Name: Global Immigration Reckoning: What 2026 Policy Shifts Mean for Your Team
Uploaded: 2026-05-08T15:26:09.468Z
Duration: 1 h 17 s
Description: Global Immigration Reckoning: What 2026 Policy Shifts Mean for Your Team

Transcript for "Global Immigration Reckoning: What 2026 Policy Shifts Mean for Your Team": Hi, everyone. My name is Owen Bevan. I lead, the customer success team over here at Mitratech's, legal solutions, division. Mitratech's a global software company focused on, compliance, and we're talking today a lot about compliance in the immigration space. I am excited today to take a back seat to our, three incredible panelists, who are who are joining us. Starting off initially with, Melinda Popmessl. Linda is a senior attorney at Bakori Global Immigration. That's Michigan's largest independent immigration firm. She's become sort of really a go to voice on these alternatives, especially in this volatile h one b environment. She is the kind of practitioner, that helps employers think creatively when some of those, obvious pathways get blocked, and she does that, especially in automotive, IT, engineering, and and health care. So welcome, Melinda. Very glad to have you. Lisa Atkins is here as well. Lisa leads, the global immigration practice at Clark Hill. She sits in San Francisco, and her team covers, sort of global mobility across a 100 plus countries. Lisa, before him to the law firm side, served as director of immigration policy at the US Chamber. So she's been sort of lobbying for this practical immigration reform, for quite some time, understands this from both of policy side and the law firm side. And last and certainly not least and welcome, Lisa. Last and certainly not least, Jonathan Grode. Jonathan has been in the trenches of US business immigration since, '99, I think, Jonathan. So he's seen about every policy swing that Washington can throw. He's currently US practice director at Green and Spiegel, advising everyone from tech startups to major corporations. He also teaches business immigration law at Temple University's Law School. He is the person you call, when immigration enforcement gets really complicated. So incredible group, for us today. Adam, maybe you could show us just a little bit of our agenda and what we'll work through here. So welcome, Adam. If you wanna take a step back quickly just to sort of recap, welcome to this webinar, on the global immigration reckoning. We're gonna look a lot at what these twenty twenty six policy shifts mean for your workforce. And, Adam, if you wanna move forward to the agenda, we can look at sort of how we'll work through the topics. So I'm gonna start by talking a little bit about the h one b cap, and that h one b issue in particular. I know it's got a lot more complicated. We'll talk a little bit about project firewall. Jonathan will will tell us more about what that is, and how the government's using AI, in various ways. We'll touch on global also international travel concerns, sort of the comings and goings of our employees, and then we'll touch on a more global perspective. We've just talked a lot about sort of, US immigration here, and and Lisa in particular will tell us a bit more about the global perspective. So, with that, that's sort of the agenda. We'll we'll jump right in. Melinda, maybe I'll turn to you and ask a little bit about, the h one b issue in particular. Maybe just to kick us off, there's I think maybe these days a tension between what hiring man how a hiring manager describes a job and what actually survives h one b scrutiny. How should HR and tell us probably tells a little bit about what's going on in that space generally, but, how should HR navigate that conversation internally, especially if there's a role that sort of blends functions or has sort of ambiguous ambiguous, experience levels? Absolutely. That is a yearly kind of conversation considering where we are right now. We have concluded the h 20 cap. We have our first lottery selections. So, hopefully, many of the HR professionals and managers on this call are sitting down and have that that detailed conversation of we have to submit the petition now. We have to detail out what job they're going to be sponsoring for. What does that look like? What are the requirements for that job? And how do we put together most successful eight twenty decision possible so that come October 1, we have a full new class of eight twenty's country employees? That can be a really difficult conversation to have because the HR professional has to balance the requirements of being an h one b qualified position against what maybe the individual thinks they're doing or what maybe the hiring manager thinks the potential should be. So it's a it's a very tedious balance that we wanna make sure that we're starting off with the meeting h one b minimum requirements, which is, of course, at least a baccalaureate degree in a specialized field of study. And that individual has to have that associated degree. So that's definitely something I always talk to the manager about. What does this position require? And, oh, by the way, does the individual you're hiring for this position have that specific set of credentials, the education, the experience level, just to make sure that that we're putting up realistic requirements in our h one b theoretician. With that being said, it can be a hard conversation that you mentioned, especially in the software industry where we have nontraditional positions or positions that might be dealing with emerging technologies. How do we accurately describe that position in one of the large buckets of job categories that you're given by the Department of Labor? And that can be a a technical conversation with the individual of, do you see yourself more as a computer assistant analyst? Are you more of an architect in software? Or are you dealing with complex, databases and managing data? That's where the individual can kind of provide you some of that expertise. But as the HR professional, you wanna make sure that you're not designing a job description or a job position that's only unique to the person you're hiring for the h one people. You have to have the broader perspective of, are all of my individuals in this role going to meet this job description? Are they going to meet these minimum job requirements to both craft a unique job, but also one that's going to be, sitting for the the full of their company? Melinda, I know there's there's sort of two hot terms in this space right now are SOC codes and wage level selections. Can you tell us a bit of more about what those are and sort of what they mean and and what implications they have? Absolutely. The SOC codes are basically the job buckets. They're defined by the Department of Labor, and they are the job categories that we have to identify as where our h 20 rule fits. They are a broader bucket, so we do have some discretion as the employer to pick which bucket we fit, you know, our unique position falls into. But you also have to be careful because every SRC code comes with, four unique wage levels and that is set for what what duties are being performed in that position, where their work is physically being performed in the geographic area, and what are the minimum experience requirements for that position. So level one then four starts as an entry level position moving up to a mid position and more senior up to a level four position. That is important because that job category that's set by the SOC and the wage level that we identify comes with a corresponding minimum prevailing wage that every employer has to pay for that position. So this again goes back to your HR, goal where you have to balance what is really required for the position and how does that match up with the office salary. You might have an amazing employee with a master's degree and fifteen years of experience, but if they are filling a more mid level position that only requires maybe a master's degree and one to two years of level experience, you wanna make sure that you're not classifying that job above the way that wage that you're actually being realistically offered for that position. Great. Jonathan, we'll turn to you. So there's an updated I one twenty nine that asks more granular questions about sort of degree requirements in particular. I feel like we're sort of touching on on what Melinda said. What is what is the practical impact of of that for employers, especially if they've used sort of pretty broad flexible job descriptions in the past? Yeah. Thank you for having me here today. I mean, look, I think this is, like, a really fascinating topic because this change to the form, like many things with CIS, just came out of nowhere. Mhmm. And to me, I don't know if you remember, like, Star Wars, if you're a Star Wars fan, but you know when they're like, it's a trap. Like, I feel like this is a trap. Like, I feel like they're setting you up with this very odd juxtaposition with how we are allowed to calculate the wage levels for the lottery selection versus the actual requirements for the employer. And Melinda did a really good job of explaining this, but there's an inherent disconnect with the way they presented these systems. So on one hand, they say, okay. When you're entering the lottery, we wanna get more tickets, you know, have a higher wage level. It's just based on salary. They didn't ask you to look at education or experience requirements. They didn't ask you to do, like, their traditional department of labor wage calculation or analysis. They said set the wage. And then it's like almost sneaking it in kind of now on the form, you're being asked to justify it. And to me, there's, like, a disconnect there. Now under normal circumstances with a less aggressive administration in terms of being immigration hawks, I wouldn't think too much of this or read too much into it. But as you can tell from everybody's social media posts and what's this, consuming the national media, I got a little bit of, like, a tinfoil hat conspiracy thing going on here, Owen. Like, I'm worried. Yeah. Yeah. I'm worried. And I've been, like, noodling this idea around when do you be aggressive and what are you creative? When do you push the envelope on immigration versus when do you step back? And right now, I am, like, very happy to push out new ideas or to try something different if I'm asking for permission. So if I'm making, like, an affirmative filing for somebody, like, in an e v one category and I wanna make a novel argument, they know it might be delayed, but it's not affecting their underlying status, I'll be aggressive. I'll push it. But I don't want to be aggressive when I find myself of a potential posture for asking for forgiveness. Mhmm. And this is where this actual question on the form has me twisted. And it'll be interesting to hear what my colleagues say, and I think nobody knows. Because the reality is is we haven't gotten any guidance. There's been no policy updates. There's been no explanation. It's just like, oh, by the way, here's the new form. So what are they trying to do here? And I think that that's it. I mean, on some level, it's about increased scrutiny. Right? They're asking us to justify a lot of the things that Melinda said versus, like, the wage level and the occupational class vacation. I think they're trying to, you know, avoid this sort of disconnect potentially with somebody saying, oh, we're paying this person at level four. But then when they go and form that the minimum requirements are a bachelor's degree and no experience, like, they're gonna come at you and say, why? Why is there this disconnect? Justify this wage. Are you just saying this is wage or is this the actual wage? But because h one v kicks in on October 1, it's this prospective aspect of it. Keep that prospectivity in mind when we talk a little bit more about impact of perm filing on this particular question. And I think, honestly, there's also this other little thing in there about supervisory review aspects, which I thought was a little bit of a an extra poke. You see those on the prevailing wage determinations and analysis when you're going through a perm process and you're involving the Department of Labor. But, Melinda's point, you know, we've enjoyed wide flexibility on the occupational classifications that we choose. And I wouldn't be surprised if we start getting some request for evidence that say, why did you pick this SOC code in the first place? Mhmm. So So And until the oh, sorry, Lisa. But just, like, until the dust settles around this, I'm trying to play it straight. I'm like, look. If if you put in, like when we did our wage analysis, like, I was, like, strict. I was like, well, even if you're paying them this, if your requirements are down here, we're gonna put it in at the lower wage level just to be conservative with our approach. So that's, like, the first kind of takeaway from that. Lisa, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. No. You're fine. I, actually got access to an RFP on one of these cases the other day. And I'm not you know? And it was crazy. It was it was your conspiracy theory that I've had to say conspiracy theory too is accurate, I think. And it was very interesting, the RP, because in the past, we used to get, when I I would use Radford. In California, we use Radford for a lot of technology companies. And so a lot of our clients out here are they map internally to Radford, which I think is actually a good thing because with, Radford is an alternate wage survey. And with Radford, they have, for each type of role and each type of category, it's broken down into, depending on the SOC code, six to eight different categories essentially or different levels, whereas the prevailing wages that we deal with, from the Department of Labor are only broken down into four wage levels. And so with Radford, it allows you to have a bit of a bigger spread in terms of experience, and it also has much more granular requirements for each level. And so a couple years ago and, you know, every I guess every, you know, every couple of years, we would get these RFPs on h one bs saying, hey. You used Radford. You leveled it to x. Show me all the other roles in your company that are leveled to x y z, why they're leveled, and they would make you kind of prove your internal leveling system. Now for smaller companies, this is really challenging because they're not leveled. They're not sophisticated. And, I mean, as a business owner, why would you be doing this? Like, you're not gonna change your whole practice for immigration purposes. And I always tell clients that you shouldn't be mirroring your internal business practice to immigration. It needs to kind of, like, fall in line naturally. But we're in a bit of a situation where if you are hiring a lot of foreign workers, USCIS with this is, I think, almost pushing you to have to make a decision and have to level. And so, you know, we you would defend your leveling in these RVs. It would be a total pain. You would be nervous about it, but they would get approved, like, if you had, you know, some defensible arguments. So this RFE that I saw, it was essentially conflating LCA requirements with, DOL prevailing wage termination requirements. It was taking the supervisory duties question and telling you to add a wage level if you're a supervisor depending on the SOC. Yep. And Exactly. And it was questioning, like, all of your other roles. Like, you have to essentially prove that all of your other roles in the company at this level have the same or similar minimum requirements. And it it was basically a 10 page bloodbath of that prior RFE on steroids, taking all of this information and try and then also looking at DOL, like, mentioning terms and DOL. And so, you know, I'm not, like, obviously, enunciating perfectly what exactly was in the RV. But it is all of those things and more where they're you know, to me, it looks like they are essentially trying to, you know, come up with a database or come up with something on companies internally where they're actually gonna take input from all the petitions that we're filing and create their own leveling system internally that they can then kind of throw back at you. So for me, what it's kind of you know, as I'm doing these h one b caps now, it's kind of, you know, the SOC is done. The wage level is done. That was done in a lottery. We had to pick and choose. But now as I'm filling out the I one twenty nine, it's like, okay. What is my degree spread for this role? K? I need to be very, very careful on my degree spread for this role, and I need to be extremely consistent. Well, that's even, like, a step further than I was thinking. And one of the things that I had, like, employers do is provide their job rec for the original fulfilling of the position. And I was saving that on file as, like, a benchmark to answer a request for evidence. What you're suggesting is this is almost more endemic of the entire organization than its structure as opposed to the singular case that's in front of them. So I mean, I think you could I think so, like, on the there's, like, a on the I one twenty nine, you have to list special, like, skill requirements for the role Uh-huh. To list the education, years of experience, degree spread, and skill requirements. And I'm not giving them anything. I'm just saying, please see company company letter of support. And I'm hoping that, like, in my job description paragraph that I can, you know, you know, as I'm describing the job, provide the skills or requirements for the role as part of the duties. I'm not looking at it like I would have heard with minimum requirements, but and maybe I'm wrong about that. But that's my take is that I don't wanna give them more information to work and play with. And, and I you know, Jonathan, I I agree with you. I'm trying to be a little bit more conservative on these because as we all know, if you get a denial on an h 20 cap, it's I mean, it's a it's a huge it's a huge problem. Like, the it's you know, you have to wait. Well, you might get some $100,000 fee even if you get I mean, there's, like, a whole can of worms. Things. Yeah. So I know. I I do it's interesting to see that playing out in real time because I don't know. Just something smelled rotten when the the sequencing of how all these things came out. So Yeah. Actually We're gonna talk to them with sorry, Linda. Go ahead. Oh, I I was I was getting kind of past our details when you mentioned the spread of the green fields that if they do start collecting that information to see, you know, what are all the degrees that you have historically said qualify for this position. Yeah. And if it becomes too broad, are you then going to start triggering those lovely specialty occupational arguments that you found a few years ago? I hadn't thought about that till you mentioned it, but that's a real possibility if they start aggregating that type of data. Jonathan, we're gonna talk a little bit about how the government's already using AI in the in the I nine context, and it it sounds like that's a possibility here. Lisa Lisa, were you gonna talk a little bit about, you know, that that sounds like there's a line field here, right, in the h one b space increasingly. Right? And I think you were gonna talk a little bit about what are some strategies, for people who are not selected, you know, were not able to go down the h one b. Yeah. I mean, you know, so I think we should we could probably talk about strategies for not selected and strategies for denials too at this point because, I think they're unfortunately coming. You know, and during the last Trump administration, we did we have received, like, a a much higher uptick of denials in all cases, essentially, but also in h one b's. Just like Melinda mentioned, there were so many RFPs on these cases. At that point, it was the it was like the Baha that was his that was the first Trump. Was that Baha? Right? Buy American, hire American? So that was that slew of RFPs that, came with that round of caps. But, you know, obviously, like, the lottery this year was a little bit different. There was definitely a higher selection rate And, unfortunately, not for my cases, but I think for Melinda and Jonathan, you guys mentioned you had the higher selection rate. But, just because of how the leveling was done and also I think the $100,000 fee, did play a big impact in terms of how many people put in for the lottery just because you can no longer reasonably console our process. Everything really has to be change of status. And so, you know, the good news is that more people, I think, were selected in general for the lottery. And so in terms of parking considerations where you have to you know, people are running out of time and they need to be moved abroad, I'm not seeing as much of that right now. However, with the 100 k fee for individuals that are running out of time and weren't selected or maybe unable to be part in get an H-1B, we are looking a lot at L placements, abroad. So I'm seeing a lot of, companies moving, individuals to different destinations, where they have global offices maybe or they're starting global offices. Having them work there, in a specialized knowledge role or a managerial role for, you know, over a year. Usually, we suggest fifteen to eighteen months if it's specialized knowledge. Managerial, you can usually get away with, you know, twelve, thirteen months and kind of having them come back in that way. O's also tons of o's. However, in the last couple of weeks, seeing a lot of RVs on o's. So I think the jig might be up on o's. I also saw a stat that, like, all adjudications and denials were almost at like, RVs were almost at 50% last week, and NIW denials and RVs were at almost 60%. So I think they have finally caught up on that. But, yeah, in general, you know, still seeing a lot of those kind of classic game situations going on right now, with this lottery, but also, you know, people really coming to me and talking to me about how to strengthen their backgrounds, especially if they're an f one student to see and figure out if they could qualify for an o in the future. Really helpful. I I wanna I'm gonna switch this over to sort of more like, audit and compliance in just a second, but we'd love to see Jonathan and Melinda if you have Wow. Sort of additional takes on on Lisa's points here. I I really like what Lisa was saying about the l play. It's actually become, like, a very strong place to play for multinational companies in general, especially if you have individuals that may be suffering, like, long perspective wait times on the Visa Bulletin when it comes to permanent residency, you know, especially if they're earmarked as a leader and you get them into a management role and then you can use the l one a and leverage that into e b one c. It's spectacular for some people, welcomed in a lot of instances, and takes a bad situation and can make it somewhat of a positive. Problem is, for a lot of smaller employers, they don't have that international component. We've been doing a lot of exploration within the j space as a stopover. The j is not a panacea, but there is some flexibility there around trainees and internships and researcher positions. There was an increased flexibility there that was put forward by the Biden administration that still holds on some levels. It it has its own can of worms as well with nonimmigrant intent and changing status and potentially leaving The United States and coming back in. So, you know, the and there obviously are those, like, day one CPT programs and also some of these hybrid h one b programs that you see with, like, universities that are capics that allow you to have a concurrent h one b employment. The thing I tell my clients, and I think this is the sort of takeaway of this topic, is there is not one route for every single person. When you don't have somebody selected in the lottery, you gotta take the time to sit down and talk to them to give them a real strategy to understand when their OPT might be expiring, and see what other avenues are available. I think a lot of mistakes are made when you say, well, this is how you fix it, and you push everybody kind of into the same bucket. So I do really profess a bit of, like, individualized attention when it comes to non cap selection. Well, and also I get from a lot of employers, like, can't we just park them in Canada? And, not if no. Like, not anymore. You know? Like, I mean Well, they you used to be able to, but they're getting stricter on that stuff. Yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, it's like they Canada changed its ICT specialized knowledge rules, for non treaty nationals back in November or October 2024. They haven't changed it back, unfortunately. So, you know, a lot of my clients are remote first employee like, employers where everyone works remotely. And, surprisingly, in The US context, that's okay. But in the Canadian context and some of these other countries, that it it's not workable depending on your nationality. And so I I really agree, like, doing kind of individualized assessments is huge. One thing I see a lot is we'll just move them to The UK. It's easy. It's quick. And then you look at the government fee, which keeps going up. It went up again April 1 in certain categories. And the sticker shock is unbelievable in terms of how much you're paying for a single person, you know, family of two to three people, it's upwards of 25 to 30,000 US dollars just in government fees. So, you know, while while there are certain solutions that are faster than others, I think, you know, it just isn't gonna make sense for a business to spend that much money, depending on the type of person. Maybe they're, you know, a managerial or a leadership role, and it's usually important to keep them with the organization. We're gonna you know, a company's gonna spend more money on that person versus a, you know, more entry level software issue. Incredible expertise here, folks. And, you know, it's it's clear that, you know, yes, you're as you're saying, at this individual level, there are, you know, very broad range of strategies that can be explored for for any individual, Broad National. Jonathan, I think you were gonna bring up, sort of to to switch topics a little bit over to the sort of I nine, enforcement and audit topic. There's there's something that we talked about called project firewall, and I would love for you to tell the audience just a little bit about what that is, and, how that's how that's impacting employers. Okay. Well, project I mean, I love these names that they cook up here. Like, you know, they they they have to have some catchy title. I I think somebody at the White House is making t shirts or doing some, like, bookkeeping on this stuff because they, like when they were going into Maine, it was called project catch of the day. Anyway, so project firewall is not a nice thing. It's not an I nine thing. It's the Department of Labor. And, essentially, what Project Firewall by the name is targeting tech companies that are abusing the h one b program. That's pretty much their objective. That's why it has this computer type terminology associated with it. Just to give you a little bit of perspective, like the Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division, I have found historically under the enforcement perspective is harder to deal with than ICE. They really dig in. They really wanna look at all these records. They wanna see the public access files. They're very concerned on, back wages, misclassifications, not paying people the correct thing. But penalties are severe. You can have punitive damages. You can be debarred from using the h one b program. You can be debarred from using PERM. The consequences are very heavy. So whereas, like, an I nine type of action typically will lead to sort of monetary fines, which can be business interruptive, of course. And certainly, if you get strung up with a high set of fees, it can be very disruptive. But here, you can actually lose your ability to use a specific visa classification, which is, for some employers, extremely detrimental depending on the industry. But historically speaking, like, these sort of wage and hour investigations would come about from disgruntled employees noticing that there's actually somebody you can call when you post notice of an h one b or perm. I've seen them come from competitors. Okay? And I've seen them, like, come from consumers even in some instances where they say, well, this place is full of foreign nationals, and I'm calling the DOL on you and that kind of thing. What's interesting here is now all of a sudden, Department of Labor has suisbonte ability to incite investigations, meaning they can do it on their own volition. They don't actually need a complainant to start the process. And what's happened as a result of this along with technology, as you were kinda indicated to, is they are, like, turning on the technology machine to look for inconsistencies, to look for worker displacement, to do wage underpayment, and even in some instances like unauthorized recruitment processes by looking at what is being portrayed online for job openings. And what we're also seeing here is a lot of cross governmental cooperation when it comes to what databases the AI agent is being allowed to review. So we're seeing, like, you know, justice department. We're seeing, CIS, like, kind of coordinating on some of these things and sharing data spaces for these AI agents to start the investigations. It's like about pattern recognition. That's what they're looking for at this point. But whereas previously, they would really go after, like, the real bad actors within this h one b sphere, I think now you could find yourself with, like, almost anybody having potentially receiving an audit, from the Department of Labor. And I I don't really have great figures on this because it's new ish, but some reports, where do I see this? Some reports is that, it could be up to a 50% increase in investigations this year over last year. I don't know how true that is. Like, anecdotally, I haven't seen much of an uptick, to be honest with you. Lisa and Melinda might have other clients that have experienced it. Certainly, we've had Department of Labor wage and hour investigations for some of our larger clients that have multiple locations, but they feel very much of the old original style of looking in and doesn't have, like, a new bent to it, at least in what I'm seeing so far. That is opportunity. You know, you don't wanna wait for the shoe to drop, Owen. You don't wanna be left holding the bag when the Department of Labor comes and, like, as an immigration practitioner or the companies that are listening. This is also a great way to enhance the services that you offer. Unlike I nine, which is sorta at a revolution of, you know, online and technical solutions that make it very hard to make an error, I know Mitratech has tracker, which is a great platform and program for I nine maintenance. The Department of Labor public access mechanism has never really been something that has been automated or controlled by a system. It is a paper file more or less. Some people have them electronically. But you have to, like, affirmatively put these things together. And there's varying level of services that law firms will offer, so you may or may not have your public access file created by your practitioner. Some people charge an extra to put together the public access file. Some firms will just give you instructions. So you have a wide varying degree of what a client is willing to do on compliance, what a law firm provides on compliance. And in there lies a ton of errors. Whether intentional or unintentional, I have yet to look at a public access file where I haven't said, this could be different. This should be updated. You need to put this in here. Now when you do get the audit, certain things you can add before you hand them over and there's things that you could do. But the reality is is if you find yourself with dozens of employees and trying to, like, recreate a public access file, it is not a posture you wanna be. So, like, my takeaway from the project firewall is before they enhance up the hiring, before they turn on, like, this wide sweeping mechanism, get your house in order. If you're a law firm, reach out to your clients. Have them review their public access file. If you're an employer, ask your your firm to help you with this. This is a neat little crossover area between immigration and labor and employment law. There might be some questions around there that would require local counsel. It's a good opportunity to partner with other firms to provide a real robust solution. But sitting back and saying, we're cool. We're not gonna worry about it, I think is an erroneous posture. Or we only have three h one b employees. They're not gonna look at us. We're too small. That might have been true before project firewall. Mhmm. But this AI, if it sees an inconsistency, is gonna be indiscriminatory as to employer size and scope because it's gonna be about a volume of investigations. So that's kind of the lay of the land on what Project Firewall is and where we are and and what what you can do to be proactive about it. Yeah. And I I like that you had, you know, you had some pretty clear advice there, which is go take a look at this public access file, you know, ask your law firm to do that. Go take a look at, you know, essentially what what the LLL knows about you all and and go from there. Lisa and Melinda, I think you were gonna talk a little bit about I sort of miscategorized the I nine issue for sure. I apologize. But but there are I nine issues there. Right? And it sounds like there's some recent new ICE guidance, FAQ there that that folks that you're you're familiar with, interested in your take on that. And and I think you also had some ideas about, maybe the same program and other kind of remediation steps. So I'd love to hear a little bit more from you on on that front. Sure. I I'll take the FAQ question. They recently, came out with a new FAQ question, which didn't get much announcement, but in in practice, it overturned, a a thirty year standard that we had all been operating in in the industry. And it goes directly to what Jonathan was saying about what was classified as a technical error that if ICE comes knocking, they would allow you to correct because it's miss signatures. It's misdated. It's filling out the wall and fill out from the I nine. But they moved six of those technical errors now into what they call substantive errors. And that is important because substantive errors cannot be corrected, within the period, and they come with much higher penalties to the employer. So, again, to to Jonathan's point, I had the same experience. I've never looked at an I nine that had more than two or three in the folder and said these are all done perfectly. It's a dis disceptively simple form that's surprisingly easy to, with with all good intentions, not fill out correctly. So I think it is, the FAQ moving those from technical, to substantive errors can have some really negative impacts to employers who don't know what the status of that file is and who just every time someone's onboarded, they might do everything correctly within the three day period, complete the I nine, never think about it again. And that's also true with sponsoring h one b e employees in the CAF file. They may get a stack of the folders from their attorney or be told to put certain files in certain places separate from the personnel file, and then never think about it again. And I think in the new uptick of site visits and the new uptick with investigations, the product firewall, again, to the point where it doesn't have to be from a complaint from a disgruntled employee. They have this proactive ability to walk into any business and say, I would like to look at your I-nine folders. And with that in mind, I think that just the burden of action is where you should know what your files look like, do some self auditing if you don't, and and then you prepare to to your house in order. Yeah. And I think, you know, as Melinda said, the I nine form is, you know, I think what it's like quoted as, like, the hardest, like, form to get right, like, in America or something. Like, there was some quote about it because as Jonathan and Mohammed both said, I I've never looked at even, like, a stack of 10 I nines and not found an error on an item form. And this is for companies even that use electronic programs. Right? Electronic programs are great. There's a lot of fantastic programs out there. There's a lot of new software out there. But even if you are doing your I nines electronically, these errors can still appear. Like, the programs are not, you know, they're not perfect in terms of being able to correct or spot issues. Like, there there are still errors there even in these electronic records. And how you deal deal with correcting an electronic I nine record also, you know, you need to work very, very carefully with the software to make sure that you're, you know, not trying to correct something that's considered actually a substantive violation, which you're not allowed to essentially correct. And I think as Luna and Jonathan have both mentioned, you know, this is an area where we have seen audits in the past, but often there, you know, wasn't a ton of personnel able to do these audits. They're they're they were very labor intensive for, DHS to do. But now with AI and also this focus on enforcement, they're able to do them they're able to run I nines much more quickly through the AI to actually process and find these errors. So it's taken a lot of the labor intensive intensity out of the process completely, and they're able to do it much more efficiently. And also, with the new FAQs, what it's kind of signaling to me is that by moving things out of the technical into the substantive category, they're looking for ways to jack up these funds. They're looking for a bigger hit from companies of any size to get more money so that they can then use that money for other enforcement activities. Other they can move that money around and use it for other buckets of priorities that they wanna use within DHS. And so I think, you know, it's really critical that companies are, you know, very closely speaking with their electronic software providers, if they're doing electronic I9s, that you are asking your provider, you know, about what they're doing to kind of help, you know, help companies not fall into some of these more substantive violations as you're actually completing the documents. And if you are working with your providers to do a mock audit internally, because you could be hit with, you know, just hundreds and thousands of dollars of fines. And, you know, for a small company, that's, you know, that's, you know obviously, there's litigation. There's different things that companies face on a daily basis. But I nine is usually not, you know, something, you know, in your overall corporate strategy that you're thinking that is gonna be a large line on your expense. So I would just really recommend again, you know, we don't wanna scare you, but, these are coming and they're happening to really, look closely at your programs and and also make sure that you have appropriate training for everyone involved in this process. Right? You know, if you have new people on your team, are they appropriately trained? Are they being mentored? Are they, you know, are they actually doing this correctly? Because one bad trainer or one person who's not entering these incorrectly can have a a very large substantive impact. And I would just add on that. Like, this list of changing the technical to the substantive is bonkers. It's it's really out there. I mean, it's pretty much everything. Like, you have a typo in the name of an agency and you don't have a means of correcting it. It is like draconian in the level. And the reason why they're doing that is, historically speaking, you could cure technical issues. There's no cure for substantive. It automatically puts you into the fine bucket. So, you know, somebody's gotta pay for all these new people and, you know, obviously, the $1,000,000,000,000 is not enough. So they're gonna add to it through I nine auditing. That was an exaggeration, but it's not far off as to what's actually happened. Lisa, you I we on our prep call the update, you'd mentioned something called the save program and and interested to, you know, maybe you had an idea about, you know, or you're starting to see that be sort of an option when companies find themselves in this situation? Yeah. So it's interesting because I'm not sure if it's an option anymore. But, you know, in the past, you know, we have seen I nine audits of clients. And when, you know, the the ICE officers come out, they've, you know, met with the client, they've discussed the substantive and technical violations. There, you know, was can can be and has been historically a bit of a negotiation. Right? Like, where you are able to kind of depending on, you know, good faith efforts, kind of looking at your overall program, looking at the type of errors, like, are is it, you know, historical that there's, like, this one type of error during this period of time? You know, are you able to kind of explain what happened during that time, kind of do a holistic back documentation of, you know, there was this one HR person and they could not spell this correctly or they always put the you know, they always put this in the wrong category. So there, you know, there were ways that you could be, you know, work with the officers to kind of creatively get your fines a bit lower. Right? And one of these ways was enrolling in the safe program, that that we had experienced in our form of, you know, volunteering at that point to enroll in the save program, you know, which essentially, like, basically provides, you know, DHS with information about your program, allows them to come in and just a lot of stuff your program. And, historically, this would allow, you know, allow us to kind of reduce the fines, by, you know, signing up with the program and and basically showing the officer in good faith that you as a company are gonna try your best to fill out this form correctly, do everything correctly in this space. With this new FAQ document, I'm not sure if that is going to be a reality anymore. I'm actually not even sure how these negotiations are going to go. Belinda and Jonathan, I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on this, because it just it just seems like by moving these benign issues from technical and substantive violations that can't be corrected, then it's it's almost like a gotcha. And there's really Well, they still, you know, they still have the sliding scale on fines, and there's a lot of factors involved. I think it also depends on the circumstances of your client. Like, I nine is a funky thing because it applies to everybody. So immigration attorneys might not encounter everybody that has an investigation. Like, I had a client recently, 39 US workers, no foreign nationals. Guy didn't even know what a nine nine was. He got strung up with $350 of fines. You know, that would have put him out of business. And I call him up, and I'm like, look, guys. This guy has no foreign national employees. It's low skilled. He does a recidivism program with the prisons. Like, this is the exact employer you want. You can put him out of business over paperwork. And we ended up getting something like 25¢ on the dollar on that one. You have other ones where they feel like they should know better. So, like, the sophistication of the client is something that I argue regularly as well as good faith effort. I think, Lisa, to your point that good faith effort one is going to get sufficiently undermined with this new memorandum, and that's where we're gonna have to be more careful. But, you know, when you are doing these negotiations, the financial stability of the enterprise and its ability to continue operating in light of fines is like the strongest argument you can make. That's the one that gets them off the needle. And it is worth negotiating because you'd be surprised historically speaking, I don't think this is gonna hold, but, specifically speaking, like, 50¢ on the dollar was never unreasonable. I think you have to adjust your expectations a little bit in light of this new memorandum, but you there's still room. There's still room. Yeah. And then do you have anything to add on this topic? I would agree. I think some of it is going to depend on how they implement this. The FAQ is fairly new. This is not in March, so I don't believe we know exactly how far line they will take it. But if anything, I think there should be a proactive step for employers to to put that extra effort in it. And just looking in knowing what the the status of your nine documentations, what your process is, It's a great time to look at, you know, if you can talk to your files and whatnot. We have one last topic I I wanna hit before we sort of begin to wrap up. And I I think, what I'm gonna do, you're gonna start to talk about it. And this is sort of the international travel element. We've talked a little about we've talked a lot about visas and sort of I nines and enforcement, but, you know, what are you seeing in terms of sort of how visa appointments are working? Are they getting canceled? And, you know, there's a lot of conversation in the in the in the media about sort of social media scrutiny. And anything you wanna share with this audience about sort of those topics and, you know, how they should be managing or inviting their employees on international travel? Sure. So we're basically moving away from the mass research installations that we saw towards the 2025 and 2026, but we're still facing a large amount of operational delays. That's partly from the cancellation of the circulating of the visa waiver program, partially with the cancellation of visa appointments to insulate new social vetting procedures. So the operational delays are resulting in the scheduling of these appointments months out. And India is making the news, but it's not limited only to India. You know, Dubai has operational delays and and verified delays. Listen, finds it stuck outside US and China. The operational delays are coming from the backlog, but also coming from an uptick in the issue. Administrative, warnings, the w two twenty one g was saying quite a few more people receiving those. They finally get the interview scheduled at maybe several months out. They go to the interview. They get the notice. It's checked off two twenty one g. They may or may not get an explanation of what the additional background screening is or the social vetting is, but that usually immediately results in in several months added to their child. The social media piece is interesting. The vetting has been around for a while since about 2019, but the recent expansion has included almost all nonimmigrant visa categories. The way that works is once you go to schedule a Visa agreement online through any US consulate in the world, you have to complete a DS two sixty. Part of that in questioning is disclosing all social media accounts that you have held in a retroactive five years. Your WhatsApp, your Facebook, your X, all of those accounts have to be disclosed and consulate officers are looking at them. They're not just looking at them what you post publicly on those channels. They're actively requiring individuals to put the privacy settings to open or public so that officers can review all of the social medias. And for my clients, I bring that up not because I expect them to accidentally post their plans to take over control of the world. I I'm not worried about that. I am more concerned about in the h one b context specifically, LinkedIn posts and what you've listed as your education, what you've listed as your employee industry. Very recently, I had a client who worked in the IT consulting space to where his employer was Acme and consulting services. But he worked on projects with big names in the industry like IBM and Google. And so those were the employers who were working on his LinkedIn page, which didn't match up with what this HMD sponsor was in this paperwork. And consular officers are looking at that, and they had the AI tools to very easily pick out those inconsistencies. So it's definitely something individuals should be aware of, and HR managers need to know these kind of things that are being implemented and the delays are pretty common about the the world value regardless of where it'd be blocked track. I thought it was, or you're on mute on. I thought it was guy I'm sorry I smirked when you were giving your intro, but I get asked this question, like, what to travel with all the time. And, like, there's, like, this thing going around that you should travel with burner phones and, like, travel laptops. To me, nothing more looks more dodgy in your terminology, Owen, or suspicious if you're coming in there with a blank device. Mhmm. Like, if you if you are one of the less than one tenth of 1% of people called in the secondary inspection to have a phone searched upon entry, they're meant to keep it in airplane mode. I'm not saying that there aren't rogue officers that will tap into your stuff. But if I'm an officer and somebody prevents their phone and it has nothing on it, to me that's like, what are you trying to hide rather than, oh, this person has nothing, you know, going on. Right? Like, this is the most boringest person in the world. They don't even have pictures of their kids on here. Like, we gotta be somewhat logical here with how we approach things. You can protect yourself by putting your data, you know, behind, like, something on the cloud where a password is required because they're not meant to access the web. There are some protections you can do. There are privileges for attorney relationships or medical records. But just flying in there with nothing on a device, I think, is is not terrifically good advice under the current circumstances. So Well, I also think, similarly, if you have no online presence Yeah. And, like, it's I mean, that's almost more suspicious. Right? Like, if you're a professional at a company and you have no I mean, it's not that it can't happen, but it's like and you have no LinkedIn presence, it's a little weird. Right? Like, most people who are professionals are on this platform. Very good. Reader's category with me. But yes. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, within a certain demographic, right, or or on these platforms, and you're you're going to have, you know, there's a presumption that you're going to have this platform. And so if you don't, you need to have a pretty good explanation, I think, of why you don't have an online presence and don't have this platform. And, you know, for those people that don't have an online presence, they usually actually have a pretty good explanation for it. That's pretty believable. But, you know, I I always tell clients, like, don't like, I have someone in admin processing right now in China. I told her not to travel, but she did anyway. And immediately, admin processing. And she wanted to you know, the the consulate asked for just basic information. They asked for resume, offer letter, like, you know, letter of employment, like, company support letter for the h one b. And she was gonna give them all these different things. And I said, no. No. No. No. No. I said, look. They're asking for these three things. We're only gonna give them what they're asking for. We're going to give them make sure that what they're asking for is consistent, right, as it as it is and it should be. But, like, you know, you can't go change your LinkedIn profile right now to make it consistent. Like, you're kinda stuck with what it is. Like, they've already seen that. They've already looked at it. So let's just give them the other documents and, like, make sure they're as consistent as possible. But in these circumstances, you know, the government has access to all different things now, especially with this social media policy. And so our thing is still, like, let's be as narrow as possible in how we're providing information to them to not give them more to work with because they already have right now just a time to look at. Great advice. Super. Thanks, guys. This is I wanna make sure we let folks off who have, meetings at the top of the hour. Adam, I think you have just a kind of a quick slide to flash up, and I've got a sort of one final question, to ask for all of you, for for those who are able to hang on, which is just, you know, if if you could change one thing, that might need to be sort of a a a a a one a one word answer. One thing about how employers think about immigration, what would it be? So we'll turn to you guys in just a sec. For those of you who are immigration practitioners who are on the phone, our team will be at AILA in San Diego in June. We'd love to see you there, share a little bit about, as you can see on the screen, sort of our road map, in the tech space here. So, take a little QR shot or I'm sure that'll be in our follow-up email. We'd love to see you if you're if you're gonna be at AILA as I'm sure most of this group will be. So closing thoughts here, quick, kind of lightning round. Lisa, the one thing you'd want employees to to bear in mind? I mean, I think it's like you know, think about immigration. I mean, a lot immigration is often often comes last. I do a lot of m and a work and and deals globally, and immigration is always the last thing to be booked at. But I think in the with this administration, if there's anything that employers need to know, is that, you know, these immigration concerns, if you you deploy immigrants, have them as part of your workforce, they need to be top of mind now. And I'm not just saying that. So I'm an immigration provider. I want Yeah. People to call me. But, these are real, and and these are real priorities. And this administration, over the past year, has made it very clear that this is, in fact, our focus. And, while the first, you know, past year has been a lot on deportation removal and defense, the you know, we're we're starting to feel it on the corporate side and it's it's only gonna get worse. That's great. Melinda Melinda? I would say strategy. There's a lot of scary things. There's a lot of changes coming up. But to keep immigration to the top of mind and really work with your individuals, your employers, your managers to have that strategy in place so that you can move forward to immigration, and it's a a smooth process for everyone that's involved in the process. Fantastic. It's a strategy. Jonathan, last words. Yeah. I think we've all kinda said it. Yeah. To me, it's about being proactive. Mhmm. Stop waiting for it to come to you. Stop waiting for the employee to have the questions. Stop waiting until you have a need in your organizational chart that you can't fill. Think about it in advance. I think we'd all kinda say the same thing. It's not like immigration is going to stop. It's not like the people who are well prepared aren't gonna be successful. You just gotta be a little bit more pragmatic in your approach, and we're all here to help, including Mitratech. So thanks for having me today. Thanks, everybody. This was this was an incredible group. We appreciate all the, really deep insight and experience that you all brought to this conversation. So, thank you very much for us, and and thanks everybody for attending. And hope everyone has a wonderful day.