February 25, 2000
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Good morning ladies and gentlemen: My name is Sunil Vatave. I am general counsel and corporate secretary for TekEdge Corporation in Santa Clara, California. TekEdge is a multi-national company with offices in Canada, United Kingdom, India and the United States. We are engaged in the business of providing e-business solutions to companies in the high technology, telecom, and financial services industries. We employ more than 750 people and have annual revenues of approximately $100 million. I am responsible for oversight of all legal issues relating to the company in the United States and abroad. Among those responsibilities is supervision of one immigration attorney and three paralegals who process immigration related filings. From September 1999 to the present, we have made more than 900 filings with the INS. Thus, we are extremely familiar with the desire of individuals to have some meaningful interaction with the INS as to the progress of their particular petition. We have been asked to testify today, as to how we believe technology could improve the INS's level of service. We have three specific recommendations. I will outline today the kinds of problems we experience, and each of the three recommendations. A major dilemma faced by H-1b employers every February is whether to keep filing H-1b petitions for foreign workers. The reason for this is that there are annual quotas for the number of H-1b visas. This year the quota was 115,000. By February, notices and rumors routinely circulate that the cap is approaching. However, no specific numbers are given as to how many visa petitions are pending and how many have been approved. With the cost of each petition being $610, the decision of whether or not to file 200 petitions becomes significant from a financial perspective If employers knew these two numbers, then they could make an informed decision about actions, which in many cases have significant business consequences. We believe that the INS could accomplish this by building a reporting system based on service center numbers that could tabulate on a nightly basis the number of petitions which have been received and assigned a number, against the number of petitions which have received an I-797 approval notice. In our office, we have developed a similar reporting function which tracks how many applications are pending, where they are pending, when they were filed, when approved, and the average processing time for the previous 90 days at the particular service center. This way we can schedule our project start dates accordingly, with a general idea as to when we can expect our employee to be authorized to work in the U.S. Ideally, as in our company, this data should be available via the web so that it can be accessed quickly and easily without the delay and expense of the current telephone inquiry system. Another problem related to the telephone inquiry system concerns the candidates themselves. Currently in order to get a status update as to a particular INS petition, the employees must telephone the INS. The problem with this is that the telephone lines are normally busy throughout the day. In some cases where a status update was critical, my staff has spent hours trying to get through to the INS. In these cases they call very late at night as it is the only possible time to get through. The problem is exacerbated when international applicants are considered. These individuals like to check their status, but to do so they have to incur the significant expense of telephoning the INS and waiting on hold until they get through. Also, in England and Europe, the time difference is such that it is difficult to call at a time when one can reasonably expect to get through. Again, we think that simple web-based technology could solve this problem. We would propose a web-based system where a candidate could log in by her service center number and passport number. They could then see exactly where their petition is in the process. We suspect, this would greatly reduce call volume to the INS and would increase the overall satisfaction of the applicants. TekEdge recently implemented a similar system where we enter the INS data after we have received it and the candidates are notified by way of a website they can access from anywhere in the world. Of course, there is a lag between INS action on a particular petition and our entry of the data after receiving an INS notice. Therefore, an INS system would be preferable. Since the INS already enters the data in its telephone system, that database should be easily web enabled using any number of available tools. Our third proposal is one that we feel would significantly help U.S. business. Currently, multiple employers can file H-1b petitions for the same candidate. It is common for candidates to have in hand two or three approvals from different companies. This has a number of negative implications. The most obvious of which is that, in the above example, one candidate ends up taking three visa approvals from the quota. These individuals, because of their skills, are in extremely high demand. A simple look at the high salaries offered evidences the lengths to which employers will go to get the necessary skills. Consequently, every year, the quota runs out sooner and sooner and intense debate rages on whether to decrease, increase or eliminate the cap. Regardless of the ultimate determination on the numerical issue, we believe that the system should be such that the full quota, whatever that may be, is utilized. In our view, the problem of multiple approvals could be solved if INS simply numbered the visas and used technology to track those visa numbers. An applicant could still obtain multiple visas, but when she traveled to the U.S., the unused visas would be canceled and put back into the quota. We successfully use a similar procedure tracking people on blanket LCA's. An LCA is a document that sets the wage that must be paid to an H-1b worker. A blanket LCA is one that applies to a specific job, say software engineer, and allows up to 25 people, in our company, to be processed under the same LCA. What we do is number the LCA, and assign people to that LCA number as their petitions are processed. If a person drops out before filing of the petition, then she is taken off the LCA and someone else takes the spot. We think the same thing could be done for H-1b petitions. Thank you.
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Bay Area Congressional Delegation
Studies Chronic Delays at Immigration Agency Statement of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren Statement of Jennifer Dineen-Ocon Statement of Sister Marilyn Lacey Statement of Jacob and Yetta Bromley Statement of Debra Jaramillo-Coker Statement of George Windsor Jones
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