Excerpt from Immigration-law.com
12/07/2006: OFLC Intends to Open Safety Window for Conversion of TR to RIR
AILA has announced that the OFLC is expected to announce an important policy next week to hold issuing a Job Order and Recruitment Instructions for the TR applicant upon receiving a notice that the applicant intends to go for the RIR conversion. Under the current conversion rule, the employer is disqualified for the conversion upon receiving the recruitment instructions for the TR cases and unless the employers take a big risk of spending tons of cost for recruitment and facing disqualification because of the receipt of recuritment instructions from the BECs druing the voluntary recruitment process, the employers have been hesitant to initiate the RIR conversion attempts. Obviously this slapped the face of the OFLC's recent policy change to encourage RIR conversion and thereby to achieve backlog recductionh within a short time. The OFLC is currently under a tremendous pressure from its mandate to remove all the backlogs within less than 10 months. Please stay tuned.
We do not know whether the last week's OFLC-SWA officials' training conference in St. Antonio, Texas which focused on the prevailing wage determination was an overture to launch this RIR conversion policy change. But from the perspectives of the TR employers and aliens, this policy change will give a golden opportunity to short-cut the process of pending labor certification applications at the BECs. Unlike TR process, in the RIR process, obviously the prevailing wage determination for the voluntary recruitment process ought to be made by the State SWAs and the state SWAs will be pull back into the backlog reduction process in this regard. It is hoped that the upcoming announcement of OFLC next week will give specific guidelines for the voluntary recruitment standards so that the employers achieve the RIR conversion with the least amount of risk and in the shortest period of time. Otherwise, this upcoming policy change will doom to fail as it will fail to give an incentive to the employers to try this process at the last minute when the whole cases must be decided by OFLC in less than ten months.