Don't shoot the messanger
06/02/2005: Clogged Foreign Labor Certification System Without Light at End of Tunnel
The reengineering of the nation's foreign labor certification system is facing a serious crisis as both the PERM program and the Backlog Reduction program reveal serious flaws. One doubts whether anyone within the DOL would have anticipated such serious problems when they had worked out this labor certification reengineering process. The nation's labor certification system is practically under seize at this time. Reportedly, the Backlog Processing Centers still have a huge number of boxes of files which have yet to be opened just for data-entry and until the data entry is completed, cases may not be adjudicated except a few oldest cases pending early 2001 or ealier than that. There is no end in sight. Since the Backlog Reduction program was first announced in the federal register, more than eight months have passed by now with no visible results and adjudication of applications. It appears that the serious flaws in planning and operation of the backlog reduction process are related to the concept of "national queue" and "FIFO." First problem existed in the management of this concept. The DOL should have known which states and which regions had the oldest backlog cases. Some small states did not even have any backlogs at all. We thought the leaders in the FLDC were aware of this issue and planned and scheduled shipment of cases from the states and regions in the order of assumedly heaviest backlog locations. As we all know it, San Francisco was picked first for this reason. If this plan worked perfectly, the oldest San Francisco cases should have been gone out of the labor certification processing pipelines while back. The same should be true with other earlier shipment state cases. The current backlog in opening boxes and completing data entries for later shipped cases from the least backlog states should not have halted the adjudication process for the earlier shipped cases. It is horrendous to draw a picture of limited number of analysts and certifying officers in the Backlog Processing Centers beginning to adjudicate over 300,000 cases sometime in the future after completion of the data entries and 45-day letter processing. Supposedly, a large number of these cases are traditional regular applications which will have to go through the time-consuming supervised recruitment process. The announced schedule of 24-30 months removal of all these backlog cases may turn out to be a dream, considering the fact that over eight months have already gone by without completion of preparation phase for processing of the cases. Unless the leaders of DFLC seriously relook at the current plan, operation, and management, they may have to deal with a tough political challenge in the Congress as they will have to hand out begging additional tax-money appropriations. One wonders how the DFLC will be able to persuade the tax payers and the Congressional leaders for the additional money and failures.
