Kennedy's Immigration Law Report : Iowa Immigration Lawyer & Attorney : Austin Kennedy : Brick Gentry Law Firm : Green Cards, Permanent Residency

We here at Brick Gentry, PC, have an on-going in-house Continuing Legal Education (CLE) program, whereby all the attorneys take turns presenting on a different legal topic each month.  In addition to conveniently earning yourself a handy CLE credit, the in-house program is great because it helps you become aware of your colleagues' areas of speciality and brings to light interesting cross marketing possibilities that might otherwise fall to the wayside during a hectic work week. 

In December I presented a CLE entitled "The Employment-Based Path to Lawful Permanent Residency in the United States Through the Labor Certification Process".  Despite the clunky (albeit descriptive!) title, the CLE was very well received and a number of partners suggested that I post it as our firm's first free webinar.  We hooked up with Andrew B. Clark, who writes a cool marketing blog here, and Andrew really added a tremendous production value to the presentation I had written, the end result of which you see and can view and listen to below this very post! 

By way of a brief introduction, I should note that there are a number of commonly acknowledged ways someone can immigrate to the United States:  1) through a family member; 2) as an asylee or refugee; 3) through the visa lottery system; 4) through the EB-5 investment program (more coming on this soon); and finally 5) through an employment relationship.  It is this last category, the employment relationship, that serves as the focus of the webinar below.  More specifically, this webinar speaks to a situation where a U.S. employer has a valuable foreign national employee and the employer wants to be able to retain the foreign national employee in the U.S. on a "permanent" basis.  The most common way of helping this employee remain in the U.S. beyond their temporary status is through the labor certification process.  For a whole slew of additional details, see below!  And please keep an eye in the future here for additional webinars from Brick Gentry, PC. 

Brick Gentry P.C. – Labor Certification Presentation – Webinar January, 2011 from Brick Gentry P.C. on Vimeo.

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For those of you here in central Iowa who are involved with an immigration process, or soon to be, please note that the local USCIS Field Office in Des Moines has moved, ever so slightly.  The local USCIS field office is still located in the Neal Smith Federal building at 210 Walnut Street, in downtown Des Moines.  However, with the recent move now accomplished, all Application Support Center (ASC) appointments will take place in Room 101, which is located directly off the building's lobby on the first floor.  All INFOPASS and interview appointments must report to Room 215, which is located right next to the Skywalk entry.   

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Amid the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in December issued an important and interesting ruling which held that an undocumented worker injured while working is eligible under D.C.'s statute to receive workers' compensation payments.

Like so many people in our current workforce, Palemon Gonzales originally obtained employment with Asylum Company, an entity who owned and operated the D.C. bar  where Gonzales worked, by using a fake identity and another person's social security number.  

Gonzales was working at the bar as a busboy on June 30, 2005, when a customer threw a bottle that hit Gonzales in the right eye, blinding him.  Gonzales had to have his dislocated lens reattached through surgery and he wasn't able to return to work until January 25, 2006.  The record is somewhat unclear as to when the employer came to know Gonzales was an undocumented immigrant, but in any case, the employer decided to not pay Gonzales' workers' compensation claim based largely on the argument that an illegal immigrant is ineligible for worker's compensation benefits.  

In ruling that the employer was in fact obligated to make workers' compensation payments to the illegal immigrant, the D.C. court focused largely on the fact that D.C.'s workers' compensation statute defines "employee" broadly, and in so doing makes no mention of "illegal aliens" or immigration status in general.  Importantly, the court also noted the strong public policy argument which supports undocumented workers' eligibility for benefits under the workers' compensation statute.  The court reasoned that if employers were not required to make workers' compensation payments to injured undocumented workers, then employers would have a strong economic incentive to hire undocumented workers.  Such a result would contravene the stated purpose of one of our primary immigration laws, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which explicitly sought to deter employers from hiring undocumented workers.  Interestingly, the definition of an "employee" under Iowa's workers' compensation statute is very similar to the definition utilized in the D.C. statute.    

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