Kenneth J. RobinsonIn an interview with Manage HR, Kenneth J. Robinson, who chairs Hahn Loeser’s Immigration Practice Group, shares his insights on how they help clients understand the nuances of immigration regulations and build customized solutions for businesses’ challenges.
What are the challenges you are currently observing in the immigration space, and how do you mitigate them?
The immigration process has steadily grown adversarial over the years. As a result, petitioning employers have to invest more effort, money, and time to attain the immigration benefits for employment authorization and various visa classifications for their foreign national workforce. Leveraging technology, we facilitate the requirements-gathering process and streamline the work that has to be done to prepare and file petitions.
Foreign national employees can interact directly with our immigration platform, while HR professionals can review and administer all the activities through a dashboard. This saves significant time, lessens the burden for in-house HR professionals, and allows companies to quickly achieve immigration benefits and onboard employees. This is a win-win situation for all the parties involved.
What are the factors that set you a notch above the rest?
We measure success in terms of meeting clients’ goals. Our Immigration Practice Group is result and goal-oriented. We understand the complexities of the immigration process and help clients holistically. It is not simply applying for an immigration benefit and getting it approved. There are many considerations and agreements between the employer and the employee that factor into the process. Also, many services have to be rendered before, during, and post-filing for immigration benefits. We design an immigration program for clients that they can use as a value-added benefit while recruiting and onboarding their foreign national talent. If businesses fail to make the immigration process transparent, foreign national workers often feel lost. We strive to ensure that there is visibility and understanding at every step so that employees appreciate their employers’ efforts on their behalf. Foreign nationals always prefer to work for organizations with immigration programs that take care of them and their families.
Our goal is to use our resources to ease the immigration burden on employers while helping them attain the workforce they need to remain competitive
Please share some instances where you helped clients achieve their goals.
At the beginning of the Trump administration, we attracted numerous technology firms that were receiving government pushback and denials of their petitions for benefits— especially in the H-1B space. Working with them, we reduced the number of requests for evidence (RFE) for consistently earning approvals when prior counsel failed to do so. We made a difference.
We have also been successful in helping our clients navigate the COVID-related travel restrictions. Many of them were confronting various issues as embassies and consulates were closed for normal visa operations. Travelers required special permission to commute and show the proper reasons for it. Although the process of obtaining such permissions was complex, we served our clients well, allowing them to travel when necessary. For example, we helped the CEO of a major brewing company in commuting seamlessly from the U.K. During the COVID period, the company converted and dedicated a few facilities to produce hand sanitizers and provide space for vaccination. Their CEO was negotiating six different sites for building bottling and distributing facilities but could not enter the U.S. due to COVID restrictions. We were able to bring him to the U.S. quickly by advocating on his behalf why he should exempt from the restrictions. His permission was also renewed several times, which helped the CEO to lead his company’s plans toward success and create hundreds of jobs across the U.S.
How did you respond and adapt to the pandemic? Given the current scenario, what does the future hold for Hahn Loeser?
During COVID, when the economy went into a bout of turmoil and companies were laying off employees across the globe, our firm showed our resiliency that has stood the test of time. Although we had to make some adjustments, we managed the storm, ensured zero layoffs, and quickly pivoted to be able to help our clients remotely. We have even hired during these trying times and continued the summer program for our summer clerks.
With regard to our immigration practice, we will continually grow and increase our bandwidth by enhancing technology and processes. We also expect to add personnel, especially paralegal staff, to facilitate our work and grow the practice group in the coming months.
