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Alka Bahal is a highly experienced corporate immigration attorney with a career spanning over two decades. Specializing in corporate/business immigration, she has represented companies of all sizes, providing expertise in business visas, strategic immigration planning, case management, and I-9 compliance. Alka’s dedication to her clients is evident in her track record of maintaining a 99% approval rating for visa applications and providing counsel on a wide range of immigration issues, including government inspections, Social Security mismatch issues, and Department of Labor investigations.
Throughout her career, Alka has demonstrated a commitment to excellence in corporate immigration law. From her early days as a solo practitioner, where she coined the term “corporate immigration” to describe her niche practice, to her role as Partner & Co-Chair of the Corporate Immigration Practice at Fox Rothschild LLP, Alka has consistently delivered high-quality legal representation and strategic guidance to her clients. Her expertise extends across various industries, including hospitality, telecommunications, media, healthcare, and more, where she has assisted numerous companies with their immigration needs.
Alka’s passion for corporate immigration is matched by her dedication to educating others on the intricacies of immigration law. As a frequent speaker and writer on corporate immigration topics nationwide, she shares her knowledge and insights to help employers navigate the complex landscape of immigration compliance and strategic planning. With a focus on providing timely and cost-effective legal representation, Alka continues to be a trusted advisor to businesses seeking immigration solutions in an ever-changing global environment.
Outside General Counsel Solutions™ serves as the indispensable legal partner for companies unable to maintain a dedicated legal department. Specializing in providing tailored virtual legal support, their team boasts extensive expertise across key areas crucial to mid-cap businesses, from contracts to commercial litigation. With seasoned General Counsels from “Big Law” backgrounds, they offer fixed-fee solutions and round-the-clock accessibility, ensuring clients effectively manage risk and propel business growth.
Alka Bahal: My name is Alka Bahal. and I am your co-host with my partner, Christopher Santomassimo. Welcome to my very first podcast.
Christopher Santomassimo: It’s a pleasure to be part of it.
Alka Bahal: Thank you for having me and for letting me co-host with you today.
Christopher Santomassimo: Absolutely. Now, I thought it was time not only to spotlight what you do in corporate immigration services, but to talk about the upcoming conference that you’re going to speak at.
Alka Bahal: Yeah.
Christopher Santomassimo: One of the thought leaders.
Alka Bahal: I welcome that opportunity. So I’ll be speaking at the annual AILA. That’s the American Immigration Lawyers Association conference this June. It’s our really big annual conference. We get somewhere between 6 to 8000 attendees of immigration lawyers. It’s a lot of immigration lawyers in the United States, isn’t it? And I’ll be speaking there about consular processing. So what consular processing is after somebody is in the U.S. or abroad gets the actual visa, they get an approval from the immigration services here in the U.S. There’s another step to be done, which is to go to your local consulate, have an interview, get your visa stamped, and then you get to come into the U.S.. So it’s maybe a little known, unknown piece of the visa process.
Christopher Santomassimo: And it’s not just something you do over the Internet.
Alka Bahal: Not anymore. And you can make your appointment over the Internet, you know, and just like all sort of customer service things, can’t talk to a human being anymore. You just got to use those interfaces that they come up with. I mean, for whatever reason, the government never wants to employ H-1B employees, so they have these sort of antiquated systems, that software,
Christopher Santomassimo: They just test people’s will or the two to actually come?
Alka Bahal: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You can go to the consulate, wait for a few hours for a formal interview.
Christopher Santomassimo: Well, welcome to working with the federal government, right?
Alka Bahal: Yeah, it’s all about the rights.
Christopher Santomassimo: Is there actually some some substantive reason they do that other than just to make it not so easy?
Alka Bahal: There definitely is. What they’re really primarily looking for is detecting fraud. They want to know, you know, is the individual who’s applied for this visa the same as the person whose credentials were submitted to immigration? Is there really in, for example, in a work visa, a bona fide job offer? Is there an existing company? You know, are there local criminal issues that weren’t disclosed that the consulate could discover, you know, before sending the person? So they’re really looking for truth. They’re looking for, you know, is there fraud in the process? Are you who you say you are, you know, and is all this information that’s in the visa petition really true? Or did your lawyer or someone else just concoct and file it? And the human being who’s out the consulate has no idea what’s going on.
Christopher Santomassimo: Right. Well, that that could happen. Right. They put up somebody. Right. And there’s actually a nefarious reason they’re doing it.
Alka Bahal: That’s correct. Is correct. The government is particularly concerned about fraud, especially in the H-1B contracts. You know, they’re trying to sort of jimmy these H-1B visas just to bring people. So there are some concerns that are actually known as high fraud consulates where they’re more aware of fraud than others. You know, for example, you might imagine that in India, where we’re sending hundreds upon thousands of people in a year, there’s a higher rate of fraud than there is from, say, Sweden, where we’re sending maybe a thousand people. I don’t know. That’s just numbers I’ve made up. But, you know, there are consulates where there’s more fraud than there are in others. And so they tend to sort of take a more scrutinizing approach.
Christopher Santomassimo: So they have a higher level of level of scrutiny in those particular places as a result, right?
Alka Bahal: Correct. Correct. And sometimes real legitimate applications can get caught up in these screening processes and then it can be hard to untangle them. So even where you as the lawyer know things are legitimate, it can take time to undo them. You know, if somebody gets caught in something called administrative processing, they could be held up in their home country for an additional 30 days. Now, that might not be so painful when the person’s coming here to start work and you have to defer a start date. But imagine when a person goes home for vacation for two weeks and they need to renew their visa stamp to come in, and now they’re stuck in India for 30 days, 60 days it becomes difficult.
Christopher Santomassimo: What are some of the things that you as an experienced immigration lawyer can do to help, you know, resolve some of those issues or maybe set the the visa application on a good footing from the beginning?
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