Maria Ramirez Uribe, PolitiFact, Oct. 3, 2024 "Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole do not provide people a pathway to citizenship. So, people with humanitarian parole or Temporary...
CMS: The Untold Story: Migrant Deaths Along the US-Mexico Border and Beyond October 16, 2024 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM (ET) The Journal on Migration and Human Security will soon release a special edition...
Angelo Paparelli, Manish Daftari, Oct. 3, 2024 "Recent developments have upended many of our earlier predictions of the likely post-election immigration landscape in the United States. These include...
Reece Jones, Oct. 2, 2024 "“Open borders” has become an epithet that Republican use to attack Democrats, blaming many problems in the United States on the lack of attention to the border...
UCLA Law, Oct. 1, 2024 "Today, a UCLA alumnus and a university lecturer, represented by attorneys from the law firm of Altshuler Berzon LLP, Organized Power in Numbers , and the Center for Immigration...
Marcelo Rochabrun, ProPublica, Apr. 7, 2017 - "Lost amid the uproar over the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants is a change coming to the legal immigration system that’s expected to be costly for both U.S. companies and the government itself.
Each year at about this time, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services receives a tidal wave of applications for H-1B visas, the ones for college-educated workers. For-profit companies usually have a five-day window in April to send in applications for new visas just as existing visa holders begin renewing theirs.
The new wrinkle is that earlier this week USCIS suspended so-called “premium processing,” a program that allowed employers to pay extra to reduce visa wait times from as long as eight months to just two weeks.
Officials have depicted the temporary stoppage as the upshot of a “significant surge” in demand for expedited service, but, in reality, it appears to reflect the agency’s own mismanagement and waste.
According to USCIS records, congressional testimony and interviews with former agency officials, USCIS has plunged most of the expedited program’s revenues from the last eight years — some $2.3 billion — into a failed effort to digitize the larger immigration system, leaving inadequate resources to staff the H-1B portion that was its cash cow.
“I can’t believe that my old agency could be that stupid and reckless,” said William Yates, a former senior USCIS official who helped create the fast-track program. “It infuriates me.”
USCIS has occasionally suspended premium processing before, but the timing of this suspension, which is expected to last up to six months, is especially damaging. Some 236,000 H-1B applications poured in in April 2016.
Pausing expedited service is likely to cause delays for tens of thousands of applicants for new visas, mainly workers at universities or research organizations, as well as foreign doctors who receive H-1Bs in exchange for working in areas that are medically underserved, according to USCIS data.
It’ll also cost USCIS up to $100 million in lost fees, agency spokeswoman Carolyn Gwathmey acknowledged."