Business Immigration Insights

On January 31, 2024, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) published a final rule to adjust certain immigration and naturalization benefit request fees, effective April 1, 2024. Employers will see significant increases on the fees they pay to submit petitions for workers and to sponsor employees for permanent residence. The agency stated that the fee increases will “…allow USCIS to recover a greater share of its operating costs and support more timely processing of new applications.” This is the first major adjustment in USCIS filing fees since 2016. Notably, the Service is implementing different fees for each type of visa classification sought on Form I‑129 nonimmigrant worker petition, replacing the uniform $460 Form I‑129 filing fee across all classifications. 

USCIS announced that effective May 4, 2022, certain categories of Employment Authorization Document (“EAD”) applicants will be eligible for an additional extension of automatic work authorization, beyond that to which they are already entitled.

A new rule, “Implementation of the Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act,” published in the Federal Register on March 30, 2022, will open the popular USCIS “premium processing” service to new categories of immigration filings that are currently subject to extraordinarily long backlogs.  USCIS will roll out the expansions in stages.

Following the settlement of a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) lawsuit that finally recognizes that dependent L and E spouses are able to work lawfully incident to their status, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its admission system to designate on the I-94 admission records those spouses who are authorized to work without applying for an EAD.  L and E spouses should be admitted with an “S” after their status to indicate that they are spouses authorized to work.  The new I-94s do not explicitly state “work authorized”, but the “S” designation tells employers for I-9 purposes that they are authorized to work for the validity of their I-94s.