Simone Williams, Managing Attorney with Williams Global Law, spoke at the Invest Caribbean Conference 2017 in Saint John’s, Antigua and Barbuda. The conference is an annual event focusing on investment opportunities and advantages, particularly in real estate and other sectors, including agriculture, healthcare and renewable energy in the Caribbean. The theme of this year’s event was “Transparency and Sustainability: CIPs in the New World.” Ms. Williams discussed the new U.S.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) announced that it has completed data entry of all H-1B cap-subject petitions selected in the computer-generated lottery for the fiscal year 2018. USCIS began returning all H-1B cap-subject petitions that were not selected. As a reminder, H-1B is a highly competitive visa which is not granted to every qualified applicant. It is a computer-generated random selection process with the established cap of 85,000 per fiscal year. I

Secretary of Homeland Security, John F. Kelly, has extended Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) for eligible nationals of Haiti through January 22, 2018. Although Haiti has made significant progress in recovering from the January 2010 earthquake that prompted its designation, conditions in Haiti supporting its designation continue to be met at this time. Current beneficiaries of Haiti’s TPS designation seeking to extend their TPS must re-regiter by July 24, 2017. TPS beneficia

The Trump Administration is seeking renegotiation of North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”), the three-member agreement with Mexico and Canada. With a letter to U.S. lawmakers, Robert Lighthizer, the newly confirmed United States trade representative, stated that the administration aims to support economic growth and better-paying jobs through improvements to NAFTA that would modernize the agreement. Renegotiation of NAFTA was a key campaign promise of U.S. President D

The Department of State’s Visa Bulletin for the month of June 2017 notes, among other things: The continued high level of demand for the China and India employment-based first preference (EB-1) categories has required the establishment of a cut-off date for June. The EB-1 date for these two countries will once again become current for October, the first month of fiscal year 2018. There has been an extremely large increase in China employment-based third preference (EB-3) appl