Page 17 - FCW, May 2017
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A COSTLY DELAY
IN DIGITIZATION
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has long struggled to modernize its paper-based systems, and now it stands to lose the H-1B revenue it’s been using to fund the effort
BY MARCELO ROCHABRUN, PROPUBLICA
ost amid the uproar over the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocument- ed immigrants is a change coming to the legal immi-
gration system that is expected to be costly for U.S. companies and the government.
Each year around this time, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services receives a tidal wave of applications for H-1B visas, which are used to tempo- rarily employ foreign workers in highly skilled specialty occupations. Compa- nies usually have a five-day window in April to submit applications for new visas just as existing visa holders begin renewing theirs.
The new wrinkle is that in early April USCIS suspended so-called premium processing, which allowed employers to pay extra to reduce visa wait times from as long as eight months to just two weeks.
Officials have depicted the temporary stoppage as the upshot of a significant surge in demand for expedited service, but in reality, it appears to reflect the agency’s own mismanagement and waste.
According to USCIS records, con- gressional testimony and interviews with former agency officials, USCIS has plunged most of the expedited program’s revenues from the last eight years — some $2.3 billion — into a failed effort to digitize the larger immi- gration system, leaving inadequate resources to manage the H-1B portion that was its cash cow.
“I can’t believe that my old agency could be that stupid and reckless,” said William Yates, a former senior USCIS official who helped create the fast-track program. “It infuriates me.”
USCIS has occasionally suspend- ed premium processing before, but the timing of this suspension, which is expected to last as long as six months, is especially damaging. Some 236,000 H-1B applications were submitted in April 2016, so pausing the expedited service is likely to cause delays for tens of thou- sands of applicants for new visas, main- ly workers at universities and research organizations and foreign doctors who receive the visas to work in areas that are medically underserved, according to USCIS data.
In addition, USCIS will lose as much as $100 million in fees, agency spokes- woman Carolyn Gwathmey acknowl- edged. She said the loss would be cushioned by a $700 million reserve fund created by a surplus of premium processing fees and would not negative- ly affect the agency’s ability to contin- ue paying for the digitization initiative, which is $1 billion over budget and five years behind schedule.
AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
The interruption, however, has fueled concerns about the Trump administra- tion’s intentions for the H-1B program in general and the fate of the digital push that it has funded.
Many of the visas are gobbled up by outsourcing companies, and during his campaign, President Donald Trump
promised to ensure that visa holders were not displacing Americans for jobs. In January, a draft executive order aimed at cracking down on work visas was leaked, and although it hasn’t been signed, Politico reported that it might be soon.
More recently, the Justice Depart- ment and USCIS have announced initia- tives to look into H-1B fraud and abuse, and USCIS has said that some entry- level computer programmers might no longer be eligible for the visas.
The suspension of premium process- ing won’t affect the number of H-1B visas issued, even to outsourcing firms, but critics are concerned that lost rev- enue from the program will extend the agency’s digitization delays and, thus, perpetuate the backlogs that led to the stoppage in the first place.
So far, the effort to modernize has been plagued by glitches and lapses in security. From 2014 to 2016, for exam- ple, faulty programming resulted in the agency sending thousands of green cards with inaccurate information on them and then failing to recall them. Some see little hope of fixing such flaws if funds from premium processing stop flowing.
“Any CEO who would propose to cut the source of all your revenue while at the same time still paying to fix your product would be fired,” said Greg Sis- kind, a longtime immigration lawyer.
When it was unveiled in 2000, pre- mium processing appeared to be a clev- er solution for USCIS and its frustrated users. At the time, the wait for H-1B
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