Dedicated to providing individualized legal advice and services to our clients in the areas of immigration and naturalization law matters.

...according to Sayra Lozano, a DACA recipient and MBA student at Southeastern University. Her article was published in the Miami Herald last Friday. Perhaps I was impressed by what she wrote because the point of her article is one that I have made many times. Allowing the dreamers to obtain permanent residence is good for our economy. In March, I wrote a blog entitled DACA, the “Dream Act” and its latest Read More

Immigration is in the news daily. TPS is a frequent topic of discussion in the news so I am writing this newsletter to explain TPS. I apologize in advance for this article being so long, but the topic is important and complex. TPS is the abbreviation for Temporary Protected Status. As the word temporary implies it is a temporary immigration status granted to citizens of countries that have been designated by the Read More

Many of our lives have been disrupted by Hurricane Irma and our hearts go out to those in Puerto Rico suffering from Hurricane Maria. Many are busy filing insurance claims and trying to obtain FEMA assistance for uninsured or underinsured losses. Some of you may have questions as to whether non-citizens qualify for disaster relief. As might be expected, the answers are not always simple and depend on the type of Read More

Attorney Linda Kaplan has appeared on Al Hikmat, a Muslim media outlet that has been serving the Muslim and non-Muslim community for over three decades with dialogues, lectures, and other materials. Watch below as Linda discusses the firm and how she helps both American and foreign clients. Read More

Current law allows a U.S. citizen to file a visa petition to obtain residence for parents, spouses, minor children, adult children (married and unmarried) and siblings. Current law also allows a legal permanent resident to file for spouses, minor children and unmarried adult children. Except for “immediate relatives” defined as parents, spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens, all categories of relative petitions Read More

At the time of writing this update, it appears that refugee admittance to the U.S. will end on or around July 12th.  There are two different legal issues at play. The number of refugees to be admitted each year (which starts on Oct 1st for these purposes) is set annually by the President.  In approximately May of 2016, President Obama set the number at 110,000 for the fiscal year starting on Oct 1, 2016. President Read More

There has been much in the news recently about “extreme vetting.” Last month when I wrote a blog about the Immigrant Investor program which allows one to obtain U.S. permanent residence status though an investment, one of my readers (and good friend) asked about whether the investors were subjected to security checks. This question gave me the idea to write about security checks for foreign nationals wishing to enter Read More

The EB-5 Immigrant Investor program is a provision of the U.S. immigration law that allows foreign nationals, their spouses, and unmarried minor children to obtain U.S. permanent residence status, which will later allow them to apply for citizenship. To obtain this status, one must invest in a commercial enterprise in the U.S. that creates or preserves 10 permanent full-time jobs for U.S. workers. This provision Read More

As an immigration attorney with a background in economics, finance, and tax law, I tend to look at the immigration issues in economic terms. While many people are under the impression that immigration is a drag on the U.S. economy and that immigrants take jobs from Americans, this is simply not true. Immigrants don’t take jobs from Americans, they create jobs for Americans. It is not a coincidence that the largest Read More

There are many disparate opinions about what the U.S. should do about undocumented immigrants, but the group that elicits the most compassion seems to be those who were brought to the U.S. as children. Most Americans sympathize with the plight of children who have lived much of their life in the U.S., and in many cases, do not even remember living anywhere else or even speak anything other than English. Some of them Read More