Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Julian Montalvo, MPI, Apr. 25, 2024 "This article provides an overview of the scale, impact, and effectiveness of Title 42, ahead of the one-year anniversary...
National Immigration Forum, Apr. 24, 2024 "Today, center-right advocacy organizations hosted a press conference unveiling a border framework that prioritizes security, order and humanity at the...
Jeanne Batalova, Julia Gelatt and Michael Fix, MPI, April 2024 "The U.S. economy has changed dramatically in recent decades, from one that was heavily industrial to one that is mostly service and...
Chronicle of Higher Education "One woman’s journey between two countries in pursuit of an education and a brighter future Every weekday for the past 10 years, Viviana Mitre has driven back...
News reports indicate that some of the migrants trafficked to Martha's Vineyard by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will receive work permits, protection against removal and eligibility for U visas. See...
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."