U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced today that it received nearly 233,000 H-1B petitions for 85,000 slots last week. Horrible.
Businesses, prospective employees, HR specialists, and attorneys all over worked hard during the previous months to prepare applications. The Department of Labor’s labor condition application system was actually backlogged, so that certifications took longer than usual. All sorts of money was spent in preparing applications.
The odds of even being considered are less than 50%.
This is economically wasteful. Meanwhile, applications received unnecessarily high scrutiny, with attorneys increasingly having to go to court just to get a rational evaluation of whether a position is a specialty occupation.
Increasingly, the H-1B program is entering the land of the absurd. Businesses are right to demand an H-1B program that better serves the public interest.