H-1A REGULATIONS FORMALLY RESCINDED

File this blog entry under the category of “of no value to anyone but historians and regulatory completists”. 

The H-1A was a nurse-specific nonimmigrant visa category in the 1990s.  Congress failed to extend the H-1A in 1997 and the last H-1A nurse visa expired in 2000.  The H-1A law was formally repealed by Congress in 1999 in Sec. 2(c) of the Nursing Relief for Disadvantaged Areas Act of 1999, Public Law 106-095, 113 Stat. 1312, 1316.

For reasons that must be clear to someone but are lost on me, the Department of Labor formally rescinded some of the underlying H-1A regulations on November 20, 2013.  To give you an idea of how far the H-1A has fallen on everyone’s radar screen, the H-1A was not even considered in this June Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill.