In the past several years, the comprehensive immigration reform has been a hot legislative issue. Unfortunately, the comprehensive immigration reform bill failed again in the Senate in this summer. However, the advocators of immigration reform will never stop their efforts to push the reform through all kinds of means, including protest, lobbying legislators, and calling support through media. Zhang & Associates, P.C. has also been actively advocating for the comprehensive immigration reform in the past several months, for example, we set up an “Immigration Reform” webpage in our website to help people contact their representative congressmen and senators.

Immigration Voice, a nonprofit organization dedicated to address delays and other flaws in the employment-based immigration process, is organizing a rally in Washington DC on September 18th, 2007 and other lobbying activities at the same time. The purpose of the rally is for the legal, highly skilled and educated immigrants to be seen and for their voices to be heard by the legislators in the capital hill and the media all over the nation. The planned rally on September 18 will protest Congressional inaction on the issue of H-1B visa shortage and processing backlogs for highly-skilled legal immigrants. It proposes the increase of H-1B quota and calls the law-makers to lift the employment-based immigration visa cap and break the 7% annual nation quota, which mainly caused big backlogs in the visa bulletin for people born in China and India. These proposals may remove the major obstacles in many highly-skilled immigrants’ road to work legally and eventually permanently reside in this country.

Besides the protest, Immigration Voice will also organize a lobby day on Sept 17 to help participants to meet their congressman/congresswoman and senators.

Information about the rally and the schedule can be found at this link: http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/showthread.php?t=12749
Moreover, Legalimmigrant.org, a non-profit organization organized by Chinese non-immigrants, is also an organizer of the rally. For more information about Legalimmigrant.org, please kindly click http://www.legalimmigrant.org.

Too often the media and the legislative system have focused only on the issue of illegal immigration. The illegal immigrants have demonstrated their influence through protests in the past sever years. Many foreign nationals have come to this nation legally, played by the rules, followed the immigration procedures to maintain legal status and waited to get the immigration petitions approved. However, we have been adversely affected by the visa bulletin retrogression, H-1B cap crisis, and other flaws in the green card application process. Now, it is time to let our voice to be heard by the legislators.

Zhang & Associates believes the best solution to fix the issues in the immigration system is to take action by ourselves at the first place. Mr. Matthew Graham, Bennett Wisniewski, and Attorney Jerry Zhang, from Zhang & Associates will meet Congressmen and Senators in Washington, D.C as well as attend the rally. We call for immigration attorneys around the country to support the lobby efforts and attend the lobbies and rally.

We wish that you attend the lobby efforts and the rally. Together, we push and work for your American Dream and make a difference.

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Founded in 1996, Zhang & Associates, P.C. offers legal services to clients nation-wide in all aspects of U.S immigration laws. We have successfully handled thousands of immigration cases. We have been constantly supporting and advocating for immigrants’ rights. For instance, our firm recently made a pledge of $2,000 to support the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA)’s Legal Action Center and a $1,000 pledge for its New York Immigrant Achievement Awards. AILA a non-profit organization established to promote immigrants’ right and benefits.