The deadline fell at sunset. April 30, 2001. A young associate in New York was working until one or two in the morning as filings poured in under 245i, the short-hand for a Clinton-era legalization window that let certain applicants who would not normally qualify for adjustment of status pay a 1,000 dollar penalty and apply anyway. That frenzied, high-stakes introduction to the field still shapes how David Katona thinks about immigration today.

“I started practicing right when 245i was passed. It was a crazy introduction,” he recalls. Those early years took him through a boutique, a mid-sized firm, then a large firm. In 2005 he founded his own shop. Two decades later, Katona leads a lean boutique focused on corporate immigration that still keeps its litigation muscles warm. The firm handles the full spread of business cases — H-1Bs, E-2s, L-1s, O-1s, P-3s, PERM, EB-1s, NIWs, even EB-5 — with family, removal defense, and targeted impact litigation as a smaller slice. “The only thing we don’t really do at all is asylum,” he says. “I prefer to stay lean and mean. You grow too fast, you get too big, you tend to see problems.”

Ask Katona what has changed most in the last 20 years and he does not start with statutes. He starts with scrutiny. “The laws have not changed significantly for a couple decades,” he says. “What changes is the level of scrutiny the government applies.” He points to the roller coaster of EB-1 and NIW adjudications. Early last year, many extraordinary ability and national interest cases were moving quickly, often without questions. Then the volume ticked up, quotas loomed, and the screws tightened. “It’s a capped system,” he notes. “If they keep approving at the same rate, they run out of numbers. So they tighten up. Things have gotten stricter over the last year.”

That dynamic sits inside a larger pattern he has watched across administrations: an expanding reliance on executive power whenever Congress refuses to act. “The biggest changes in decades are the greater use of executive authority,” Katona says. Presidents who favor humanitarian relief use parole and related programs; presidents focused on enforcement use the same tools to narrow access or escalate removals. Either way, litigation follows. “You’re going to see continued lawsuits. The administration gets checked by the courts. We saw this in the first Trump administration and it’s replaying now.”

Katona is blunt about certain headline proposals. On the push to limit birthright citizenship, he thinks the legal theory is thin and expects the courts to hold the line. “There are case laws that have held that even people who are unlawfully here are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” he says. “I’m hoping the Supreme Court does the right thing.” On a newly issued noncitizen registration requirement executed via interim final rule, he predicts an injunction challenge on process grounds. “To argue this is just procedural and does not impact rights is, in my opinion, false.”

The border is the other arena where rhetoric and reality diverge. Katona credits certain enforcement actions with reducing crossings but flags cost, legality, and sustainability. Splashy removal operations using military assets quickly became financially unwieldy, he notes, and some high-profile promises fizzled. “There’s a lot of talk,” he says. “Behind the scenes there are laws, procedures, and protections. He’s running up against that.”

Why does any of this matter to employers and workers who never get near a port of entry? Because pressure at one end of the system spills into the rest. Katona splits the labor market into two bands. At the unskilled level, undocumented and seasonal labor prop up agriculture, hospitality, and restaurants. “Our hotel clients on Long Island or upstate rely on H-2B,” he says. “They struggle to find people to show up for the season.” If fear suppresses that workforce, employers suffer. “We’re already hearing that people are afraid to show up to work, or even go to church or hospitals, because sensitive location protections were rescinded. Over time, those sectors get hit.”

At the high-skilled end, STEM shortages continue. “We hear it from employers all the time,” Katona says. Reliable, well-trained talent in engineering and data roles remains scarce, and immigrants plug those gaps through H-1B and employment-based green cards. Many later become founders and job creators. “There’s a lot of positive impact,” he says, “both at the high-skilled and unskilled levels.”

If scrutiny is the immediate headwind, backlogs are the head wall. Katona walks through the arithmetic. The annual employment-based quota is finite. A 7 percent per-country cap creates separate lines for India and China, which supply outsized shares of STEM talent. “Congress should get its act together and increase the quota,” he says. Short of that, there are technical fixes: eliminate the per-country cap, recapture unused visa numbers from past years, or change how family members count against the total. “Right now a family of five uses five numbers,” he notes. “One family should count as one. That would help significantly.” He is clear eyed about tradeoffs. Removing the cap would speed relief for India and China but lengthen waits for the rest of the world. Still, he frames each option as a rational lever Congress could pull.

Inside his own firm, the future looks both more digital and more careful. “Technology has played a huge part,” he says. Pandemic-era tools normalized video consults and self-service scheduling. AI now assists with drafting cover letters and briefs. But Katona draws a bright line between assistance and abdication. “You have to continue lawyering,” he says. “Review the work, verify the sources. We’ve seen briefs with non-existent case law get lawyers sanctioned.” His shop uses a separate drafting tool for EB-1, O-1, and NIW work, while running case management elsewhere. He is open to platforms that bring it all together, yet his risk antennae are up. “The more technology you have, the more exposed you are to hacking or vendor disruptions. Your firm does not have to be hacked. It could be your cloud vendor. The challenge is balancing productivity with security.”

That balancing act mirrors the profession’s larger dilemma. The system needs throughput without losing legitimacy, speed without losing due process. Courts should check overreach, but courts cannot allocate visas. Employers need workers, but enforcement headlines can empty job sites. Firms want efficiency, but clients deserve careful counsel. Katona is not cynical. He is pragmatic, and his advice to clients and colleagues sounds a lot like the way he built his practice: stay small enough to move, broad enough to help, and disciplined enough to keep standards high.

Two decades after 245i, the sun still sets on real deadlines. Quotas roll over. Policies adjust. Lawsuits land. In that churn, Katona keeps returning to first principles. Do the work. Tell the truth about what the law allows today. Push for the reforms that would make tomorrow less arbitrary. And keep your tools sharp, even when the tools are changing.