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H-1B processing
times
Hiring an H-1B employee can affect a company's staffing
plans. Depending on whether premium processing is selected, the INS
may take between 15 days to 3 months to process a petition.
Time must be factored in
for the attorney to prepare the paperwork. This involves obtaining a
prevailing wage determination from a state's employment security
agency and checking to make sure that the employer's actual wage is
comparable to the prevailing wage. If it isn't and it's because the
prevailing wage is not an accurate reflection of what the market is
paying, then the attorney must find alternative salary surveys to
prove that what the employer is paying is competitive. Resolving
this issue may take a day or two.
Once the salary issue is
taken care of, the Labor Condition Application must be sent
and certified by the Department of Labor. A faxback system
has been implemented which greatly reduced the response time.
Waiting times for this procedure has been cut down from a few weeks
to as little as a few days.
Once the H-1B petition
has been submitted to a INS service center, the processing times
vary depending on which service center the petition was sent to and
the kind of H-1B petition.
The California Service
Center (CSC) is probably the worst considering the heavy volume of
petitions it receives daily.
Recently, the CSC has been processing
change of status petitions within roughly six weeks. However, with
the new premium processing launched July 30, 2001, the INS promises
to turnaround a petition within 15 days. A change of
status petition is a petition by an applicant who is already in the
U.S. in a different status and is seeking to have his status changed
to H-1B. This could be a B-2 tourist who after deciding to
stay, found a job as an engineer and is now applying for an H-1B.
Petitions for extensions
of an H-1B status are taking longer than six weeks. Fortunately, the
law permits individuals who are currently in H-1B status who submit
their H-1B extension petitions before the expiration of that status
to continue working for up to 240 days thereafter while they await
the results of that petition.
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