Insight, News, and Strategy on Immigration Matters Around the World
On December 18th, the Senate passed the FY2016 omnibus spending package on the heels of House passage the day before and sent the bill to the White House. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill, making it law.
The bill includes the following immigration-related provisions:
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it will resume adjudications of H-2B petitions, even though it will continue to suspend premium processing until further notice.
The March 17, 2015, announcement follows the filing of an unopposed motion on March 16 by DOL to stay until April 15the U.S. District Court ruling in…
The Department of Labor lacks authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to issue regulations in the H-2B program, a Florida federal district court has ruled, vacating the DOL’s 2008 H-2B regulations establishing standards and procedures for certifying employers’ requests to import H-2B workers and calculating the prevailing wage rates for temporary foreign workers. Perez…
Calling the Department of Labor regulations authorizing employers to use employer-provided wage surveys for prevailing wage determinations (PWDs) for H-2B workers arbitrary and capricious, and finding that they violate of the Administrative Procedure Act, the U.S. court of appeals in Philadelphia has vacated the DOL regulations at 20 CFR §655.10(f) and the Department’s 2009 H-2B…
The Temporary Non-agricultural Employment 2011 H-2B Wage Rule for calculating the prevailing wage rates (“Rule”) has cleared one of the last hurdles to implementation by the U.S. Department of Labor, with a ruling by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia upholding the regulation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held on February…
The National Prevailing Wage Center (NPWC) has acknowledged that the October 2013 government shutdown and the significant increase in wage survey-based prevailing wage requests from H-2B employers has delayed processing of Prevailing Wage Determination requests. These undue delays by the Department of Labor (DOL) and NPWC in adjudicating cases are prohibiting employers from filing their…
In a significant decision likely to have a major impact on H-2B employers, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Board of Alien Labor Certification (BALCA) has rejected the DOL’s attempt to apply supplemental prevailing wage determinations (PWDs) retroactively upon employers who use H-2B temporary foreign labor. The action came in an Appeals Board Decision rendered on…
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that, as of November 8, 2013, the agency receipted applications for 9,078 beneficiaries toward the 33,000 H-2B cap amount for the first half of FY2014. This count includes 7,478 approved and 1,600 pending beneficiaries.
The H-2B non-agricultural temporary worker program allows U.S. employers to bring…
Many employers traditionally have relied upon H-2B visa holders to augment their permanent workforce during seasonal and peak-load cycles simply because they cannot find U.S. citizen and Permanent Resident workers to handle the temporary assignments. The H-2B temporary program generally allows U.S. employers who meet specific regulatory requirements to bring foreign nonimmigrant workers to the…
The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor have issued a joint interim final rule that establishes a new methodology for calculating prevailing wages under the H-2B low-skilled, nonagricultural guestworker program. This is in response to a March 21 district court decision, in Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas v. Solis, vacating…
