Scott Titshaw, chair of the Atlanta chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

A sudden shift by the U.S. Department of State in its policy on employment-based immigrant visa quotas has inconvenienced many Atlanta businesspeople looking to file for permanent resident status in the United States, said Scott Titshaw, chair of the Atlanta chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). 

The Atlanta chapter of AILA has 363 member attorneys throughout Georgia and Alabama who represent companies that employ international workers in the two states. Mr. Titshaw, an attorney with Arnall Golden Gregory, LLP., has received a flurry of complaints from clients seeking an explanation for the unprecedented change.

This year the federal government has a quota of 140,000 “green cards”—as the permanent resident visas are commonly called—available to issue to foreign employees based on their occupation, taking into account other factors such as education, experience and nationality.

The application process usually takes years to complete, and international employees seeking green cards must first submit a petition to the federal government. 

Once their petition is accepted, they must wait for the government to issue a statement saying that their “priority date”—the date on which they filed the initial petition—has become “current.” Then they can officially file their application.    

Because “current” priority dates change from month to month based on demand, the employees in limbo and their lawyers must make their application plans based on monthly visa bulletins issued on the Department of State’s Web site, said Mr. Titshaw.

“It generally proceeds so that people who filed their cases or started the case first in their categories will get a green card first,” Mr. Titshaw said.  “It has worked this way for decades.”

In the July visa bulletin released on June 12, the Department of State said that to “generate increased demand” for the 140,000 slots, it would consider all priority dates current for the entire month of July in every category except one.

But a shift occurred when on July 2—only half a month later—the Department of State revised its statement, saying that no applications filed in July would be accepted, and no more slots are available until the new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.

Mr. Titshaw said that although the content of the visa bulletins is unpredictable, it is usually consistent for at least a full month.

“The Citizenship and Immigration Services regulations refer to the monthly visa bulletin to see which quotas are filled.  Up until now, they have used it as a reference for the entire month,” he said. “This is totally breaking from the way they normally do things.” 

But Steve Royster, a spokesman for the Department of State, said that about 10,000 of the 140,000 slots were not processed last year, and the measures of the past month were enacted to make sure that all available slots were filled by the end of the fiscal year.

“Through the visa bulletin, we monitor the progress of applications for visas and petitions, and we balance the number of visas that are available with the demand,” Mr. Royster said.  “As we were monitoring this year we were concerned again that some of these available visas would not be issued.”

According to the revised bulletin issued on July 2, CIS was able to process 60,000 slots during the three weeks between the two bulletins, using up all available employment numbers until October. 

Whatever the cause, the sudden flip-flop has had profound consequences for some Atlanta-area employees who shuffled their schedules in an effort to submit their paperwork at the beginning of July, only to find the policy changed on the first business day of the month, Mr. Titshaw said.

One of Mr. Titshaw’s clients, a corporate executive in Atlanta, “interrupted his annual vacation in India to quickly fly back to Atlanta this weekend, just to file his case today,” according to Mr. Titshaw. 

Gary Furin, a longtime AILA member attorney, said that the change in policy is “worse than inconvenience” for some of his clients.

One couple he represents bought plane tickets from Korea to Atlanta so that they could begin the filing process, only to find out in the July 2 update that their applications would not be considered current after all.

“I’ve been doing this stuff over 38 years and I’ve never seen anything like this…To me, this is fraud on behalf of the federal government,” Mr. Furin said. 

Also, applicants shut out of this round will have to pay increased filing fees when the new fiscal year begins, he added.

Mr. Royster would not comment on whether the Department of State expects lawsuits to spring from this dispute, but he did say that he is confident that a disclaimer in the original bulletin should be sufficient to deter most legal action. 

He added that immigrants seeking green cards should be encouraged rather than upset.  By filling up the numbers for this fiscal year, he said, CIS will be ready to immediately begin receiving and processing applications when the new year begins in October.