Visas

Presidential campaign: An article in Tuesday's Section A on Sen. John McCain's appearance at the convention of the National Council of La Raza said that the Republican had cosponsored a bill that would have made illegal presence in the U.S. a felony. It did not. It made fraudulent use of a Social Security number a felony and mandated jail time for people who overstay their visas.

The U.S. debut of Barrie Kosky's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," scheduled to open UCLA Live's International Theatre Festival on Wednesday, has been canceled because the Department of Homeland Security has rejected the visa application for Austrian actor-singer Martin Niedermair, whose solo performance is the heart of the show.

As it prepares to leave office, the Bush administration is moving to make it easier for U.S. farming companies to hire foreign workers, which farmworker groups say will worsen wages and working conditions. The farmworker groups said changes to the H2A visa program, used by the agriculture industry to hire temporary workers, were posted on the Labor Department's website at midnight Tuesday but later taken down.

After spending six months trapped in legal limbo in London, creative director Ahmet Ahmet has been granted a visa by the U.S. government to return home to Los Angeles. Ahmet said he returned to his rented apartment in London on Thursday and found a package from the U.S. Embassy containing the passports and visas that will allow his family to enter the United States. Ahmet, a British citizen, and his family had gone to Britain last summer to visit his ailing mother.

Al Qaeda's Iraq-based faction considered trying to use student visas to get a dozen or more operatives into the United States to launch an attack, a ploy that was successful for one of the hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. counter-terrorism officials confirmed Monday.

Two local immigration attorneys have been charged with fraud after allegedly filing false employment visa applications for 14 foreign nationals working for their firm, according to a federal grand jury indictment released Thursday. The lawyers, of ASK Law Group in Sherman Oaks, filed the fraudulent applications and paid their employees in cash while awaiting approval for the visas, according to the indictment.

India has taken thousands of American jobs through outsourcing. Now it's giving a few back. The Indian government plans to outsource processing of visas (visitor documents, not the credit cards) from its embassy in Washington to a U.S.-based company. A top embassy official wouldn't say whether the 40 staffers who do the jobs now would be laid off. Many of them are Indian nationals. "We are not going to let too many go," said Gautam Bambawale, head of political affairs at the embassy.

When Sabulal Vijayan saw the advertisement in a newspaper in his native state of Kerala in southwestern India, he thought he had found the solution to his family's financial problems. The ad offered laborers job opportunities in the U.S. Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina under a guest worker program.

The United States has approved a visa so that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can address the United Nations Security Council before it votes on additional sanctions over his country's nuclear program, the State Department said Monday. A draft resolution introduced to the council last week would ban all Iranian arms exports and freeze financial assets abroad of 28 individuals, groups and companies.