As the Co-Chair of the firm’s Immigration practice, Fazila Vaid assists multinational corporations and business professionals with temporary and permanent residence matters, including a full range of nonimmigrant and immigrant visas and PERM applications. Clients appreciate Fazila’s ability to cut through the complex legalese of immigration law by streamlining and explaining the issues or problem at hand and providing a workable solution to realizing the right result.
Fazila's practice focuses primarily on counseling companies engaged in trade and investment in the U.S. regarding the transfer of employees utilizing the E and L visa categories. She has broad experience assisting companies to file complex and challenging O-1 petitions on behalf of researchers and individuals with extraordinary ability in business, the arts and sciences. She assists companies to file H-1B petitions for foreign students and workers as well as TN applications for Canadian and Mexican nationals. Fazila has developed a niche practice assisting professionals in all industries to secure permanent residency in the EB-1 category as entrepreneurs, researchers, scholars, artists and in other hard-to-define professions. In addition, Fazila has extensive experience assisting companies to file traditional PERM applications and I-140 petitions in the EB-2 and EB-3 preference categories. Fazila provides strategic advice to employers on a wide range of immigration issues, including I-9 compliance, audits and negotiations with ICE, corporate restructuring and mergers and acquisitions, complex Requests for Evidence, Notices of Intent to Revoke/Deny, nonimmigrant visa waivers, and short and long-term immigration options for corporations and individuals. Fazila also addresses issues related to family-based immigration and citizenship and naturalization matters.
Moreover, Fazila represents clients before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Labor, and numerous U.S. consular posts worldwide. She has been practicing immigration law exclusively for nearly two decades, and represents clients from a wide variety of industries including energy, information technology, finance, engineering, food manufacturing, automotive parts manufacturing, construction equipment manufacturing, and high-speed railway and railway manufacturing.
Fazila has served as pro bono counsel to low-income individuals in asylum matters for the National Immigrant Justice Center. She lectures on immigration issues at professional and community organizations, conferences, universities and professional schools. In the past, she has served as pro bono counsel to low-income individuals in asylum matters for the National Immigrant Justice Center. Prior to joining Masuda Funai, Fazila worked in the immigration department of a mid-size law firm in downtown Chicago, where she represented corporations, universities, hospitals, medical institutions, foreign medical graduates and individual clients with temporary and permanent residence matters.