immigration updates: July 29, 2025

More fee hikes, the lottery may be on its last legs, and it might finally be possible to feel sorry for Harvard.

still hating on Harvard

The Department of State administers the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP) to foster academic and cultural exchange by means of the J-1 visa. It covers a wide range of occupations and activities: including, but not limited to, students, au pairs, interns, researchers, summer work, professors, camp counselors, and medical trainees. The aim is to enable foreign nationals to gain experience in the U.S., often in positions where they are temporarily needed, that they would bring back to their home countries.*

The DOS is now investigating Harvard’s EVP––purportedly for appropriate oversight, transparency in reporting, and alignment with the program’s purpose––despite not yet having identified any misconduct. We’ve detailed the Trump administration’s numerous attempts to prevent Harvard from enrolling foreign students, as well as Harvard’s litigation in response, which seems to be going well enough that one might speculatethat this investigation essentially mounts to spaghetti-throwing.

humanitarianism gets more expensive

New fees kick in for a number of applications. Asylum applications will have a filing fee for the first time ($100), and will also be subject to an additional annual fee ($100) for as long as they are pending. Asylum-based applications for employment authorization will be increased for initial filing ($550) and for renewal ($275). New fees are also applied to applications for parole ($1,000), TPS ($500), and Special Immigrant Juvenile ($250). A number of other feeswill be applied to those applying for entry into the U.S., as well as for certain court-related filings. Related validity periods for employment authorization are also now limited. Applications postmarked on or after August 21, 2025 that do not include the new fee will be rejected.

lower haphazardness for higher wages

The H-1B visa allows an employer to hire a foreign worker in a “specialty occupation” that typically requires a the equivalent to a U.S. bachelor’s or master’s degree (though there is a limited exception for those with certain work experience). There are 65,000 of these visas available each year for those in the bachelor’s category, and another 20,000 for those with a U.S. master’s or higher.** As with nearly every type of visa that is numerically limited, a much larger number of people apply for the visas than there are visas available.

Normally, this creates a backlog that effectively operates as a queue in which applicant’s wait for a visa to become available—whether for months or many years. However, the H-1B replaces the line with an annual lottery. Recently, around 33% of lottery applicants were picked: meaning that there were basically 3x as many applicants as visas available. Because the visas are released at the start of the fiscal year (October), because most employers want the workers to begin their employment as quickly as possible, and because the H-1B petitions cannot be filed more than six months before the intended start date, the cap-subject petitions are generally all filed around April 1st.

Initially, employers were required to file the entire petition during the first five business days of April, after which USCIS ran a random selection (once the number of petitions exceeded the number of visas). Five years ago USCIS began using an electronic pre-registration system in which employers submitted only basic information about the prospective employee, which would be used to register them for a spot in the lottery. Thus, employers did not have to spend the substantial amounts of time and money to submit a petition that was unlikely to be selected.

However, this permitted abuse from businesses (largely high-volume IT staffing firms) that would file multiple registrations for the same employee in order to game the system in their favor, which many did with impunity. Last year, USCIS largely mitigated this by switching to a beneficiary-based system in which each person could be registered by several potential employers, but only once per employer, and that person could only be selected once. Employers were required to attest to a bona fide job offer, and job offers that were not legitimate were to be denied or investigated for fraud.

A soon-to-be-(re)published rule (first published by the first Trump administration in 2021) will essentially end the lottery by instituting a priority system based on tiers based on “prevailing wage” levels set by the Department of Labor, with the registrants offered a wage at the higher levels would receive priority, and an intra-tier lottery would only be used if demand exceeds supply at that level. While this would further mitigate against another concern (in which outsourcing firms pay lower wages and effectively replace U.S. workers in certain positions), smaller employers, universities, and recent graduates (typically offered lower wages) but be highly disadvantaged. These concerns sank the prior attempt to institute the rule; whether they are sufficient this time around under an administration more practiced in regulatory matters remains to be seen.

the headlines

During the Obama and Biden administrations, Republican states regularly sought to undermine the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by arguing that the federal government does not have the sole power to regulate immigration––the exact opposite of what the Trump administration is currently arguing by suing New York City. Arizona has and Florida have yet to protest.

Certain visas from a whole bunch of countries will now be limited to three months, but birthright citizenship doesn’t appear to be going anywhere for the time being.

ICE wants to crack down on employers––including theDACA recipients they employ, and particularlyin Democratic states––meaning that care for your parents is probably going to getharder to find and more expensive. Alligator Alcatraz is generating a number of frightening reports, in addition to creating a lot of homeless pets. And more judges are getting fired.

_________

*As we’ve mentioned prior posts, ICE, via their Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), monitors student compliance through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).

** There are exceptions for certain organizations related to research institutions—sometimes referred to as ‘cap-exempt’ organizations.

Matthew Blaisdell, Esq.

Sunset Immigration PLLC

219 36th Street, Ste 511

Brooklyn, NY 11232

Book appointment