H-1B visas:
Some employers allowed to pay to speed process
Immigration officials restore the ability of some firms to pay to expedite foreign worker applications.
Federal immigration officials gave certain employers the ability to pay to expedite applications for H-1B work visas again on Monday, partially restoring a service employers and visa applicants had prized for giving them more certainty about the prospect of placing foreign workers in a job.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had suspended premium processing for all H-1B applications in March, just a few weeks before the application period for the next fiscal year began. The agency resumed the accelerated processing of H-1B petitions Monday for employers whose applications are not subject to the annual H-1B cap and pay an additional fee.
There are 85,000 H-1B applications given to for-profit companies every year and are randomly allotted through a lottery. Thousands more applications are filed every year from institutions that are exempt from the cap, such as nonprofits, research institutions and hospitals. The agency said it will allow premium processing for capped H-1B applications “as workloads permit.”
With premium processing, a company can pay a $1,225 fee to learn within 15 calendar days if a prospective employee is eligible for the visa. Otherwise, it takes immigration services months to respond.
Nearly 60 percent of H-1B applicants applied for premium
processing last fiscal year, according to immigration services.
Some cap-exempt institutions, such as hospitals and universities, felt the absence of premium processing this year, as they typically rely on the 15-day processing period to quickly hire doctors or academics. The government resumed premium processing of physicians eligible for a waiver program in June.
Decisions on the visas are ultimately made by lottery, however, and access to the expedited track does not impact an applicant’s probability of a winning lottery entry.
At the time of the suspension, the citizenship and immigration agency said that the temporary suspension would help it reduce overall H-1B processing times and work on “long-pending petitions, which we have currently been unable to process.”