Free Republic

The Justice Department announced today that it reached a settlement agreement with ASTA CRS Inc., a provider of IT staffing and consulting services with offices in Ashburn, Virginia, and Greenbelt, Maryland. This is the ninth settlement under the Civil Rights Division’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which is aimed at targeting, investigating, and taking enforcement actions against companies that discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of temporary visa workers.The settlement resolves a claim that ASTA’s Maryland office discriminated against U.S. workers because of their citizenship status when it posted a job advertisement specifying a preference for non-U.S. citizens who held...

For years, the Department of Homeland Security has operated a fake university in the Detroit suburbs as part of an undercover operation that lured undocumented immigrants seeking to obtain fraudulent student visas. Now, eight people from around the country have been indicted for “conspiracy to commit visa fraud and harboring aliens for profit,” as part of an elaborate scheme to aid as many as 600 foreign nationals in remaining in the United States illegally. “We are all aware that international students can be a valuable asset to our country, but as this case shows, the well-intended international student visa program...

Foreign nationals attempting to enter the United States through various visa programs will now have to prove they have the means return to their native countries as federal law mandates. As part of President Donald Trump’s Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, the vetting procedures conducted by the State Department of foreign nationals trying to come to the U.S. have been strengthened to weed out not only radicalized individuals, but also foreigners with no documented intentions on departing. The National Law Review outlined the changes by the Trump Administration, writing that “the revisions appear to instruct officers to apply a...

America has an alphabet soup of visa programs for foreigners to choose from: B-1 for business visitors, B-2 for tourists, EB-5 for investors, F-1 for students, and so on. All are overwhelmed, loosely monitored and riddled with fraud and corruption. According to the recently unsealed federal indictment against him, sleazy Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., took it upon himself to add his own very special, crooked path to the U.S. Call it the 36DD Visa. The New York Post recounted this weekend how Menendez and his staff pressured the State Department to expedite the foreign tourist and student visa approval processes...

The US government is poised to propose rules that could restrict the ability of Chinese and other foreign nationals to engage in high-level research in the country, a plan that is generating fierce opposition from companies and universities. The move comes amid growing fears in the US that its relatively open rules allowing foreign nationals to work with sensitive technologies leave the country open to espionage.