Immigration Insider

(Starship) Enterprise Management

Whether you are an in-house attorney at a busy corporation or in private practice, you can probably relate to this scenario:  your paralegal -- with whom you have a codepenency rivaling that of the most dysfunctional sitcom couple -- is finally off for a week-long vacation he/she planned a year ago.  Your desk is full of sticky reminders and your Outlook calender is peppered with a rainbow of conference calls, kid's soccer practice, cases due, and client follow-up calls.  You arrive Monday morning, optimistic but wary...and then all hell breaks loose.

By the time you are able to track the overnight you sent for the last minute filing (not your fault but the client's fault), you have 12 half-intelligible messages from the new receptionist, who isn't quite as detail-oriented as she presented herself to be when interviewed by your HR Director.  The school calls because your son is sick, you call your spouse, and when you get their voicemail, you remember that he/she is handling a big site visit today...and can't be interrupted.

By the time you have managed to pickup your son and take him home and arranged to have your daughter's friend's mom to drive her home after soccer practice, it is 5 p.m. and you've had to cancel two calls and two filings due tomorrow sit staring at you on your desk.

How the best laid plans so easily go awry, eh?

Now, compare your reality to Captain James Tiberius Kirk, he of the Starship Enterprise.  Your missing paralegal is his damaged deflector shield.  Your failing receptionist is his unstable dylithium crystal down in Engineering.  Your unattended and overdue casework is the humanoid planet relying on the Enterprise for protection from an imminant Klingon attack, and Scotty can't get the big girl up to light speed with the dylithium crystals acting up.

But note the difference between your enterprise and Kirk's Enterprise:  while all this is going on, Kirk stays on the bridge.  As Atticus' Mark Powers would say, he stays at his "dashboard".  His control center is built to preserve his stability and steadiness when the you-know-what hits the fan.  Kirk pesters Scotty, who's always "givin' her all she can take, Captain, she can't take much more".  He doesn't go through the sliding doors, get in the elevator, and get in Scotty's face to micromanage because he's not an engineer!  Kirk knows what his team is doing and knows what they can deliver.  He knows that the resolution of the problem is in the most competent hands and that's what makes him Captain: he's assembled a team of professionals upon which he can rely and for which the idea of micromanagement is unthinkable.

That, my friends, is what hybrid outsourcing operations can do for your in-house immigration department or private immigration  practice.  I sold my law practice four years ago; in the five preciding years, the crew of MY enterprise -- attorneys, paralegals, and other personnel -- did not need to be micromanaged.  While my life wasn't exactly a Corona commercial, I really did spend a great deal of time on the beach, laptop in hand, thousands of miles from where my team was making it happen.  Through scaling, we were able to handle international accounts firms our size would never dream of approaching; through systems engineering, training, and an unwavering commitment to client service, the firm continues to grow.

You went to law school to practice law, yet the delivery of legal expertise takes up perhaps 10% of your day; the other 90% is spent on things best handled by the Scottys and Uhuras of the world, not by you.  Simple as that.  And whether your ambition is to work less hours or to make more money, enterprise management is the key, and our profession is as adaptable to efficiency as any other.

Email me your questions and I'll show you how, using today's technologies and intelligent resource partnering, you really can transform your business immigration practice into a Corona commercial.

The Perils of Thinking Inside the Visa Box

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on companies which are "getting creative" to deal with U.S. visa bottlenecks.  I eagerly started reading to see what creative juices were flowing in the pretty uninspired world of immigration compliance.  I was disappointed to see that, in reality, it was nothing more than the "same old, same old":

1. "parking" employees in overseas jurisdiction at great expense while their skills are desperately needed by the U.S. enterprise.
2. encouraging critical technical professionals to pursue unneeded advanced degrees to "buy time" in F-1 student status till H-1B visa numbers become available.
3. Rescinding job offers (and leaving critical positions unfilled) until visas became unavailable.

As the WSJ concludes, all of these "creative" solutions face a "big flaw": they assume that next year the H-1B shortage will be resolved.

It won't be.  With a lame duck president and the final shot at meaningful immigration reform squandered over bipartisan bickering, Corporate America seems to be in a serious skilled-worker-shortage quagmire for the next couple of years.  In fact, the only player with the energy and initiative to demand a response from Washington -- Microsoft, which quickly snuffed former Sen. Alan Simpson's ill-conceived elimination of the H-1B category a few years back -- has smelled the coffee...and headed north.

Pragmatically aware of the fact that current U.S. employment visa policy is decimating the human resources so desperately needed in the technology sector, Microsoft is going from Redmond to Richmond, British Columbia, some 133 miles away in a country far more savvy about its business migration policy.  The net result: entire U.S. divisions are forced to move abroad, eliminating countless U.S. positions, just to address the high tech worker shortage.

Instead of "parking" employees -- a leading immigration law firm quoted in the article cites a client spending $30,000 per employee to do just this -- real creativity is the solution to this fine mess:

1- Establishing short and long term intracompany (L-1A and L-1B) visa strategies to train and polish qualified specialty and managerial employees offshore to provide a steady, non-quota pool of U.S. nonimmigrant workers deployed on an as-needed basis and guided by market conditions, not by governmental bureaucracy.

2- Strategic alliances, mergers, and acquisitions which establish de facto qualifying intracompany relationships facilitating blanket L visas.

3- Intelligent process restructuring which divides core technical needs from all other functions for which there are NOT U.S. worker shortages to create offshore/onshore delivery platforms maximizing workforce skills.

Creative solutions exist to the current tech worker visa crunch, but spending big corporate dollars on international furlows is hardly creative, and certainly NOT the stuff of which shareholder dreams are made.

Hello, Everyone!

Welcome to Immigration Insider.  After almost two decades of looking out for the interests of leading corporations and the tremendous compliance problems they face with governmental regulations relating to immigration and labor laws, I've decided to launch a blog written for the HR and Legal representatives who these issues most affect.

For years -- in fact, before "blog" was a word -- I published a column called "Port of Entry", which grew to have thousands of daily readers. While "Port of Entry" was directed at the general business immigration market (i.e., both employers and visa beneficiaries), this column is going to focus specifically on the issues affecting U.S. corporations which must depend upon international workers in the course of their business.

Two phenomena are shaping the current climate for business immigration: first, both parties in Congress and President Bush are clear on the public's loud and clear mandate: "enforce existing laws before adding new ones."  Second, if U.S. industries and the people who work in this country intend to continue as leaders in the global economy, fundamental changes responsive to the reality of globalism must shape continued U.S. economic growth.  I believe that the U.S. workforce is the most talented, nimble, and empowered workforce on the planet; the solution lies in redefining our role in the global economy to capitalize upon that talent and skill set, not only increasing the availability of U.S. jobs, but the availability of GREAT U.S. jobs which best make use of our leadership role in the world marketplace.

I hope you find my observations useful.  UnitedLex intends to bring forth a new era of responsiveness, efficiency, and intelligence to the corporate legal services sector, and we intend Immigration Insider to keep your HR and Legal departments one step ahead of the changes which will affect your enterprise.

Jose Latour, Executive VP, UnitedLex Corp.