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U.S. IMMIGRATION SYSTEM | hOT TOPICS THE NUMBERS CRUNCH At this firm, we named Friday, March 30, 2007, as “H-1B Filing Frenzy Day.” We were compelled to file our H1B cap-subject cases under a very unyielding, pressurized deadline precisely so that we could position our clients’ H-1B filings most favorably for approval, given our expectation that the 65,000 H-1B numbers for cap-subject petitions would be used up quite quickly. In reality, our worst fears came to true in that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the H-1B quota had been met as of April 2, 2007, which was the earliest date on which the Service could process H-1B cap-subject petitions for Fiscal Year (FY) 2008. By the Service’s own count, it has received in excess of 150,000 cap-subject H-1B Petitions, meaning that even timely filed H-1B Petitions are now being put into a lottery for random selection.As a consequence, our firm in one day filed 85 cap-subject H-1B Petitions, requesting immigration/employment authorization for our clients starting October 1, 2007. We surmise that this filing of voluminous H-1B Petitions was repeated by various other law firms throughout the United States, meaning that the H-1B numbers were depleted in very short order. Therefore, employers missing out on this H-1B filing deadline will need to either forego entirely the employment of critically needed foreign professionals or scramble for some type of patchwork solution. The purpose in leading off with this H-1B saga is not merely to broadcast our success in filing a large quantity of new H-1B Petitions in a timely, effective manner, but rather to highlight the single, most overriding reality in employment-based immigration law today: The quantity of available immigrant and nonimmigrant visa numbers is clearly and absurdly deficient to meet the legitimate needs of the United States in retaining and enhancing our competitiveness in a globalized world. In this forthcoming period of time, the Congress will either need to address forthrightly this numerical deficiency as part of a comprehensive or piecemeal approach, or simply choose to ignore this looming immigration crisis to the detriment of our legitimate national welfare. |
Aronson & Associates, P.A. |