The annual American Immigration Lawyers Association conference is in Vancouver, British Columbia, this year, so all the immigration lawyers attending from the United States will get to do a little real-life research of their own on how it goes when you want to get into the United States.

The conference gets going Wednesday, June 25, and runs through Saturday. It's wall-to-wall with interesting people and activities. The exhibit hall alone is likely to be quite something. Of course, our LexisNexis booth will be the best! We'll have some of our authors there to talk to people, and we'll be able to answer and ask questions, seeing what's on people's minds and what's happening. Lots is!

There will be practice roundtables, workshops, informal sessions with experts, forums with representatives of the main immigration agencies, several "tracks" of panel discussions every day, and plenty of other activities. The "tracks" cover everyone from beginner to super-duper expert.

Immigration has so many interesting issues involving getting permission for people to enter, to stay, to work, to naturalize, to bring family, or to hire. The hottest topics will probably about immigration enforcement (federal and, lately, state and local). Very recently, two big developments have been (1) a new regulation (discussed in the July 1 issue of our Bender's Immigration Bulletin by former USCIS Director of Business and Trade Efren Hernandez) requiring companies that contract with executive-branch agencies to use the E-Verify[i] online service to check that employees are allowed to work in the United States and (2) a bombshell when the Department of Labor said it was investigating a very prominent law firm. As you can probably guess, there's been quite a reaction. If you thought the no-match regulation and the stricter identification requirements to get into the country caused a ruckus, you should see some of the comments about that announcement!

And that's just on the enforcement issue! Things are hopping in dozens of areas of immigration law. I hope to give you an update from Vancouver in a couple of days.  For more information, see the AILA Web site at http://www.aila.org/ac.