The USCIS today said that, as of August 27, 2010, it has received 34,900 H-1B visa petitions against the cap of 65,000. This compares to 33,900 petitions it had received on August 20, 2010. USCIS also reports receiving 13,000 H-1B petition toward the advanced degree cap of 20,000, up from 12,600 received as of August 20, 2010. Employers can still file H-1B petitions. This is great news for foreign professionals, but the slow pace of the filings is a sympton of the anemic economy and weak overall hiring practices.

The very practices for which the Arizona immigration law has been criticized are already quietly in place in many border states, leading to arrests and detentions by the border patrol of Lawful Permanent Residents and U.S. citizens, who travel that area in fear and have taken to carrying their U.S. passports with them. Here is a snapshots:

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: August 30, 2010 in The New York Times

ROCHESTER - The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers. "Are you a U.S. citizen?" agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. "What country were you born in?"When the answer came back, "the U.S.," they moved on.

But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister's in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He is one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation's northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol's growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September. The checks are "a vital component to our overall border security efforts" to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP). He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.

For thousands of people, the September Visa Bulletin brings great relief. Although Chinese and Indian nationals are not thrilled (yet), others in the heavily subscribed worldwide Employment-based Third Preference  (EB-3) visa category are jumping up and down.  For professionals and skilled workers, the numbers advanced over five months, to December 15, 2004. This means that come September 1, anyone with a priority date (which is the date of filing your PERM labor certification or I-140 petition) on or before December 15, 2004 whose resdience application is pending will be processed, or they can file their residence applications known as I-485 adjustment of status. For unskilled workers, the advance in the visa bulletin was more than 10 months, to March 22, 2003.

The worldwide family visa numbers advanced between 2 and 12 months, which is much further than back in September 2009.  The biggest changes among the worldwide family visa categories were the 2A category (spouses and children of permanent residents), which moved up 10 months to January 1, 2010, and 2B (unmarried sons and daughters of permanent residents), which advanced by a year to January 1, 2005.

Many of us have not seen this kind of movement in these categories for quite some time and have reason to rejoice!

To view the visa bulletin each month to track priority date processing, go to http://travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_1360.html

The bulletin is published by the Department of State mid-month prior to the month being reported. That is, the September bulletin was published mid-August and the October bulletin will be published mid-September.