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H1-B Administrators Are Challenging An Unusually Large Number of Applications (bloomberg.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader decaffeinated quotes Bloomberg: Starting this summer, employers began noticing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications. Cases that would have sailed through the approval process in earlier years ground to a halt under requests for new paperwork. The number of challenges -- officially known as "requests for evidence" or RFEs -- are up 44 percent compared to last year, according to statistics from USCIS...
"We're entering a new era," said Emily Neumann, an immigration lawyer in Houston who has been practicing for 12 years. "There's a lot more questioning, it's very burdensome." She said in past years she's counted on 90 percent of her petitions being approved by Oct. 1 in years past. This year, only 20 percent of the applications have been processed. Neumann predicts she'll still have many unresolved cases by the time next year's lottery happens in April 2018.
"We're entering a new era," said Emily Neumann, an immigration lawyer in Houston who has been practicing for 12 years. "There's a lot more questioning, it's very burdensome." She said in past years she's counted on 90 percent of her petitions being approved by Oct. 1 in years past. This year, only 20 percent of the applications have been processed. Neumann predicts she'll still have many unresolved cases by the time next year's lottery happens in April 2018.
As somebody who has been through the USICS process with a relative I don't think you really capture the situation at all.
An RFE isn't a "challenge." I received an RFE myself. It is what it says it is: a request for additional documentation. The person who decides to send an RFE or not isn't a person who has "reasons," or an "agenda." They are basically a police officer. Their title is Immigration Officer, and their job involves not only investigating the paperwork to see if it is naughty, but also chasing down and arresting people who don't have the right paperwork. This is not some sort of political appointee, these are the same career professionals who were doing the job last year, the year before, the year before. Whatever personal agenda they might have, it isn't changing from year to year.
What changed is a policy, relating to how much paperwork they have to find in the application before approving it. In the past they had instructions not to really investigate the H1B applications in the same way that they process other types of application; now they're applying the same type of evidence standards that other applications require, and are in fact called for in the laws authorizing the H1B program. That's what they're going to do. Naturally, these companies were submitting the least evidence they needed to get approved, because in a "rubber stamp" regulatory environment you don't want to submit extra stuff that might get examined. But as here, when they suddenly switch to the actual system that the law set up, now those applications don't have all the required evidence, and so of course they're going to get RFEs.
If their situation is like mine, and everything is in order the Officer just wanted additional evidence, then they'll have no problem. If in fact their application doesn't meet the standards in the law, and they only even submitted it because they anticipated getting rubber-stamped, then they'll get rejected. Rightfully.
Your idea is silly because it would require there to be a bunch of new appointees running things, but actually that isn't the case. They're not involved in considerations like trying to encourage companies to hire domestic talent; they're concerned with the paperwork involved in documenting the required steps in the law.
These aren't the immigration cops who arrest brown people for being near the border; these are the immigration cops who wake you up at 6am to make sure you're really married and sleeping in the same bed! They don't give a rats ass what color her skin is; most people whose applications they approve are going to have brown skin, because we're on planet Earth.