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ImmigrationLayer: Dated, Cited Immigration Answers for Your AI

A training cutoff. A monthly bulletin. One answer, every time.

A closed folder tied with red string, an hourglass, two notebooks, a pen, and a coffee on a sunlit desk

Every AI model has a training cutoff. USCIS does not. ImmigrationLayer gives the AI tools immigration practitioners already use a dated, cited answer instead of a guess from memory. Here is what it covers and what it leaves out.

I worked through my own immigration case with Claude. It gave me outdated information and did not tell me about upcoming deadlines. That was frustrating, and it cost me time and money.

Every AI model has a training cutoff. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) does not.

The model behind every AI assistant, “immigration AI” tools included, was trained months before today. Since then, USCIS has published new form editions, and a new Visa Bulletin has come out every month.

If you track editions, fees, and visa dates by hand, you already know the cost. A wrong form edition is a rejected package. A wrong fee is a rejected package and a lost filing date. A priority date read off an old bulletin is a missed window. And the duty to check sits with you, not the tool (ABA Formal Opinion 512, 2024-07-29).

ImmigrationLayer connects the AI tool you already use to data read from USCIS and Department of State pages. You ask about a form edition, a filing fee, a processing time, or a Visa Bulletin date. The assistant calls ImmigrationLayer instead of answering from memory.

Every answer that returns data carries three things:

  • as_of: the date of the data.
  • source_url: the page it came from, so you can open it.
  • content_hash: a fingerprint of what we stored.

You get the same answer until the source changes. When it changes, we log the change. A search engine hands the model a page to read. We hand it the value, with the date and the link, so you can check it before you rely on it.

Four tools are free, no sign-in

  • check_form_edition: the edition of a form USCIS accepts today, with its accepted-from and rejected-from dates. It also reports an edition USCIS has announced but not yet put into effect.
  • list_form_changes: form edition changes and alerts published since a date you pick.
  • get_visa_bulletin_dv: the Diversity Visa lottery cutoff or status for a region, and any country-specific exception listed for it.
  • get_visa_bulletin_notes: the advisory notes published in a month’s Visa Bulletin, such as a category that may become unavailable.

Four more tools, for filing fees, processing times, full Visa Bulletin charts, and alert search, need sign-in and an active plan. All four are included in the Practitioner plan, $49 a month plus tax.

Connect your assistant

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard for connecting an AI assistant to outside tools and data. You add a server’s URL once, and the assistant can call that server in the middle of a conversation.

The ImmigrationLayer server URL is https://immigrationlayer.com/mcp. No API key needed.

In Claude:

  1. Open Settings, then Connectors.
  2. Choose Add custom connector.
  3. Paste the URL and save.

In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http immigration-layer https://immigrationlayer.com/mcp

ChatGPT needs developer mode on the web, and the paid tools need a Business, Enterprise, or Edu workspace. The steps are on the connect page. For the paid tools, sign in with the email you used at checkout.

Boring on purpose

I wanted the answer to be boring. The verification is still yours. ImmigrationLayer only makes it quick to see what the answer was based on.

If you use AI in an immigration practice and something here is wrong or missing, message me on Bluesky or LinkedIn. I would rather hear it now.