Earlier this year, our office sent an advisory to clients, friends and community members on our email list to inform them of a scheduled increase in immigration filing fees. We encouraged anyone thinking of filing for naturalization (citizenship) in particular to file if they were eligible. We submitted many petitions and applications for our clients just before the July 30, 2007, deadline. Because of the increase in applications, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released an advisory stating that the tremendous increase in applications has created a backlog in their ...

Why Become a U.S. Citizen? Some permanent residents have held their green cards for decades and for various reasons have not applied for citizenship through the process known as naturalization. One client had been wavering back and forth for about 30 years as to whether or not he should apply. When he came to meet me for his immigration consultation he brought in the various versions of the forms that changed over the decades and showed me a history of the fee increases over time. He had finally felt it was time to become a citizen after seeing how the forms had only gotten longer and ...

The deadline to have the opportunity to apply for permanent residence under the 2009 U.S. visa lottery program is less than two weeks away on Sunday, December 2, 2007; 12 noon Eastern Standard Time (11 a.m. Central Standard Time). The visa lottery is formally known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. The U.S. government makes available up to a maximum of 55,000 diversity green cards annually. 5,000 of these visas are reserved for a visa program for certain Central American nationals, leaving 50,000 visas available to be drawn at random from a pool of applicants who meet specific ...