USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All H-1B Petitions

Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by pavanky on Friday March 03, 2017 @06:59PM (#13788106)

I just moved to a new company so I can talk about the H1b transfers. When you apply for a H1b transfer, currently it is taking 8-9 months before you can get the final approval. You can however work for the new company while this process is going on.

That said, you (or your employer) can pay about $1k which sort of puts your application at the top of the pile. If you go down this route, you end up getting the approval in about 2 weeks.

There are reasons why people choose premium processing. For example if they have to go out of the country within the next 6-8 months, it is best if you have the H1b approval documents with you.

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Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by pj_mukh on Friday March 03, 2017 @07:29PM (#13788283)

Shouldn't this system allow USCIS to hire the adequate staff to handle the premium applications on a separate load than the regular pipeline? They seem to be shutting this down to help the regular H1-B application pipeline, that means all applications were being handled by the same staff, which seems silly.

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Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by pavanky on Friday March 03, 2017 @07:40PM (#13788343)

There are insane amount of H1B applications (I think there were over 200,000 last year). Ofcourse they use the lottery to process about "only" 85,000 of them.

This does not include H1B transfers and other stuff USCIS handles.

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Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by sjburt on Friday March 03, 2017 @08:06PM (#13788466)

I don't know the exact details of DHS and UCSIS but typically, the number of employees is set by the Federal Budget and the have may have limited flexibility to hire more.

To do something like that there would probably have to be special language written into the budget and it would have to be approved by Congress.

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Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by johncolanduoni on Friday March 03, 2017 @07:32PM (#13788304)

Depends if $1k is commensurate to the additional work needed, and if they can find enough staff to hire to put the money to good use. At least one of those failing to be true seems fairly likely to me.

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Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by klipt on Friday March 03, 2017 @07:39PM (#13788339)

Also depends on whether the $1,225 fee was used to pay for H1-B processing at all, or simply used to cover other USCIS expenses.

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Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by johncolanduoni on Friday March 03, 2017 @07:54PM (#13788417)

Yes, I probably should have wrote something like "commensurate to the amount of work/money USCIS's structure requires before it will process the application." I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone argue that USCIS operates at near-optimal levels of efficiency ;)

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Re:USCIS Will Temporarily Suspend Premium Processing for All... by usernametbd on Friday March 03, 2017 @07:46PM (#13788370)

This is the government. Everything goes slow.

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