© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Brooks Igo
(July 29) – K&L Gates recently announced that corporate immigration expert Brian Graham joined the firm’s Austin office as a partner.
Prior to making the move to K&L Gates, Graham was chair of Strasburger & Price’s immigration law team and EB-5 Task Force. He says he was attracted to K&L Gates’ “highly integrated culture” and global platform.
“Teamwork and collaboration are very important and exciting to me, and the opportunities for that at K&L Gates are what made it a no-brainer,” he said. “It’s not just the fact that they have lawyers in the right disciplines and the right places, it’s the way they use technology and communication to create a really incredibly well-integrated culture.”
He added that it is “crucial” for his practice of counseling high net worth clients on investment-based immigration to have offices in places like Shanghai, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Sydney and across the U.S.
In May, Graham did the immigration work for the executive team and much of the foreign talent of the Rock in Rio music festival Las Vegas. It was the first time the festival had been held in the U.S.
Graham, a former assistant district counsel for the U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Service, said one of the significant issues “taking a toll” on employers is that the demand for H-1B visas, the primary visa for STEM occupations, has been outpacing supply.
“The problem is that employers go on U.S. college campuses to recruit the best and the brightest, and often the best and brightest are foreign-born students,” he said. “There just aren’t enough visas to allow U.S. companies to be as competitive as they should be given all the talent we are educating here.”
Another hot topic Graham is monitoring relates to the EB-5 program, which is renewed in three-year increments and is due to expire on September 30. The Brookings Institute issued a report on EB-5 in February 2014, and Graham says it will be interesting to see how many of those recommendations Congress incorporates into the final bill.
“I’m particularly interested in seeing whether public-private partnerships get some sort of advantage over fully private offerings,” he said. “The required capital amount – currently set between $500,000 and $1 million – is widely expected to increase and it will be interesting to see where that ends up.”
He added that there is significant concern about the growing backlogs in EB-5 adjudications and uncertainty as to how the statutes will come into play as processing times exceed the life of the EB-5 loans.
© 2015 The Texas Lawbook. Content of The Texas Lawbook is controlled and protected by specific licensing agreements with our subscribers and under federal copyright laws. Any distribution of this content without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.
If you see any inaccuracy in any article in The Texas Lawbook, please contact us. Our goal is content that is 100% true and accurate. Thank you.