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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.
The H1B visa program is used intentionally as cheap labor to replace the American worker under the guise of 'we just can't find anyone skilled local'.
It's more about finding a worker who will work for 1/3rd the salary.
H-1B visa abuse is pretty commonplace. Even B-1 visa abuse is commonplace where people from offshore wind up working here in the US for 90-180 days, then get rotated out, and another batch of people from Kerala or Bangalore moved in. The fines for that are so cheap that it is written off as a cost of doing business.
The problem is that there are many tax incentives to abuse the visa system. For example, I can pay the payroll tax for 20 FTEs, or I can pay some contracting firm that hauls in people fresh off the boat, and don't have to pay a dime. As an added bonus, I can tell them to punt someone I don't like because I feel like it, and the contracting place removes them. No separation, no work on my side other than locking some accounts. Plus, I don't have to worry about HR and interviews.
So, until the system is fixed that encourages outsourcing to H-1B abusing contract firms, we will see this shit continuing. The H-1B program needs to be tossed, or modified where for every dollar paid for an H-1B, another dollar gets paid to the US government earmarked for education, with a minimum salary of five times the median income.
You know the likely result of this? "Oh crap, we need to hire more Americans!" followed shortly by "damn we need to invest in and train our people, hiring is too expensive these days!"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Both were hit with RFE. Guidance from the lawyers were:
They seem to be cracking down on the practice of finding unusual combinations of qualifications in the candidates (like BS in accounting, fluency in Kannada language and truck driving license), putting them all as necessary qualifications making it impossible for anyone else to apply.
We only hire people with Masters or PhDs from top American schools. We were at a very heave disadvantage in the earlier loose era. TCS, Wipro and the assorted Indian body shoppers would grab the H1Bs and our candidates had to live through lottery. But now, we can easily meet the law, in spirit as well as the letter. Personally I welcome such strict scrutiny. It should have been like this from day 1.
US high school grads with 1 or 2 year training is enough to do most jobs done by the Indian Body shop imports. They should not even be considered for H1B. Simple coding is all they do, and they were gaming the system. They should restrict H1Bs for Graduate degrees from US universities. That will curb the rampant resume inflation and outright lies in the resumes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Even if it wasn’t the author’s intent. From TFA:
”For Centro, a company in Chicago that makes technology for ad agencies, the problems started this summer. Centro had applied for visas for three young employees who already had the legal right to work for a limited time after graduating from college. One of the applications had been chosen in the H-1B lottery. Emilie Clark, the company’s director of human resources, happily called the employee to tell him his immigration status was settled for the next three years. ”
H1-B is supposed to be used for special cases where there simply aren’t enough Americans available with a particular hard-to-find skill set. There’s just about zero chance that some young recent graduate has such a background. But just for the sake of argument, what were the skills in this case? Again, from TFA:
”... which consisted of writing algorithms and required knowledge of multiple programming languages as well as a solid understanding of relational data storage systems ...”
Seriously? The company needed an H1-B for that?
#DeleteChrome
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.
Probably the paperwork requirements are just BS, but simply putting obstacles in the path and making it more of a hassle to get these visas actually makes sense. In principle, you have to try to recruit US citizens first, but there are ways around that requirement. For example, you advertise an entry-level job with a low salary, reject applicants for not having some very specific job experience or skills, then hire a highly experienced overqualified foreigner at the same low salary. I'd be very surprised if it weren't true the in a majority of cases, H1-B holders were sought because they're younger and cheaper, not because they have special skills. What the government really ought to do is have an auction for these visas instead of a lottery, If Google, Microsoft et al. really need these people, they shouldn't mind paying $100,000 or more bounty to get them. Use the money to fund scholarships for US students in fields where there are supposedly such dire shortages, instead of saddling them with $100,000 of student debt.
That's not what he said. They need to follow the process and meet the requirements.
What we have are companies claiming they can't find qualified people, then bring in people that are equally as unqualified, but measurably cheaper.
if you are going to have rules, fucking enforce them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.