Is your company getting ready for the annual H1B visa race? Are you hoping to enlist enough visas to meet personnel needs? Or are you one of the students waiting to see whether the USCIS will allow you to enter the U.S. on a temporary work visa? How will President-Elect Barack Obama's advisors impact the cap for these work visas? What kind of visa reforms will take place?
Meet Department of Homeland Security nominee Janet Napolitano. Her confirmation is to be overseen by Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a sometime friend and sometime foe of the H1B Visa Program and its reform. While both Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Lieberman have advocated heavily for an increase in the number of H1B visas issued each year, Mr. Lieberman is also a strong proponent of visa reform.
Ms. Napolitano's push for increasing the top on the number of visas issued each year is based on the argument that the United States lacks skilled workers to fill the economic needs experienced by American companies. Although she couldn't change the cap (this is controlled by Congress, and is currently set at 85,000), she could push to streamline the process, making the application much easier for persons with foreign degrees.
Another hopeful outcome of Napolitano's nomination as Director of the Department of Homeland Security is that students who earn American Degrees would have no difficulty obtaining an H1B visa after passing a background check. In fact, she advocates attaching a green card to these students' diplomas! She believes this streamlining would help to keep technology workers, as well as the resultant innovations in design and technology, within the United States.
However, to successfully implement her ideas, Ms. Napolitano will probably have to address the many indiscretions that have become a part of the H1B program. In the past two years of reviewing applications, USCIS officials found that more than one-fifth of these applications violated federal rules and regulations. Even more so, certain trends surfaced in the violations.
First, some foreign degree evaluations, which are required for persons seeking H1B visas, reference fake diplomas or universities. Some applications contain forged signatures. While some applications were falsified for shell companies. In addition, some companies hired workers to perform job duties not listed on the labor certificate.
<a href="http://www.thedegreepeople.com">Career Consulting International</a> is a foreign education credential evaluation agency whose experts take care to ensure that their foreign degree evaluations meet USCIS requirements. By keeping the agency's standards high, Sheila Danzig, the executive director, ensures the agency's excellent reputation among immigration attorneys, USCIS officials, and business corporations. She is currently gearing up for another booming H1B season rush.

Sheila Danzig, author and renowned education expert, is the executive director of Career Consulting International, a foreign credential evaluation agency that evaluates foreign degree evaluations for immigration visas, employment, and university admissions. For more information on foreign academic credentials, visit The Degree People at www.thedegreepeople.com. Visit The Race for H1B Visas: Who are the Winners?.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.