He is the Chair of the Pro Bono Committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, trustee of the American Immigration Law Foundation and recipient of the 1997 Joseph Minsky Young Lawyers Award. At this time, everyone is speculating about quotas and resulting backlogs. Most immigrant visa categories have quotas. The H-1B visa category also has a quota.
Demand far exceeds the quotas and people have to wait endlessly before obtaining the visa.
In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to increase the H-1B quota to 115,000 visas for Fiscal Years 1999 and 2000. Last year, the H-1B quota was reached on April 9, about six months before the end of the year. The INS fiscal year commences October 1 and ends September 30 the following year. For fiscal year 2000, the rumor mill concluded that the quota would be reached much earlier, perhaps by the end of December 1999. I had earlier predicted that this would not happen.