5 Common H-1B RFEs and Their Solutions
- Right Degree, Wrong Specialization or No Specialization
- Three-Year Bachelor’s Degree
- Degree has an Unclear US Equivalency
- The Right Evaluation for the Wrong Visa
About the Author Sheila Danzig Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723. ]]>
When is it the attorney’s fault? Very rarely, an attorney will file an application incorrectly. Generally, however, the attorney error occurs when the candidate’s education is not reviewed by an education specialist before the application is filed. In this case, the candidate’s account of their education and experience is incorrect or does not meet the CIS requirements for the H1-B. Unless this is the case, don’t fire your attorney over an RFE. When is it the evaluator’s fault, and how can it be the fault of the evaluation but NOT the person who wrote the evaluation? There are situations when the RFE is clearly the evaluator’s fault because the evaluation was done incorrectly. For example, when a non-accredited PGD is listed as accredited, CIS jumps on that inaccuracy to issue an RFE. This rarely happens, because most evaluators are highly trained in spotting unaccredited education. However, every evaluation is different, and evaluations for different Visas must be written very differently. When an evaluator writes an evaluation for any particular visa, he or she needs to know both the Visa regulations AND current CIS trends. Not every evaluation agency is aware of the Visa regulations. The evaluator may have provided the evaluation ordered by the client, only to find that the equivalence does not work for the particular Visa. For example, if you have a four-year degree in electrical engineering, you can receive an evaluation written correctly showing an equivalency to a US bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, but then receive an RFE anyway because your job is in the field of computer software analysis. This sort of mismatch triggered an onslaught of RFEs this year. The evaluator did a good job, but the evaluation was not correct for the purposes of the Visa. In this case, you may have likely found the right evaluator, but he or she provided you with the wrong evaluation even though they acted in good faith. To avoid this, make sure you order your evaluation from an agency that knows education regulations for each Visa. If you advise an evaluation agency that you need an evaluation for an H1-B visa and they don’t ask about the job offer, find a new agency. The degree must precisely fit the field of employment for this Visa and the evaluator needs to know this information so they can evaluate an equivalency to the proper degree. If you are not asked about the job offer, the agency does not look at the Visa regulations and is not right for this job. If you have already paid an evaluator and a mistake was made, I suggest you go back to that evaluator to try to address your RFE. However, if the evaluation agency did not make sure that the evaluation was written for the particular Visa it was ordered for, that may just be how they operate. There is nothing wrong with that unless they lead you to believe that they evaluate for immigration and meet Visa requirements as part of their service. They may just be writing standard evaluations and not be authorized to make the conversions from work experience to education, which is necessary to prove equivalency between fields or across educational system structures. You cannot expect an agency to do something they don’t claim to do. So the evaluation agency you want and need is one that will look at the education, as well as the visa requirements and current CIS trends. When is it CIS’s fault? Government bureaucracies make mistakes and some RFEs are simply factually incorrect. Everything in a petition could be done correctly and you can still receive an RFE. Often when CIS is at fault, the RFE will state that an accredited university is not accredited, or that a qualified evaluator is not qualified. While these RFEs are frustrating, they are usually also easy fixes. With the help of your evaluator, you can easily provide]]>
st, 2016. That means CIS does not have to issue an RFE to get the information they need out of you to make an informed decision. Preventing an RFE is much easier than answering one. An RFE is a tool CIS uses to make the right decision about your petition. When they cannot make a decision based on the evidence you provided, they request more. While this is not the end of the world, and can actually be utilized as an opportunity to strengthen your case, an RFE is a red flag. A red flag is another tool CIS uses to streamline the massive amount of work they have to do to cut 233,000 petitions into 65,000 Visas. If you receive an RFE, that means a glaring omission of evidence has drawn CIS’s close attention to your petition, and it will now be picked apart. Minor errors that would have otherwise gone unnoticed will come to light. At the same time, answering an RFE is not necessarily a straight-forward process. To successfully answer an RFE, you need to sit down with your lawyer, your employer, and your evaluator to see exactly what is being asked of you and how to go about answering it. Some RFE’s are realistically impossible to answer. The “Nightmare” RFE is one of these, and we’ve been seeing more of them every year. While these can be answered, it requires strategy that only an evaluation agency with international education and federal case law experts on hand to work on your case. At CCI, we have been able to get around 95% of all of the Nightmare RFE’s we work on overturned, but these RFE’s cause a lot of unnecessary stress to H1B candidates and can be easily avoided. How can you avoid an RFE in the first place?