Launch Schedule of PERM - Unknown Territory
Launch Schedule of PERM - Unknown Territory
The permanent labor certification reengineering "programming" was initiated years back under the DOL five-year strategic plan. However, at this point no one is excited about this program any more for a number of reasons. Firstly, the release of the proposed PERM regulation indicated that it was not necessarily a juicy program for the employers as well as the aliens because the proposed program contrained so many poisonous elements in it. It induced a flood of negative comments from the U.S. employers and immigration communties. In response to the pressure, reportedly the DOL softened somewhat the hardline approach and the immigrant community was expected to see somewhat lenient standards and requirements once the final regulation would be released. But so far, no one knows the details. The hardline approach in the proposed regulation has induced employers to rush filing of the labor certification applications, mostly RIR, to ensure that they would not deal with the tough PERM program. Secondly, the launch of the PERM has been delayed for some known reasons and for some unknown reasons. When the five-year plan was released, everyone thought that the program would be launched within the first Quarter (Jan-Mar) of this calendar year. However, the schedule was adjusted, first by the flood of negative comments which the DOL received, and later by the change of the leadership within the DOL. One time, the latest news "was" that the final regulation would be released in the "late fall" and the actual launch of the new labor certification system will see one month from the date of the release of the final regulation. Thus everyone speculated that the regulation would be released in November and the new labor certification program will be launched in December or January 2004 at the latest. You guessed it! At this point, there is no fixed schedule, according to the available sources of information. No one knows the exact reasons.
However, it appears that the DOL continues the pilot program in the name of "Centralized Processing Group (CPG)." They formed this group and some of the ailing cases at the state agencies (SWAs) in the heavily backlogged states have been transferred to this group for adjudication. The outcome of this pilot program has not been made available to the public. However, without the final PERM regulation, the role of this group may be very limited: Centralization of adjudication rather than the reengineered labor certification program. People will have to navigate the unknown territory for a while, it appears.