Visas

When Jorge Garcia delivered a pizza in Van Nuys in September 2003, he was forced at knifepoint to enter the apartment. Garcia said two men choked him until he passed out. When he awoke, his neck and wrist had been sliced and his stomach burned with an iron. The men told Garcia they had a gun and threatened to kill him. Then the assailants picked him up, threw him in the trunk of his car and dumped the vehicle. Bleeding and in pain, Garcia escaped and sought help.

When Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle stepped off a plane at LAX in July 2008 -- a couple of jet-lagged Brits on the lam from the United Kingdom -- they looked for the first uniformed U.S. official they could find. Unfortunately for them, they found one. They thought they had found safe harbor from the English court that three days earlier had convicted them of hate-related writings originating on their website.

The United States has revoked the visas of three Palestinian Fulbright scholars whose cases were taken up personally by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after Israel refused to let them leave Gaza for interviews, officials said. Visas for the three, along with a fourth Palestinian student from Gaza who had hoped to come to the U.S. under a different program, were approved after Rice intervened in June but were rescinded last week on the basis of "new information," officials said.

As U.S. employers start applying today for visas for foreign workers, the hiring of talent from other countries is facing heightened scrutiny and the threat of greater restrictions as domestic unemployment soars. In recent years, the annual competition for 85,000 temporary work visas awarded to foreign computer technicians, engineers, university educators and other highly skilled professionals has drawn twice as many applications as spots available.

Two local immigration attorneys were sentenced Monday for filing false employment visa applications for foreign nationals, including more than a dozen who worked at their San Fernando Valley law firm. Daniel E. Korenberg, 58, of Encino, a founder and senior partner at ASK Law Group in Sherman Oaks, was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison and three years' probation, including six months in home detention with electronic monitoring, authorities said.

Driven crazy by U.S. immigration policy, Microsoft Corp. executives decided to drive some of their employees north. Unable to land enough visas for a third of the foreign-born engineers and computer scientists it wanted to hire -- many of them newly minted graduates of U.S. universities -- the Redmond, Wash., company opened a software development center just over the Canadian border last year. About 150 people now work in Vancouver. "Our immigration system makes it very difficult for U.S.

The operator of two English language schools was charged Wednesday with running a scheme that allowed foreign nationals, including several Russian prostitutes, to fraudulently obtain student visas to enter and stay in the United States. Bezhad "Ben" Zaman, 50, of Beverly Hills, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran, was arrested by federal agents without incident in what investigators believe is the largest student visa fraud scheme ever staged on the West Coast, authorities said.

State Department officials, who have been harshly criticized for moving too slowly in allowing Iraqi refugees into the U.S., issued new immigration figures Wednesday and suggested they may reach a goal of admitting 12,000 refugees this fiscal year. Government figures show that 2,627 Iraqis have been cleared to enter the country since Oct. 1. An additional 5,000 have been approved for entry within the next three months, and 8,000 more have been contacted for interviews.

June is normally one of the busiest months in this commercial hub, home to the largest wholesale market in the world. Traders from around the globe descend here to bargain with tens of thousands of merchants and place their year-end orders. But walk through the hotel lobbies, Middle Eastern restaurants and the city's big trading emporium, where some 30,000 stalls are jammed together, and it's clear that this isn't a typical year.

It was a farewell dinner, Chinese-style. A dozen people seated around a large table awkwardly picked up morsels of food from a revolving platter and sipped from tall bottles of room-temperature beer. There was a joyless quality to the evening as the dozen or so assembled guests, Britons, Canadians and Americans who had come to China to teach English, contemplated their imminent departure on account of visa restrictions.