Letter to Senators
Folks,
I have been a lurker on this forum for quite some time. As far as my details go, here they are
State - PA
EB3 - RIR
Priority Date - February 2002
Regional Data - June 2003
45 Day - December 2004
Since then I have head nothing, also the lawyer also refuses to initiate an inquiry into the status saying that, "All it will do is annoy the certifying officer!!".
Anyway, here is a letter that I had mailed to Senator Specter last week before the Senate Judiciary Hearings on October 18. Seems like nothing came out of it, but I would request you folks to modify the letter below according to your liking and then sending it to the different senators. I am in the process of doing the same.
I believe until and unless we highlight and get some pressure put on DOL the mess that PBAC(Accumulation Center) has created will basically haunt us for quite a while.
Dear Senator XXXX,
I am an international employee working for XXXXXXXX as a XXXXXXXX since last X years. XXXX has a strict policy of hiring international workers only if it is unable to find suitable US workers. I am writing to you to make you aware of a situation that is happening now with respect to the Labor Certification Process that is handled by the Department of Labor.
XXXX filed my petition for immigration in XXXX. As part of the immigration process, the Department of Labor has to certify that there is a shortage of people with a certain set of qualifications. The Labor Certification process is composed of two stages. The first stage is handled by the XXXX State Workforce Authority(SWA). My application was approved by them around XXXX. In the second stage, this application was then forwarded to the Department of Labor office based in Philadelphia for review. Since XXXX, I did not hear anything about my application till XXXX. On XXXX, I received an email from XXXX lawyer mentioning that they received a 45-day Continuance Letter from the Department of Labor Backlog Elimination Center in Philadelphia about my application.
After reading on the web, I found that around the June - July 2003 timeframe, the Department of Labor office in Philadelphia was shutting down and as a result no action was taken on this and hundreds of thousands of other applications that were sent to this office. The explanation given by the Department of Labor for not acting on these applications was that they were creating two new centers called Backlog Elimination Centers, one based in Philadelphia and the other based in Dallas, which would adjudicate these applications.
Presently, as i understand it, there are probably more than 300,000 applications that are pending with the Department of Labor.
The two centers, one in Philadelphia and the other one in Dallas received applications from all the states. The breakdown is given on the DOL website. The link is
http://www.ows.doleta.gov/foreign/times.asp.
These centers instead of functioning as Backlog Elimination Centers are probably working as Backlog Accumulation Centers. There is no transparency in the process.
According to DOL, these centers were supposed to adjudicate applications based on the dates when the applications were received by the DOL. However in this regards the Dallas Center is way ahead of the Philadelphia Center. The Dallas Center is processing applications that were filed around March - April 2003, whereas, with the Philadelphia Center there is no idea as to what applications it is currently processing.
Also mentioned on the website is the fact that the DOL estimates the the entire backlog of applications would be cleared within 24-30 months with adequate resources. Looking at the way things are going, it does not seem that these centers will be anywhere close to finishing off processing these applications within the timeframe given by the DOL.
Since XXXX, I have not received any status information for my labor certification application. I have already waited XXXX years for getting a labor certification and there is still no estimate on how long I will have to wait. On the top of that, there is visa retrogession now which makes the whole situation more fuzzy. Now dates for getting the green card have gone back to January 1998.
Please note that between the time when a petition is filed and it is approved, the law doesn't allow the petitioners to change job descriptions. In other words, I have to pass any promotions offered at my job. I have already kept my career on hold for the last xxx years.
Since I have joined this company, I have seen multiple positions similar to mine lying vacant. It is a no brainer that green card delays and restrictive H1B quotas are proving detrimental to this outstanding company.
I would be grateful if you could ask the DOL Secretary, the Honorable Secretary Chao to shed some light on the Labor Certification Process during the course of your hearings that are coming up on October 18, 2005.
I have heard that during the hearings there is also a proposal coming up that includes the following:
- Recapture of 90,000 unused EB immigrant visa numbers
- Exempting spouses and minor children of EB principal aliens from the annual EB quota limit
- Permit filing of I-485 even during the visa number retrogression
I would be grateful to you if you support this proposal as this would alleviate some of the wait involved in the entire immigration process.
Sincerely,
XXXX
