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Greencard - US / Irish Immigration Questions

GreenCard : USCIS News

April 9, 2008

By Debbie McGoldrick

USCIS News TO no surprise, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) announced on Tuesday that the annual 65,000 H-1B visa cap had been met for fiscal year 2009, which begins on October 1 of this year.

The H-1B visa allows U.S. companies to import highly skilled (college degree a minimum requirement) workers, and is one of the most sought after visa categories, with high-tech businesses constantly lobbying for a bigger yearly allotment.

The process of selecting the chosen visa recipients will occur at a time yet to be determined, according to the agency. The computer generated selection process will pick recipients at random.

There’s good news for those waiting to be processed for naturalization. USCIS announced that it will naturalize more than one million new Americans during the ongoing fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

“By the end of the year, I expect USCIS will have finished 36% more naturalization cases than last year without compromising national security or the integrity of the naturalization process,” said USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez.

How so? The agency has added almost 3,000 new workers to handle the applications it received – USCIS was especially deluged when the filing fee almost doubled last summer — reassigned workers to the busiest offices, and allocated funds to pay overtime costs.

At one point in 2006-early’07, citizenship candidates could expect to have their cases completed in roughly six months from start to finish. But once the fee increase was announced by USCIS early last year the floodgates opened to beat the raise. (The naturalization fee was one of several hikes USCIS implemented for a wide range of services.)

Last June, July and August the agency received three million applications for immigration benefits, compared to 1.8 million filings recorded for the comparable period in 2006. Of this number, 1.4 million were naturalization cases.

Given the huge workload, USCIS estimates that it’s now taking between 13-15 months for citizenship applications to be processed. It’s a long time, but better than the 16-18 month wait that was the norm three months ago. At least the wait is moving in the right direction.

Many USCIS customers have also been frustrated by the length of time it can take for security background checks to be completed. Last week USCIS and the FBI announced a new plan of action that will eliminate the backlog in this vital area.

“USCIS and the FBI established a series of milestones prioritizing work based on the age of the pending name check. The FBI has already eliminated all name check cases pending more than four years,” said a statement from USCIS. (That’s not a typo – some people can indeed wait four years for a background check!)

The goal is to implement a 30-day turnaround for 98% of all name checks. The remaining 2%, “which represent the most difficult name checks and require additional time to complete,” says the agency, will be resolved within 90 days.

More staff has been allocated to meet these targets, which will hopefully be in place by June of next year.

Naturalization applicants who have completed an interview but are still waiting for an approved security clearance will get first priority when it comes to erasing the backlog. There are some 29,800 citizenship candidates who have been waiting for the green light since May of 2006, USCIS reports.

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