It's the immigration policy version of the Royal Navy steaming out of Portsmouth Harbor on its way to the Falklands War; it means that an establishment is facing a serious challenge.
That's the image I had when I read the front-page, signed article in the September 24 issue of the immigration bar's trade paper Interpreter Releases by the grand old man of the immigration bar, Austin Fragomen, Jr. It is highly critical of a proposed set of procedures and forms for the H-1B program announced by the U.S. Department of Labor (DoL). The article is not available online, and it is one of the rare such treatments of a policy issue by IR.
Fragomen's eight-and-a-half-page-long, detailed, heavily footnoted article (there are 42 of them) is also a sure indication that DoL has done the right thing on the matter, as his huge (39 offices) law firm routinely represents employers in these matters. I met him in 1969 when he was a young lawyer on the staff of the House immigration subcommittee.
Bear in mind that virtually every time DoL approves one of these (admittedly ponderous) H-1B forms, somebody other than a legal permanent resident of the United States gets a well-paid job, and thus an American loses the job.
The DoL, appropriately I think, wants to have more information about the job, the employer, and the potential alien worker and as a result it proposes to revise the Labor Condition Application (LCA) for Nonimmigrant Workers (ETA Form 9035CP) as well as another form, and the instructions for both. These revised documents have not been published by DoL, but they may be obtained by writing to ETA.OFLC.Forms@DoL.Gov and requesting them.
Fragomen argues that the department has gone beyond its authority to seek the new, longer form and that the new system
… would fundamentally change the nature of the LCA process, transforming it from a streamlined, attestation-based system into a lengthy process that would expand DoL's authority beyond what Congress originally intended …
In other words, it would make things a little slower and a little more costly for employers, which from my point of view is a good thing. Maybe some employers looking at the proposed new forms — which are some distance from approval — would take the radical step of hiring qualified U.S. workers for the positions involved!
No matter what the department does with its processes, however, the program itself is designed to shoulder aside U.S. workers, and the whole thing should be substantially overhauled or terminated.
May Mr. Fragomen's words be less successful than Ms. Thatcher's ships!
Meanwhile, the same issue of Interpreter Releases reminds us — sadly — that the visa lottery is still with us and that another round of applications opened on October 2 and will close for the year at noon on November 3. In one of its appendices the publication provides a complete list of the nations whose citizens are eligible to apply for the 50,000 slots (see pp. 14-16 here), and, as a geography buff, I always like to read such lists to see if there are any errors or anomalies.
The only error I noted was the inclusion of "Sam" at the end of the list of nations in Oceania, after Vanuatu; this is where Western Samoa (now renamed Samoa) used to be listed, but it is both truncated and out of alphabetical order.
In the anomaly category is the fact that these listings reflect political decisions about which territorial claims we recognize, and which we do not (or only partially). South Sudan and East Timor ("Timor-Leste"), both very new nations, are on the list and their citizens are eligible for the lottery, as are residents of Kosovo, which Serbia still thinks is part of that nation. (Serbs are eligible, too.)
On the other hand, some much earlier transfers of power have not removed the residents of Hong Kong (formerly British) and Macau (formerly Portuguese) from the list of eligibles. Had those people been included under China, they would be out of the lottery. Similarly, residents of those two enclaves are not covered by the ceilings on migrants from China in other parts of the immigration law. Further, people in Northern Ireland (who have representatives in the halls of Parliament as well as much informal influence in our Congress) qualify for the diversity visas, while those in the balance of the United Kingdom do not.
Maybe the Northern Ireland, Macau, and Hong Kong decisions are not anomalies after all; maybe they are part of a larger governmental tendency to define matters in such a way as to expand international migration to the United States whenever and wherever possible, even in the fine print listing of nations eligible for the diversity visa program.
