More than two decades of independently published writing on U.S. immigration law and policy
Richard T. Herman is a U.S. immigration lawyer, author, and founder of Herman Legal Group, The Law Firm for Immigrants. For more than three decades, he has represented immigrants, families, professionals, students, entrepreneurs, and employers while writing about the laws and policies that shape immigration to the United States.
This archive reaches back to 2004 and includes more than 90 independently published original works, including articles, op-eds, legal analyses, essays, policy papers, and a book. Many were also syndicated or republished by additional outlets.
For Richard’s professional background and experience, visit Why Trust Richard T. Herman.
Richard T. Herman is a U.S. immigration attorney, author, and immigration-policy commentator based in Cleveland, Ohio. He founded Herman Legal Group, an immigration law firm serving clients throughout the United States and internationally.
His writing operates at the intersection of immigration law and its real-world consequences. Some articles address specific rules affecting H-1B workers, international students, TPS beneficiaries, naturalization applicants, or people facing enforcement. Others examine larger questions: whether the United States is competing successfully for global talent, whether enforcement respects constitutional limits, whether American cities can reverse decline through immigration, and what citizenship means in a nation shaped by immigrants.
This page lists writing authored or co-authored by Richard and published outside the Herman Legal Group website. Interviews, news stories that quote Richard, and speeches are listed on his profiles and media page.
Richard’s earliest writing established themes that continue today: the economic importance of immigration, America’s competition for talent, the role of immigrants as entrepreneurs and innovators, and the consequences when immigration policy works against the country’s long-term interests.
Makes the case that immigrant entrepreneurship is one of the American economy’s recurring engines of renewal, and challenges the assumption that immigrants and American workers are necessarily in economic competition.
A policy paper on the role immigrants play in science, engineering, and entrepreneurship, and what America loses when talent it educates cannot stay and build companies here.
Drawing on Peter Drucker, argues that attracting entrepreneurial newcomers is an economic-development strategy for aging cities, not merely an immigration issue.
Immigration policy should account for entrepreneurs who create businesses and jobs, not only workers who fill existing ones.
An economic case for reform: the United States competes internationally for entrepreneurs and risk-takers who create jobs.
Reframes the immigration debate around entrepreneurship and attracting immigrants who start companies and invest capital.
These articles examine the legal mechanics of naturalization and birthright citizenship and a deeper question: what does it mean to become American, and how difficult should the United States make that process?
Revisits Reagan’s description of America as strengthened by people who choose to come here.
How steep fee increases can make naturalization increasingly dependent on income.
One of America’s most distinctive ideas is that national identity can be acquired through citizenship.
Places naturalization fees within the long chain of costs Indian immigrants bear across years of lawful status.
Compares today’s immigration anxiety with earlier fears about Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants.
Connects rising naturalization costs with the long history of Arab-American contributions.
How groups once called culturally incompatible became part of the American mainstream.
What the citizenship test means to immigrants facing language or literacy barriers.
Naturalization as civic infrastructure that should not be available only to those who can absorb rising fees.
How attempts to restrict birthright citizenship can migrate into visa and consular policy.
Whether a president can redefine the constitutional meaning of citizenship through executive power.
Why New Hampshire became a key forum in the Fourteenth Amendment litigation.
Why naturalization is a public investment for Ohio rather than a private transaction. Richard writes commentary for Ohio Capital Journal, the statewide nonprofit newsroom that is part of States Newsroom.
Why foreign-born citizens are questioning how much protection naturalization provides in the current enforcement climate.
The question running through these articles: what happens when American employers and universities recruit talented people from around the world, but the immigration system makes it increasingly difficult for them to stay?
Immigrant physicians, scientists, and medical researchers and the tangible stakes of skilled-immigration policy.
How unpredictable rules erode America’s advantage in educating and keeping global talent.
Why work-authorization delays undermine American manufacturing policy.
Scientific immigration as part of geopolitical competition over research and innovation.
What replacing F-1 duration of status with fixed admission periods means for students and colleges.
How rising fees and financial guarantees select for wealth as well as eligibility.
How extraordinary OPT costs would alter what American universities offer international students.
The consequences of narrowing the post-layoff grace period for long-term H-1B professionals.
The H-1B system from the employer’s perspective: rising fees, compliance burdens, and legal risk.
How international students can help Northeast Ohio’s universities and workforce.
Why eliminating the 60-day grace period would destabilize families and a regional economy.
Why HR leaders should involve immigration counsel earlier in layoffs and sponsorship decisions.
These articles ask where the legal limits lie when ICE, CBP, and other agencies use airports, databases, detention, civil penalties, and aggressive enforcement against noncitizens, and sometimes against U.S. citizens.
How ICE’s enforcement priorities shape outcomes for people in immigration proceedings.
Whether a civil immigration agency is becoming a national police apparatus without public debate.
Why accountability after deaths in enforcement requires independent evidence and investigation.
What happens when mass-enforcement promises collide with legal limits and public resistance.
Why allied governments should watch how their citizens are treated in U.S. immigration enforcement.
Why unpayable civil fines push people further into the shadows.
Why enforcement policy needs transparent rules rather than social-media pronouncements.
Body cameras, independent review, and oversight as ICE expands.
Why a pending application does not guarantee protection during domestic air travel.
How airport enforcement undermines trust in a city built on global travel.
Why discriminatory language by agents is relevant to evaluating enforcement decisions.
The danger of expedited procedures without Convention Against Torture protections.
The secondary economic costs of large enforcement operations.
Institutional responsibility when enforcement operations produce foreseeable harm.
Why referring asylum cases to court without interviews shifts pressure rather than resolving it.
Immigration categories like TPS, asylum, and marriage visas ultimately govern families and lives. These writings examine what happens when administrative rules collide with family unity, humanitarian protection, and the evidence immigrants must produce.
The significance of what became DACA for young immigrants, written days after its announcement.
The evidentiary paradox facing immigrants whose secrecy once protected them.
The emotional and legal reality of marriage and fiancé immigration.
The local consequences of national TPS decisions for Ohio employers and communities.
Why Ohio’s experience with Haitian residents should inform the national TPS debate.
Legal analysis of work authorization while TPS litigation unfolds.
Employer compliance when status can change through litigation.
How federal TPS policy can work against local labor needs.
How TPS changes move quickly into local labor markets and communities.
How federal removal decisions become local family and workforce crises.
A response to the death of a 20-year-old Haitian Wright State student after he lost protection.
What Matter of Delcarmen-Lara means for advance-parole travel in DACA, TPS, and adjustment cases.
Richard has written about immigration, Cleveland’s economic future, and Ohio communities for more than two decades. Long before it became a common economic-development theme, these articles argued that shrinking cities should see newcomers as residents, entrepreneurs, and institution-builders.
Northeast Ohio was failing to take advantage of immigrant entrepreneurial energy.
How diversity strengthens creativity, entrepreneurship, and resilience.
Immigration as a population-growth strategy for Cleveland.
What population decline means for workers, customers, and taxpayers.
How immigrant business formation can energize a slow-growth metro.
Why reform should include the needs of shrinking industrial regions.
Immigrant workers, engineers, and networks in the industrial economy.
What American workers can learn from the immigrant entrepreneurial mindset.
A Northeast Ohio example of skilled immigrants creating companies and jobs.
Why a city competing for immigrants must deliberately recruit and retain them.
The self-inflicted loss when international students cannot stay and start businesses.
Why shrinking cities cannot afford to make newcomers feel unwanted.
Why downtown revitalization depends on more people living and working there.
Immigration and international students as human-capital strategies.
The contradiction between courting immigrants and monitoring them.
Immigrants as successors for retiring small-business owners.
A national Main Street strategy built on immigrant entrepreneurship.
Mass deportation as a local taxpayer choice.
The contradiction of removing residents while planning for growth.
What a national cost estimate means for one Ohio county, framed around two men held after a judge found them neither dangerous nor likely to flee.
Immigration law is federal law, but it increasingly intersects with governors, legislatures, elections, and presidential power. These pieces examine what policy should be and who should make it.
Designing reform around a global market for talent.
How confident societies approach integrating newcomers.
The case for a national immigration system over a state patchwork.
Distinguishing border control from closing legal pathways.
What a durable post-confrontational immigration consensus might look like.
Combining border control with better-designed legal channels.
Why support for border enforcement is not support for unlimited enforcement power.
How perceived excess could erode a traditional political advantage.
Visa rules shape how students, travelers, and professionals see America long before they reach a U.S. airport. These articles examine consular policy across Africa and the Americas and its overlap with diplomacy.
The risks of using visas as a diplomatic weapon.
Why port-of-entry inspection can become a second adjudication.
The difference between holding a visa and being admitted.
Visa bonds and American soft power in Africa.
How unpredictable policy redirects talent to competitors.
Whether visa bonds turn a legal determination into a wealth test.
The costs of centralizing visa processing for applicants.
The long-term implications of permanent visa bonds.
Why receiving, keeping, and using a visa are three separate government decisions.
When repeated B-2 visits begin to look like residence.
Richard was writing about immigrant entrepreneurship, demographic decline, global talent, and Cleveland’s need for immigrants in the 2000s. Those themes later expanded into international students, skilled immigration, citizenship, TPS, and federal reform, and more recently into ICE enforcement, immigration courts, asylum procedure, birthright citizenship, H-1B restrictions, and consular policy.
The underlying questions remain consistent: how immigration law can protect national interests without undermining due process, how the United States should compete for talent, and what kind of country America wants to be toward people who choose to join it.
Some of Richard’s writings have been republished by additional independent publications. Each underlying work is counted once, even when several publishers carry it.
The Fulcrum (July 6, 2026); republished by Latino News Network.
South Asian Herald (July 4, 2026); additional versions in Baptist News Global, Universal News Network, and India West.
DC Journal / InsideSources (July 24, 2026); republished by The Nashua Telegraph.
New African Magazine (August 3, 2026); republished by The Herald, Zimbabwe (August 14, 2026).
San José Spotlight (August 17, 2026); republished by The Washington Post (Ripple) on August 18, 2026.
Norwalk Reflector (September 1, 2026); also published by the Sandusky Register.
Published through Cox First Media in the Dayton Daily News and Springfield News-Sun (September 2, 2026).
More than 90 original works dating back to 2004. Syndications and republications are listed separately and are not counted again.
Richard T. Herman is a U.S. immigration lawyer, author, and founder of Herman Legal Group. He has practiced immigration law for more than three decades and has published extensively on immigration law and policy.
Naturalization and citizenship, birthright citizenship, H-1B and employment immigration, international students, USCIS adjudications, asylum procedure, advance parole, ICE enforcement, immigration courts, DACA, TPS, family immigration, immigrant entrepreneurship, visa bonds, consular processing, and immigration reform.
Law360, The Washington Post, Salon, Governing, Washington Examiner, Houston Chronicle, Crain’s Cleveland Business, IndustryWeek, HR Executive, Campaigns & Elections, The Regulatory Review, RealClearScience, JURIST, University World News, The Advocate, HuffPost, New African Magazine, CoolCleveland, and many others.
No. This page lists independently published writing. HLG’s own resources are available in its Immigration Articles and Immigration Guides.
Since at least 2004. His early work focused on immigrant entrepreneurship, Cleveland, and economic development; later work expanded into citizenship, employment immigration, students, humanitarian protection, enforcement, courts, and visa policy.
Yes. Reporters, editors, and producers can use HLG’s media resource for journalists.
Entries are based on identifiable third-party publication records and surviving publisher pages or archives. Where available, the publisher’s own record is used, and original works are distinguished from later republications.
