Re:Tech companies are colluding to cheat H1B visa lottery, U...
by vsskanth on Friday April 28, 2023 @12:20PM
(#35743431)
USCIS still has a lot of leeway over how they adjudicate visa applications (both standards and the time duration) and this is used by the administration through political appointees to shape who and how many people they admit.
Post 2016, they dramatically increased RFEs (Request for Evidence) and slowed down visa processing for H1B visas and employment authorization (EAD) cards from a few weeks or a month to years. Many, many women lost their jobs because of that.
This is also primarily why they operate on paper and refuse to modernize.
They wasted hundreds of thousands of employment based green cards every year simply because they didn't bother to process applications on time from people waiting decades.
USCIS merely follows the laws and rules. As with most things in the US, this is a Republican-created disaster.
In 2005 the Bush administration invented this system after the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Which was, to put it mildly, a shitshow. They gave members a few hours to read over 3000 pages of new laws and 9 new bills. No one had any idea what they were voting for and parts of the law weren't even properly drafted; only 2 bills had ever even been debated. It took nearly a week after voting for the actual text to come out.