Immigration management is a broad field, involving many moving parts. Here are a few thoughts on some recent developments.
SEVP Finally Gets a Field Staff. The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), a segment of ICE in DHS, oversees more than a million foreign students spread over thousands of educational institutions in the United States. You would think that to handle this assignment effectively SEVP would have had an extensive network of field offices in place for generations.
You would have been wrong.
According to a short article in the April 28 issue of Interpreter Releases, the trade paper of the immigration bar, "SEVP Deploys First Group of Field Representatives". There will be 60 of them, in three regional offices.
SEVP is perhaps the sleepiest of the immigration management agencies, and, as we have noted previously, does not begin to use the fees available to it to do anything like trying to enforce the immigration law and has publicly thumbed its nose at the congressional mandate that English-language schools must be accredited by an accreditation agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
What the 60 new field people should do, immediately, is to make unannounced visits to the smaller, for-profit institutions and the language schools, but they probably will not do anything that productive. They are more likely to talk with university foreign-student advisers about needed paperwork.
I hope I am wrong.
Many Regulators. Some sensible nations, such as Australia and Canada, have all immigration controls centralized in a single cabinet ministry, but in the United States these controls are scattered among many government departments, such as Homeland Security, State, Justice, Labor, and Health and Human Services (HHS oversees refugee resettlement). I learned recently that this long listing is not a complete one, as under certain conditions the Department of Commerce regulates summer employment for some foreign students from Iran and, most recently, those from Russia, given our Ukraine-based sanctions against that country.
According to a law firm that pays attention to export controls:
Additionally, U.S. companies that hire Russian nationals must obtain export licenses (known as deemed export licenses) [from the Department of Commerce] if the Russian national will have access to certain technology, technical data, or software that is controlled [by the department's regulations].
As I reported earlier the need for such licenses complicates life for some Iranian grad students, many of whom are in high-tech fields, so that they either return home in the summer or take on-campus assignments, thus running up the university's financial costs. The same complication now impinges on some of the Russian grad students, many of whom are in engineering or other STEM fields.
And, now, to close on a positive note:
New Boss for EB-5. My reaction to the DHS announcement a few months ago that it had created a new Senior Executive Service (SES) position for the new head of the EB-5 (immigrant investor) program within USCIS, was a dubious one. Not only had the program been moved from the agency's Western Regional Center in California to Washington, but someone new was to be put in charge, someone I suspected would be more favorably inclined to applicants than the previous incumbent.
USCIS and its then-Director Alejandro Mayorkas had gone to great lengths to get the staff to approve more of the applications, as I reported in an earlier blog. That staff had a record of saying no to a far higher percentage of EB-5 applications of various kinds than the usual DHS rejection rate of 5 to 10 percent.
My notion was that many of the California EB-5 staff would not move with the program to DC, giving the leadership a chance to recruit a new and friendlier set of decision-makers, and that the new boss of the program would be a political appointee, perhaps foreign-born and probably a hot-shot entrepreneur of some kind — not that such background would be helpful to the substance of the program (which is strictly for rich passive investors) but it would sound good.
Happily, on the second point, I was wrong. The new SES in charge is Nicholas Colucci, a career civil servant for the Treasury Department who has worked at the interface of law enforcement and IT programs.
I have not met him, and have no idea what he will do with the program, but at least the administration cannot boast of hiring an entrepreneur.