It should come as no surprise that strutting into the Four Seasons restaurant is like walking into the General Assembly of the United Nations. In the lower lobby claiming their blizzard-tested overcoats and sturdy briefcases from the coat check room is a metropolitan mix of a business types from all over the world, including African diplomats, Italian winemakers, Swiss bankers, a British journalist and a particularly well dressed Dominican-born fashion designer among others.

It should come as no surprise that the Four Seasons lobby chatter is unlike the English only conversations you’d eavesdrop in say Des Moines because anyone in New York can tell tales of walking the streets of Manhattan for blocks on end without hearing a word of English let alone an American accent. This city, like so many cosmopolitan centers throughout the world, is filled with all types: Indians, Mexicans, Canadians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Brits among dozens if not hundreds of other expat groups.

But despite yesterday’s widely followed announcement that 43% of the city’s job force is made up of “newcomers,” their euphemism for both legal and illegal immigrants, the immigration story in New York is not a new one. Immigrants created this country right here in New York City where George Washington and company planned virtually every aspect of our government down on Wall Street in the late 1780s. Over the intervening 200 plus years, new batches of immigrants have built the great skyscrapers and bridges that make New York’s skyline one of the most recognizable in the world.

You only have to be in the city for a few days to know New York is still being refined and redefined by immigrants. We all hear our schools are filled with foreign-born students grappling to learn English. We all see our companies relying not only the manual labor of third worlders, but also on the brains who were drained from their homelands with their hearts set on finding a better life here in Gotham. We know immigrants are here. We clamor for a reservation in the great restaurants they have created. We cheer as we watch them wear Yankee pinstripes for the first time. All of this is obvious to someone who has been in the city for any time at all.

What isn’t obvious is how the government manages the influx of immigrants and how immigrants can gain permission to work here legally.

Sitting down in the Four Seasons Grill Room for an afternoon tea with immigration attorney Allen E. Kaye, just as the restaurant’s power lunch ends, only serves to shed a glimmer of light onto what a mess U.S. immigration law is. Just listening to the alphabet soup of visa names is enough to convince someone that this is not a job for the do-it-yourselfer. To understand the laws may be impossible, but to have any hope of navigating a path through them definitely may take a professional.

“There are two kinds of visas,” Mr. Kaye begins. “There are visas for immigrants, people who want to permanently live in the U.S. And there are non-immigrant visas for people who want to work in the U.S. for a period of time. In this category of non-immigrant visas, there are 17 different kinds, some for students, some for professionals, some for agricultural workers, some for seasonal workers, some even for caviar workers, thanks to an Alaskan congressman who secured a special exemption for his constituency.”

The H-1B is for professionals: doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and doctors, “anyone with a job that requires a degree or the equivalent,” Mr. Kaye explains. Once limited to 195,000 workers per year, since the end of the 2003 fiscal year they are capped at a mere 65,000 H1-B workers for the entire country. This quota is “not such a great idea,” Mr. Kaye sighs. Mr. Kaye points out that not only do New York companies lose the opportunity to hire uniquely qualified, highly educated workers in critical fields like information technology

for which not enough workers are home grown here in the U.S., he also notes that universities lose valuable tuition revenues from foreign students, who make up 50% of America’s advanced degrees in mathematics, engineering and sciences. “Yes they can come here to study and even work for a year after they graduate, but after that they may have to leave the country if the quota has already been reached. Do we really want to educate them compete against U.S. from abroad? Isn’t keeping them here the perfect antidote to offshoring jobs?”

Acknowledging there are exemptions to the strict quota of 65,000 per year, Mr. Kaye notes that there are “carve outs,” immigration lingo for classes of workers who do not count against the cap. They include college and university professors, certain medical doctors, and non-profit organizations, among others. But still he wishes the cap were significantly increased to “165,000 or more,” Mr. Kaye said over the cup of peppermint tea he never sipped during his hour long impassioned discussion.

How did this Queens College undergrad and Columbia Law School graduate build a successful U.S. business specializing in immigration law?

It began with a client from India, “who wanted a green card,” Mr. Kaye recounted. “Working with him got me started writing for an Indian newspaper, called India Abroad which is based in New York. For the last 25 years I’ve been writing a newspaper column for them every week for 52 weeks a year. Then I started doing a TV show that appeared on Channel 47 which is a Spanish language TV station. One day a week they opened up the station to non-Spanish language programming and we did a show called “Immigration and You” which probably was the world’s first infomercial. This is going back to when lawyers didn’t advertise. In fact it wasn’t an advertisement. It was more of a documentary. We did all sorts of things, including creating mock deportation trails with real judges all dressed in their robes. It became so real to our viewers who soon visited me that some of the actors we hired to play people with immigration problems were stopped on the streets on New York City and asked how their cases turned out.”

Today Mr. Kaye represents clients with a wide variety of immigration problems, both employees and employers, though 75 to 80% of his clients are Indian-born. At one point he even opened an office in Mumbai what was then called Bombay and has visited there 14 times in last 25 years.

The first visit was the most enlightening. “We advertised that we were hosting seminars about immigrating to the U.S. We did that one month in advance, and then one week and then the day before. For the first seminar 1,500 people showed up. They were everywhere: in seats, standing up and crowded around the door ways. Then we learned that Indian people will go anywhere to sit in air conditioning, so we started charging an admission fee,” Mr. Kaye explains. With the door fee, the numbers shrunk considerably, but his practice grew impressively.

Was it Mr. Kaye’s hands-on 25-year relationship with the local consulate that did the trick? Or was it his TV show that made him an immigration legend in Indian communities? It’s hard to say.

But on this bitterly cold, post-blizzard day in midtown, one thing is for certain: as lunch time stragglers sat in the Four Seasons getting ready to face the post-blizzard’s whipping wind, the Four Seasons manager, Indian-born Tri-deep Bose stopped to ask “was that Allen Kaye? He’s on television. I hear he’s got a very successful practice.”