Charles M. Goldsmith Law Blog

Garganigo, Goldsmith & Weiss is a New York based boutique immigration law firm. By  limiting our practice to only one area of law, we are very knowledgeable and efficient at what we do and can offer services to our clients at rates significantly lower than larger all-purpose law firms. Our personalized approach is always our goal and is appreciated by our clients.

Although we are an immigration law firm, we strive to offer our clients solutions to meet all their legal... Read More

With the freezing cold weather we’ve faced this winter, an extra blanket certainly is helpful.  With the ever increasing difficulty companies are having getting their “L” petitions approved by the USCIS, another kind of blanket has become a necessity.  I’m referring here to the special processing larger companies can avail themselves of by obtaining a blanket L approval.

HOW IT WORKS

Unlike the individual L petition... Read More

As a practicing immigration attorney in New York for forty years, I have never seen so many instances where people with green cards have been questioned at the ports of entry and lost their green card status because they “spent too much time outside the U.S.” Unfortunately these unanticipated inquiries by I.C.E. inspectors often take place after a long flight when the traveler is tired and too readily surrenders his green card because he is too intimidated to properly respond... Read More

Many foreign nationals who live in the U.S. illegally have been hoping for an amnesty. Although not technically an amnesty like the one we had in the 1980’s because this one would require more than proving that you were in the U.S. before a certain date, nonetheless it would have provided a “path to citizenship” for the estimated  11-14 million illegal aliens residing in the U.S. Fixing our broken immigration system was President Obama’s  third highest... Read More

There was an interesting editorial in the Tuesday, October 26, 2010 edition of the New York Times entitled, “48 Is Not A Good Place.” The title referred to our ranking of 48 out of 133 when comparing to developed and developing nations in the quality of math and science instruction. Perhaps even worse, we ranked 27 out of 29 among wealthy countries in the proportion of college students with degrees in science and engineering. The editors urge our government to improve early... Read More

America has always had a special relationship with Chile and its people. Not only in Chilean neighborhoods in New York but throughout the United States, people watched in horror the plight of the thirty three miners and then rejoiced when the rescue efforts proved successful.

Some of our immigration laws also reflect this “special relationship.” The rest of the world competes annually for the 65,000 H-1B visas granted by our government. These visas are for university... Read More

Certain provisions of our immigration laws make it better to be from one country rather than another.  This aspect of our immigration law has to do with the quota system that governs a major part of who gets to immigrate to the U.S. and when.  Except for immediate relatives, for the most part those who immigrate to the U.S. do so under the family-based or employment-based preference system.  The number of persons who can immigrate in any one year under one of the... Read More

Some of our clients who have approved “E” visa registrations at various consulates around the world have recently been refused “E” visas for new transferees to the United States based on changes in either the company’s ownership or its trade percentages.

As you probably know, to qualify for E-1 or E-2 status, a company must be at least 50% owned by nationals of the treaty country and to qualify for E-1 status, at least 50% of the trade of the U.S.... Read More

In the June 17, 2010 N.Y. Times, Gal Beckerman wrote an OP-ED about Yosef Mendelevich who, forty years ago this month,  attempted to smuggle a group of  fellow Jews out of the Soviet Union so they could  immigrate to Israel, “ a dream they had long been denied.” He and his co-leader were caught and sentenced to death and his cohorts were sentenced to long prison terms. The protests throughout the world were so overwhelming that the Soviet Union  began to... Read More