent for more than the allowed number of class meetings may not be allowed to receive credit for the class. (2) Independent study projects: In the past, students have asked me to oversee independent study projects, or to allow them to write a paper for me in order to expand this from a 2-credit course to a 3-credit course. Because I maintain a full law practice in addition to my adjunct teaching responsibilities, it is not possible for me to handle these additional responsibilities. I strongly recommend that you contact full-time faculty members for these types of arrangements. WEEK-BY-WEEK COURSE COVERAGE: The following week-by-week breakdown is designed to be a suggestion of the order in which I hope to address topics in class. I have devoted a separate page to each class note that I expect/hope to cover everything contained on a particular page during that specific class. Over the years, however, I have found that it is really impossible to plan how much material we might cover in a given class, so there will be weeks when we will cover more than the Syllabus would lead one to believe, and others when we will not cover as much as the Syllabus indicates. For the most part, the Syllabus should be an accurate reflection of the order in which our semester will proceed (if not necessarily the quantity of coverage each week). There is, of course, an exception a major one to this statement. Over the course of the semester, I will be inviting guest lecturers to present areas of immigration law in which they specialize; each will present a 50-minute session. The scheduling of each of these special topics will depend entirely upon the guest lecturer s availability. At this time, to reserve time slots for the topics, I have simply listed a couple of these topics as occurring during the last class of the semester; in fact my intention is to bring in these speakers at an earlier point in the semester. Also, you will note that Chapter 20 of the Guide covers the topic of "Citizenship and Naturalization", and you will see that this topic is included in the Syllabus. I would love to cover this topic in our last class; however, it has actually been my experience that we are rarely able to devote more than a few minutes in the final class of the semester to the topic of Citizenship and Naturalization. Note that if we do not cover this topic in class, it will not appear on the final exam.

4 CLASS #1 08/28/2014 NOTE: in this first class, we will cover ALL topics listed on this page Chapter 1 - Introductory information and concepts, and the following types of nonimmigrant visas: B-2 C D I S T U Visa Waiver Program Chapter 1 of the Guide. * 8 CFR '214.2(b) 8 CFR '214.2(c) 8 CFR '214.2(d) 8 CFR '214.2(i) 8 CFR '214.2(t) INA '101(a)(15)(T)(i) INA '101(a)(15)(U)(i) 8 CFR '217 Chapter 2 - Family-Based Preference Petitions: proving familial relationships, priority dates. We will launch coverage of this Chapter in this first class we will not complete it in this class. Chapter 2 of the Guide. 8 CFR '214.2(k) 8 CFR ' CFR '204.2 * The Guide chapters, and each of the following pages of this Syllabus, provide the 8 C.F.R. regulations pertaining to each topic; however, these citations are provided simply to let you know where you can find the relevant regulations (for example, if you should ever encounter a case involving these and should need to refer to them). You are not required to read these CFR regulations.

5 CLASS #2 09/02/2014 We will cover all topics listed below Completion of Chapter 2 - Family-Based Preference Petitions: proving familial relationships, priority dates, conditional residence Student presentations of the following cases in Chapter 2: Matters of McKee and Lenning (1 student to present both of these cases they are very short) Matter of Pineda Matter of Marquez Chapter 3 K and V Visas Go over hypotheticals at end of chapter Chapter 3 of the Guide. 8 CFR '

6 CLASS #3 09/11/2014 Chapter 4 - Adjustment of Status: priority dates, effect of 3 year/10 year bar, Affidavit of Support issues, grounds of exclusion Chapter 4 of the Guide. Student presentation of the following case in Chapter 17: In re Garcia de Nunez 8 CFR '245

7 CLASS #4 09/18/2014 We will cover all topics listed below Chapter 5 - Consular Processing: more on priority dates, effect of 3 year/10 year bar, Affidavit of Support issues Go over hypotheticals at end of Chapter 5 Chapter 5 The topic of Consular Processing is covered in Volume 22 of CFR GUEST LECTURER Chapter 6 - A, G, and N Visas Chapter 6 of the Guide 8 CFR '214.2(a) 8 CFR '214.2(g) 8 CFR '214.2(n) Chapter 7 - Students (Fs and Ms), including: I-20s, Designated School Officials, financial issues, employment authorization Chapter 7 of the Guide. 8 CFR '214.2(f) 8 CFR '214.2(m) THURSDAY, 09/25/2014 NO CLASS

8 CLASS #5 10/02/2014 We will cover all topics listed below Continuation of Chapter 7 - Students (Fs and Ms) Chapter 7 of the Guide. Student presentations of the following cases in Chapter 7: Matter of Mashi 8 CFR '214.2(f) 8 CFR '214.2(m) Chapter 18 - Diversity Lotteries Chapter 18 of the Guide Chapter 8 - H-1B Visas, including: labor condition applications, prevailing wage issues, O*NET codes, credentials evaluations, numerical limitations Chapter 8 of the Guide. 8 CFR '214.2(h)(1) & (2) 8 CFR '214.2(h)(8) & (9) 8 CFR '214.2(h)(13) through 8 CFR '214.2(h)(18)

9 CLASS #6 10/09/2014 We will cover both topics listed below Continuation of Chapter 8 - H-1B nonimmigrant visas Go over hypotheticals at end of Chapter 8 Chapter 8 of the Guide. Student presentation of the following case in this Chapter: In re X (09/08/2006) 8 CFR '214.2(h)(1) & (2) 8 CFR '214.2(h)(8) & (9) 8 CFR '214.2(h)(13) through 8 CFR '214.2(h)(18)

10 CLASS #7 10/16/2014 We will cover all topics listed below Alternatives to H-1B visas: Chapter 9 - B-1 Visas Chapter 10 TN Visas Chapters 9 and 10 of the Guide. RELEVANT REGULATION - 8 CFR '214.6 Go over hypotheticals at end of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 - L Visas, including: corporate relationships, managerial & executive, specialized knowledge, new offices, blanket petitions Chapter 11 of the Guide. Student presentations of the following case in this Chapter: Matter of Hughes In re X (Veramonte) 8 CFR '214.2(l)

11 CLASS #8 10/23/2014 We will cover both topics listed below Chapter 12 - E Visas (including nationality of company, substantiality of investment, non-marginality). Also, E-3 Australian specialty occupation visas. Go over hypotheticals at end of Chapter 12 Chapter 12 of the Guide. Student presentations of the following cases in Chapter 12: Matter of Walsh & Pollard Matter of Kung 8 CFR '214.2(e) GUEST LECTURER Chapter 13 J Visas: types of J visas, 2-year home residence requirements, waivers Chapter 13 of the Guide 8 CFR '214.2(j)

12 CLASS #9 10/30/2014 We will cover all topics listed below Chapter 14 O P Q R Chapter 14 of the Guide. Matter of Skirball Cultural Center 8 CFR '214.2(o) 8 CFR '214.2(p) 8 CFR '214.2(q)(1)(i) 8 CFR '214.2(q)(1)(ii) 8 CFR '214.2(r) Chapter 15 - Labor Certifications, including: PERM process, prevailing wage issues (use of Online Wage Library and private wage surveys), actual minimum requirements, unduly restrictive requirements, use of O*NET Chapter 15 of the Guide. Student presentations of the following cases in Chapter 15: Matter of Information Industries Matter of Delitizer Matters of Kellogg Matter of Hathaway This topic is covered in 20 CFR '656; however, there is no need to read this very lengthy regulation for this class

13 CLASS #10 11/06/2014 We will cover all topics listed below Finish topic of labor certifications Go over hypotheticals at end of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 - Employment-Based Preference Petitions: priority dates, labor certification-based petitions, ability to pay wage, non-labor certification-based petitions, national interest waivers, entrepreneurs Go over hypotheticals at end of Chapter 16 Chapter 16 of the Guide. Student presentations of the following cases in this Chapter: SnapNames v. Chertoff In re X (04/01/2005) Matter of Al Wazzan 8 CFR '204.5

14 CLASS #11 11/13/2014 We will cover all topics listed below Chapter 17 - Various special immigrants Chapter 17 of the Guide 8 CFR '101.5

15 CLASS #12 11/20/2014 Chapter 19 - Applications filed by lawful permanent residents: applications to replace green cards, petitions to remove conditions, reentry permits Chapter 19 of the Guide. Student presentation of the following case in this Chapter: Moin v. Ashcroft Chapter 20 - Citizenship and Naturalization Chapter 20 of the Guide. 8 CFR '301 8 CFR '312 8 CFR '316 8 CFR '319 8 CFR '322 THURSDAY, 11/27/2014 NO CLASS THANKSGIVING DAY

16 CLASS #13 Tuesday, 12/02/2014 GUEST LECTURER - I-9s *** I-9 materials in the Reference Materials section of the Guide 8 CFR '274a GUEST LECTURER -Immigration Fraud *** Handouts to be provided prior to the class INA 212(a)(6)(C) INA 212(a)(6)(E) INA 212(i) *** Actual date of presentation yet to be determined; the actual date, once known, will be communicated to the class at least one week prior to the guest lecturer s appearance.