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The Many Faces of Stern Elkind Curray & Alterman LLP

Since 1985,Stern Elkind Curray & Alterman has limited its practice to immigration law, with a special emphasis on matters relating to the employment of foreign professionals. Mr. Stern and Ms. Elkind founded the firm with the goal of providing the very best immigration advice and representation to our clients. As the firm has grown, we have continued our commitment to maintaining a high level of expertise combined with an understanding that our clients are individuals whose lives are deeply affected by the work we do. Over the years, we have developed expertise and wide-ranging experience in all facets of immigration law.

We continue to be deeply affected by our clients, some of whom are introduced within this web site.

PERM Update

April 27, 2005

Immigration Daily, a publication of ILW, has reported that it has received information about hundreds of PERM denials without any anecdotal reports of confirmed approvals. According to this report, PERM form (9089) is being compromised by technological bugs because the underlying logic processing of the input data is so complex. The article in Immigration Daily is pessimistic as to how long it will take to debug the system.

The DOL has responded to these types of complaints by indicating that cases have not been "denied" but have been rejected for technical reasons. The DOL has given AILA a number of processing tips to avoid rejections. DOL also indicated that there have been no approvals since no cases have been pending for the 45-60 days required for adjudication.

Stern and Elkind has been very cautious in its approach to the PERM process. From the beginning, we have been recommending against trying to convert existing labor certification applications that have been sent to the Backlog Reduction Centers. We are proceeding with a substantial number of new applications and a number of our clients with existing labor certification applications have started the process of filing new applications for a different position with the same employer.

In light of this information, we will be proceeding with our PERM applications but will not file applications until we receive confirmation that the system has been debugged sufficiently. We will soon file a number of test cases to determine if the system is working properly.

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