Trump administration has taken action to prevent abuse and fraud in visa programs, official says
Washington:
The Trump administration has taken a series of measures to prevent abuse and fraud in employment-based visa programs, including changing the process for selecting caps for the H-1B, the most popular work permit. sought after among Indian IT professionals, one of the leading United States. An immigration official told lawmakers.
The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant visa that allows U.S. businesses to employ foreign workers in skilled occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. Tech companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees every year in countries like India and China.
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has implemented rules, policy memoranda, and operational changes that protect the economic interests of American workers and businesses and prevent abuse and fraud in employment-based visa programs, Joseph Edlow, deputy director of policy, USCIS told lawmakers during a congressional hearing Thursday.
These include securing the fees that some H-1B petitioners must now ultimately pay to help train American workers, clarifying the calculation guidelines for the one-year employment requirement at abroad for L-1 petitions in order to “ensure coherent arbitration”.
Other steps include changing the selection process for the H-1B cap to increase the chances of selecting grantees who have obtained a master’s degree or above from a US institution and expanding collaboration with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to better detect and eliminate fraud by employers.
The H-1B visa has an annual numerical limit of 65,000 visas each fiscal year as mandated by Congress. The first 20,000 requests filed on behalf of recipients with an American master’s degree or above are exempt from the cap.
The Trump administration has also created an online counseling form for reporting USCIS H-1B and H-2B frauds, as well as an H-1B employer data hub to provide information to the public on employer claims. for H-1B workers, Mr. Edlow said.
The H-2B visa is for short-term seasonal workers while the L-1 is for internal company transfers.
USCIS released the first report of its kind estimating the number of H-1B nonimmigrants allowed to work in the United States and instituted electronic filing of multiple forms and, for the first time, using a registration process. electronic for the purpose of selecting the H-1B ceiling, he told members of the House Judiciary subcommittee responsible for the citizenship and immigration hearing.
Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations, American Immigration Lawyers of America, told members of Congress that USCIS data shows the percentage of cases closed with a request for evidence (RFE) increased from 22.3 in FY2015 to 40.2 in FY2019.
“The RFE rate reached 60% in the first quarter of fiscal 2019 and was 47.2% in the first quarter of fiscal 2020. Often, RFEs and NOIDs are issued to search for evidence that has already provided or which are not necessary to establish eligibility or the contrary to the clear language of the law, ”she said.
Even when RFEs and NOIDs ultimately lead to approvals, the unnecessary delay caused by their issuance effectively means that USCIS reviews each request or petition twice – once during the initial review and again in response to what. is often an unnecessary RFE or NOID – thus leading to twice the amount of resources actually needed to complete the judgment, she said.
According to Dalal-Dheini, when these RFEs and NOIDs result in abusive denials, American employers and individuals are forced to turn to federal courts for redress. Often, when a legal challenge is brought, the agency is forced to reopen and approve the case because the decision is against the law.
More recently, litigation forced USCIS to rescind H-1B policy memoranda that were deemed to violate immigration and nationality law. Issuing abusive denials, resulting in time and money spent unnecessarily pushing back illegal decisions, depletes agency resources which could be better used to clear backlogs.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
