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
an RFE is not a roadmap for success. USCIS is NOT trying to help you. Instead of looking at your RFE for answers, focus on H-1B requirements for guidance. If you, or your employee or client has received an RFE, here are four tips to successfully respond:
The degree came from a college or university that is not government accredited. Many institutions that provide a rigorous, quality education that fully prepare you or your employee or client for the specialty occupation he or she has been hired for are not actually government accredited. Two common examples of this situation are NIIT and Aptech. CIS will not approve unaccredited education. The “college” degree is actually a high school diploma. Yes, this happens. Attorneys: don’t listen to your clients when they insist that their high school diploma is a college degree. This tends to be an honest mistake that gets taken too far. Mistranslations, misunderstandings, and different educational systems from one country to the next cause a lot of confusion in this area. Different degrees are often called by the same name, which becomes a problem when transcripts and credentials are translated but not evaluated for academic equivalence. The H-1B visa requires a US bachelor’s degree or higher. A high school diploma does NOT meet these requirements. If your degree, or your employee or client has a degree from an unaccredited college or university, or no bachelor’s degree equivalence at all, talk to a credential evaluator with the authority to convert years of work experience into college credit. You may be able to salvage your case. The degree was not evaluated correctly. If your degree, or your employee or client’s degree is from a different country with a different language, the transcripts must be translated into English and evaluated for US academic equivalence. Sometimes, documents do not get translated correctly, or they are only translated but never evaluated. Sometimes, they are evaluated, but incorrectly. Sometimes they are evaluated correctly, but not for the H-1B visa. This H-1B trap is becoming increasingly common because some translation agencies now offer a sort of one-stop-shop for translation and evaluation. Just like document translation, evaluation is a highly specialized field that requires extensive knowledge of international education, international trade agreements, CIS precedent decisions, federal case law, and various visa requirements. This is because some visas allow education and experience from different sources to be combined to show equivalence while others do not accept that combination but require others. This is also because some degrees exist in one country but not in another, and others don’t have a direct English translation. Some degrees don’t call themselves degrees but are actually the equivalent of post-secondary education. Simply translating documents from one language to another means understanding of the academic content is lost. A credential evaluator can identify where this occurs and fix it. Each evaluation must be conducted on a case-by-case basis. Before you file your case, or your employee or client’s case, be aware that it may not be as straightforward as you think. Educational systems vary from country to country, and your degree or your employee or client’s degree may not be what you think it is in terms of US academic value. At the same time, the right degree may be in the wrong field, or difficult to find a US equivalent degree for. Talk to a credential evaluator with experience working with H-1B visas and their RFEs. The evaluator you want understands the specific requirements of H-1B visas as well as CIS trends regarding these much sought-after visas. 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, RFEs, Denials, or NOIDs, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723.]]>
Right Degree, Wrong Country A common RFE is triggered when a beneficiary has the right degree from a country that is not the United States. For example, if you, or your employee or client has a bachelor’s degree in biology from India, and a job in the field of biology that requires a US bachelor’s degree or higher or its equivalent, what CIS needs to know is whether or not your education, or your employee or client’s education covers the skills and knowledge necessary to perform the job. Since curriculums, education structures, academic content, and duration of programs differ between countries, CIS does not have all of the information to make this decision. Before you file, talk to a credential evaluator who can write a detailed evaluation of the academic content of your degree, or your employee or client’s degree, as well as experience working in the field of biology. This evaluation will show that even though this degree is not from the United States, you, or your employee or client is prepared with the specialized skill set and knowledge base necessary for the US job. These kinds of petitions filed without a credential evaluation are almost guaranteed to be met with an RFE instead of an approval. If this is what happened to you or your employee or client, it’s not too late to get the evaluation you need. Be sure when you talk to a credential evaluation agency that they understand the nuances of the H-1B visa requirements when it comes to education, as well as current CIS approval trends. Right Degree, Wrong Specialization Let’s say your bachelor’s degree, or your employee or client’s bachelor’s degree is in biology, but the job is in chemistry. With only that information, CIS has no way to know whether or not you or your employee or client has the skills and knowledge needed to perform the duties of chemist with a biology degree. The missing information is an evaluation of your education or your employee or client’s education and work experience. If you or your employee or client took classes in chemistry during college, those can be evaluated to count towards the right specialization. If you have, or your employee client has years of work experience in the field of chemistry in which he or she took on progressively more responsibility and learned new skills in the process, that can count towards the right specialization as well. Talk to an evaluator with the authority to closely examine the course content of your degree, or your employee or client’s degree, as well as the authority to convert years of progressive work experience in the field into college credit hours towards the right degree in the right specialization. Both of these common education RFEs have to do with CIS needing more information about whether or not you or your employee or client has the skills and knowledge necessary to perform their job. With literally hundreds of thousands of petitions to sort through, CIS needs information spelled out very clearly and in an easily digestible fashion. At the same time, the person evaluating your petition or your employee or client’s petition is most likely not an international education expert with the extensive knowledge of different academic structures and equivalencies ready at their disposal. What they don’t know needs to be including in the initial petition, and if not then certainly in your response to the RFE. 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. ]]>
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Why you do NOT want that RFE Aside from taking more time and money to address an RFE, an RFE is also a big red flag on the petition. When you get an RFE for a glaring error, it draws attention to the small mistakes that would have flown under the radar, and the more holes in your petition CIS finds, the more complicated your RFE will be to respond to. If you receive an RFE, don’t panic! Receiving an RFE can be transformed into an opportunity to strengthen your case, or the case of your client or employee. However, the best way to address an RFE is to avoid it in the first place. An RFE is by no means a rare occurrence. In fact, we see more and more RFEs every single year. At TheDegreePeople, we help clients with education RFEs, which are extremely common for the EB2 classification because CIS trends change with regards to educational requirements, especially from the prevalence of work visas in STEM industry companies, and also because equivalency requirements differ from other work visas. The first mistake petitioner commonly make is that the degree must be an EXACT match for the job offer on the PERM. In most cases, employers will hire employees with degrees in related fields because there is enough educational overlap that they can be sure the employee has the specialized skills and knowledge necessary to carry out the duties of their job. This is especially the case when the employee has years of work experience in the field alongside a degree in a related field. However, CIS disagrees. If the degree is not an exact match for the job offer on the PERM, you, or your employee or client will receive an RFE. To address this issue, you or your employee or client needs to have their education and work experience reviewed to write the equivalency of the necessary degree in the appropriate field, and submit that to CIS. The second mistake – which can also be made with regards to the equivalency in the first mistake – is that the petitioner’s bachelor’s degree must be a SINGLE source. This is particularly a problem when a petitioner needs a credential evaluation to write the equivalency for a degree in the exact field of employ, or if the petitioner holds a degree from a country with a three-year bachelor’s degree track. Other visas allow for work experience and different education sources to be combined to write the equivalency to the appropriate bachelor’s degree. This is not the case with EB2. The way we handle this situation is to convert years of progressive work experience into a bachelor’s degree equivalency or a master’s degree equivalency, and then cite federal case law, graduate school admissions requirements for programs in the client’s field, and provide other necessary documentation to fortify this equivalency. If you, or your employee or client receives an EB2 RFE, talk to a credential evaluation agency with extensive experience working with specific visas, and international education experts on hand. If you call and the agency does not ask about the particular job or visa, look elsewhere. While they may be able to write an accurate equivalency, they will not be able to write the accurate equivalency that you or your employee or client needs to fulfill the unique requirements of the EB2 visa. If you have yet to file, make sure your petition, or your employee or client’s petition does not fall into one of these common EB2 education traps. Don’t give CIS an excuse to issue an RFE. Get it right the first time. About the Author Sheila Danzig Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director at TheDegreePeople.com, a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a free analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723. ]]>
Why You Don’t Want that RFE An RFE is a tool that CIS uses to make a decision about whether or not a candidate’s visa should be approved. While receiving an RFE is an opportunity to strengthen your case, or your client or employee’s case – a second chance at providing all of the requested evidence CIS needs to approve the visa – it is also a big red flag. A glaring omission or error on the petition triggers CIS to take a closer look at it and may very well uncover small errors and inconsistencies that would have otherwise flown under the radar that you will now need to address. With so many petitions and so few visas available, CIS needs its red flags for short cuts. While an RFE can be used to your advantage to build a stronger case for your visa, or your client or employee’s visa being approved, the roadmap to answering the RFE is not always so straightforward. In many cases, the RFE will not directly tell you how to answer it in its wording. One daunting example of this is the notorious Nightmare RFE that is virtually impossible to answer in the time allotted to answer it, and for a reasonable price. To address an RFE, sit down with your team – the lawyer, the candidate, the employer, and the evaluator – to see what is being asked and of whom, and what CIS really needs to know by the questions they are asking. If what they are asking for in the RFE is virtually impossible to provide, you may be able to answer their underlying questions with documentation and evidence that it is possible for you to provide. Of course, the best option is to avoid an RFE in the first place. We’re coming up on autumn, which means it’s time to start preparing for the FY2018 H-1B season. Here are five measure you can take from the get-go to avoid an RFE.