Starting September 11, 2018, The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website stated that the government was extending its temporary suspension of premium processing for H-1B visa applicants until February 2019. The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to hire workers in fields such as science, engineering and information technology.
Premium processing program shortens the amount of time necessary to process H-1B visa petitions from six months to up to 16 days for a fee of $1,225. According to USCIS, this suspension is supposed to “process long pending petitions, be responsive to petitions with time-sensitive start dates, and Prioritize adjudication of H-1B extension of status cases that are nearing the 240-day mark.” U.S. employment rates have already dropped 3.9% in fiscal year 2017 due to these tight immigration enforcement.
In addition, recipients of H-1B visas are finding it extremely difficult and risky to extend their H-1B visas since USCIS has also announced that they will begin removal proceedings if extension requests are denied. This initiative to delay H-1B visas is part of the Trump administration’s “Buy American and Hire American” Executive Order No. 13788, which is a way to “protect” American workers by restricting legal immigration. But, the truth is that there are far more jobs that are not being done by American workers that are contributing to the decline of the U.S. economy.
In a recent publication posted in the New York Times, Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell University states, “A lot of our labor-force growth comes from immigrants and their children… Without them, we’d suffer the problems associated with countries with an aging population, like Japan.” The temporary ban on the Premium Processing Petition was originally supposed to be suspended by September 2018, but now that it has been extended to February 2019, job offers that were assigned more than six months ago are therefore rendered useless. Employers who were awaiting foreign employees to report to work by October 2018 are now unable to start them due to H-1B visas not being approved.
In addition, since the Premium Processing Petition had been temporarily banned, an excessive number of foreigners had applied for the H-1B lottery in 2017. USCIS ended up receiving a total of 190,098 H-1B applications at the start of 2018 which had exceeded the maximum of 85,000 H-1B visas that could be issued. As a result, more people got rejected than accepted under the lottery. The expansion of the suspension also means that current H-1B visa holders will have a hard time changing employers if need be. This is due to the fact that these immigrants cannot get a definite approval from another employer and have it processed in a timely manner of 16 days, which the Premium Processing Petition allows for.
The temporary ban on the Premium Processing Petition makes it more difficult to receive and retain an H-1B visa. A recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that the denial rate for H-1B visas has gone up 41 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017. Therefore, we must voice our concerns against the ban of the Premium Processing Petition to allow immigrant workers to continue to have a fair shot at employment within the U.S.
Instead of banning the Petition to process other cases more quickly, the USCIS can add more staff to process all cases while accepting the Premium Processing Petition. Another solution for those applying for the H-1B Visa is to file mandamus actions in order to compel the USCIS to make a decision. If more people file mandamus actions then the USCIS might realize that it is beneficial and less costly to process Premium Processing Petitions instead of receiving multiple mandamus actions instead. This ban has proved harmful to the U.S. economy and is turning immigrants from attempting to apply for work within the U.S. At the end of the day, other countries are seeing us as the land of opportunities that is turning away the immigrants that built it.
