Immigration news

A class action against the Canadian government opened in Ottawa last week. Lawyers for 1,000 people who had applied to emigrate to Canada under the Canadian Federal Skilled Worker Program are suing Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and the Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney after their applications were terminated in June 2012. Some of those affected had been awaiting a decision on their applications for permanent resident status for eight years.

A group of US business leaders has announced that it is to create a fund to finance a campaign in favour of immigration reform. Carlos Gutierrez, who was commerce secretary under George W Bush, and Thomas J Donohue, the President of the US Board of Trade announced that they were to set up a 'Super Political Action Committee', known as a Super PAC, which will raise money to fund a campaign aimed at persuading Congressmen and women, particularly members of the House of Representatives, to vote for reform.

The Romanian ambassador to the UK, Ion Jinga, has hit out at UK press speculation that tens of thousands of Romanians and Bulgarians will come to work in the UK in 2014 once EU law allows them to do so.

Last year, Microsoft reported that it was looking for qualified IT professionals. Last September, it announced that it had 6,000 vacancies that it could not fill, 3,400 of these were IT roles. It began to lobby the US government for a change to the skilled immigration visa rules.

The Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa has entered the immigration reform debate in the US by issuing a six-point reform plan. Mr Villaraigosa has written an article for the politico.com website in which he laid out the bare bones of his plan.

Mr Villaraigosa is a member of President Obama's Democratic Party. Washington insiders say that the President is determined to press ahead with comprehensive immigration reform but, as yet, no details have emerged of any proposed legislation.

A tech startup company, Blueseed, has raised seed finance to carry out research into the possibility of setting up a floating tech company incubator in international waters off the Pacific Coast of the USA. The company plans that the ship should float twelve miles off San Francisco. This would be close enough to Silicon Valley for it to have contact with the tech community there but far enough out to sea for tech graduates around the world to be able to work there without falling foul of the US immigration authorities.