It’s nearly February, and that means the electronic application for H-1B cap-subject submissions is coming right up. At the same time, the Biden Administration’s Chief of Staff Ronald A. Klain instituted a regulatory freeze through a memorandum. That means Final Interim Rules restricting the employer-employee relationship and specialty occupation requirements and changing the selection process to prioritize higher wages have been put on hold for review.
The good news is that petitioners don’t have to have their full H-1B petition complete until after the H-1B lottery. That means you can file the electronic application, pay the $10 fee, and if selected you have 90 days to file with a clearer view of the statutory landscape.
However, we recommend having the completed petition ready to file as soon as possible. The rate of RFEs and difficult RFEs is still high, and petitioners have seen as many as three rounds of RFEs before visa approval. This delays employee start dates and interrupts company workflow.
If you are planning on filing a completed petition this H-1B cap-subject season, make sure to prepare to have additional evidence and documentation to support the specialty occupation, wage level, and employer-employee relationship requirements. These have come under fire in recent years and can be addressed with added documentation and an expert opinion letter written by an expert in the field of the H-1B job with extensive field and leadership experience including making hiring decisions regarding the H-1B occupation.
Every year, we advise to fill in any gaps between the education the H-1B employee has and the exact US degree in the exact field and the H-1B job. This means degrees earned outside of the US, degrees in related fields, degrees in generalized or unrelated fields, incomplete college, unaccredited college, and no college at all are all situations that require a credential evaluation. This evaluation must take the job, the degree, work experience and course content, the visa, and USCIS approval trends into account.
At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with RFE and Denial cases every year, and we know what additional documentation and evidence is needed to fortify your case to prevent them.
Let us review your case for free before you file. Visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in 4 hours or less.
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com. Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.