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If your H-1B application for FY2021 was rejected, you may get a second chance to file.  USCIS is now accepting petitions from last year that were rejected because the start date was LATER THAN October 1, 2020. 

Why is USCIS doing this?  Last year, under the new two-step application process and the general uncertainties of the pandemic, the H-1B cap was not filled from filings from the initial selection so there was another lottery in August of 2020.  While petitioners had until November 16, 2021 to file, the start date was still required to be set for October 1, 2020.  If this is your situation, it’s time to clean up the petition and resubmit.

The H-1B approval process can be long and arduous with at least one round of RFEs to respond to.  That means to get to work by the start date, applicants need to take steps to prevent issues that may delay visa approval.  At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with difficult cases and RFEs every year.  We keep an eye on USCIS approval trends and here is what we have noticed:

• If the beneficiary’s education is ANYTHING BUT a US degree in the exact field of the H-1B job, you will need to include a credential evaluation.  This credential evaluation must take the job, the education, work experience, visa requirements, and USCIS approval trends into account.
• If the US DOL Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for the H-1B position does not ALWAYS require a bachelor’s degree minimum for entry into the position, you need to include additional documentation fortified with an expert opinion letter to meet specialty occupation requirements.  This letter must be written by an expert in the field of the H-1B job with experience working directly in the field and in positions of leadership wherein hiring decisions regarding the position in question and supporting positions were made.  Wage level issues can also be addressed in this letter.
• If the position is consultant or for a consulting firm, include a complete itinerary of the work the H-1B beneficiary will be performing for the duration of the H-1B visa period.  This must include client and customer contact information.

Let us review your petition to identify areas of weakness and advise accordingly before you file.  For a free review of your case visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in four hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.

According to Forbes, about two-thirds of annual H-1B cap-subject visas are awarded to beneficiaries in computer occupations.  As of June 2021, there were over 1 million computer positions actively vacant.  However, H-1B applicants working as computer programmers have been hit the hardest by specialty occupation issues in their petitions.

A few years back, a H-1B visa approval trend emerged wherein occupations that are listed in the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook as normally but not always requiring a bachelor’s degree minimum were adjudicated to not meet the specialty occupation requirement.  H-1B eligibility requirements state that to qualify as a specialty occupation the job must normally require a bachelor’s degree minimum, but USCIS began adjudicating the exception as the norm.

There are three other ways to meet the specialty occupation requirement:

1. The minimum bachelor’s degree requirement is the industry norm for the position in question, or this position is uniquely complex.
2. The H-1B employer always requires a bachelor’s degree minimum for this position.
3. The nature of the job is uniquely complex as to require a bachelor’s degree at minimum.

If the position in question does not ALWAYS require a bachelor’s degree minimum as stated in the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook, you will need to prove that it meets at least one of the three alternatives. 

This will require documentation of past hiring practices and the ad for the job along with ads for the same position for parallel companies that show an unbroken pattern of a minimum bachelor’s degree requirement.  You will also need to provide a detailed breakdown of the duties and responsibilities of the job along with an analysis of how complex skills and knowledge are applied.  Along with this evidence and documentation, provide an expert opinion letter written by an expert in the field of the H-1B job to lend credibility to your case.  This expert should have at least a decade of experience working in the field of the H-1B job, have held leadership roles, and have made hiring decisions regarding the position in question and supporting positions. 

At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with experts in every H-1B field that have the credentials and experience required by USCIS to accept their letters as evidence in your case.

For a free review of your case and consultation, visit www.ccifree.com.  We will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.

Brilliant, highly skilled professionals often take non-traditional pathways through education combining work experience with formal training.  Sometimes all of the education takes place on the job.  The question is, how do you explain this to USCIS in your H-1B visa petition?

The answer is that you must show the US academic value of the work experience.  The way to do this is with a detailed credential evaluation that includes a work experience conversion.  A professor authorized to grant college credit for work experience can convert three years of progressive work experience in the field of the H-1B job into one year of college credit towards that major.  That means twelve years of progressive work experience can be expressed as the academic equivalent of a US bachelor’s degree for USCIS.

What is progressive work experience?  This means periods of employment wherein the H-1B beneficiary can show education took place by virtue of promotions, more responsibility, or that the nature of the work became increasingly complex over time.  These three components show that education occurred on the job, specialized skills were mastered, and specialized knowledge was acquired.

At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with professors who are authorized to grant college credit for work experience.  Along with our team of education experts, we write every credential evaluation uniquely to address to job, the education, the work experience, the visa, and USCIS approval trends.  These are the vital elements to writing a successful credential evaluation to effectively communicate the educational value of the beneficiary’s breadth of work experience to USCIS in terms of US academic standards.

For a free review of your case and consultation visit www.ccifree.com.  We will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.

A successful visa petition takes a team effort.  The beneficiary, the employer, and the immigration lawyer all have important rules to play.  Who is the team member that gets often overlooked but performs many of the vital roles?  The paralegal.

The bones of a successful petition are ensuring the required forms are submitted in order with accurate information, consistent across all forms.  This is the bottom line of any successful petition.  This is not as straightforward as it may seem as different visas require different modes of documentation and assurance.  In the rush to complete a petition and file, especially when rounds of RFEs threaten the employee start date, vital details can get lost.  Paralegals carry a massive amount of responsibility in the petition process.

At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work to support visa petition teams by offering free consultations to identify petition weaknesses and advise on how to strengthen these areas.  If a form is missing, or if there are inconsistent answers across multiple forms, we will find it and advise accordingly, taking pressure off of the paralegal, streamlining the process, and helping teams devise a roadmap to visa approval.

Let us work with you for free.  Visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs for work visas.

At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with difficult RFEs every year.  These are RFEs that call more than one aspect of the petition into question.  On the simple end, it is wage level and specialty occupation rolled into one complicated issue.  On the other end is the Nightmare RFE that is nearly impossible to answer by its own guidelines.

The first step to answering a complex RFE is to read it through with your team, and then put it down and go back to the original H-1B eligibility requirements.  Go back to your case and see which requirements need fortification and who on the team is responsible for providing additional evidence and documentation for this. 

For example, if there are education issues, make sure that the beneficiary’s degree has the US academic value they claim it does.  If the education is from outside of the United States, a credential evaluation is needed to clearly show that its US academic equivalency meets H-1B eligibility requirements, meaning a minimum of a US bachelor’s degree or higher depending on the educational requirements of the job.  If the degree is anything except a US degree in the exact field of the H-1B job, including a three-year degree, or incomplete or missing college, a credential evaluation is needed.  These evaluations must be written to uniquely to fit the job, the education, the visa, and USCIS approval trends, and may require a progressive work experience conversion.

If the issue is specialty occupation or wage level, the employer must provide evidence as to why the duties and responsibilities of this particular job require an advanced degree to perform.  This includes documentation of past hiring practices and hiring practices for the same position in parallel companies within the industry.  With wage level, the employer must clearly show why the wage level was set as it is and that it meets the prevailing wage requirement.  An expert opinion letter written by a professional in the field of the H-1B job with extensive field experience and leadership roles including making hiring decisions regarding this position and supporting positions is needed to overturn this RFE.

Employer-employee relationship issues have become increasingly common.  The employer must show that the employee will have work for the duration of the visa, and that the employer will be able to control this work, even at third-party worksites.  This means including a complete itinerary of the work to be performed by the H-1B employee for the three years of the H-1B visa, including client and customer contact information, and how oversite will work at third-party worksites.

Before you file your RFE response, let our experts at CCI TheDegreePeople.com review your case for free to identify areas of weakness and offer consultation.  Visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.

If your H-1B petition wasn’t selected for FY2021, you may have another shot.  On June 23, 2021, USCIS announced that it will allow resubmission of certain cap-subject FY2021 petitions before October 1, 2021. 

USCIS stated, “If your FY2021 petition was rejected or administratively closed solely because your petition was based on a registration submitted during the initial registration period but you requested a start day after October 1, 2020, you may re-submit that previously filed petition.” 

Other H-1B petitions not selected in the initial FY2022 lottery may also have a second chance if all H-1B visa slots are not filled by petitions selected in the first lottery.  This means all eligible applicants have the chance to clean up their petition in time to resubmit.

If your petition from FY2021 is eligible, that means you’ve got some work to do.  If the start date was wrong, you need to go over the petition with a keen eye to make sure all answers are accurate and consistent across all documents. 

Go back to the original H-1B eligibility requirements, in light of current USCIS approval trends, and make sure your case clearly shows all of these requirements are met.  That means the employer can control the work of the H-1B employee at all times – even at third-party worksites – with a complete work itinerary for the duration of the visa.  The employee must be making prevailing wages and the factors that went in to setting the wage level must be explained.  The job must clearly meet specialty occupation requirements by one or more of the metrics. 

If the Department of Labor Occupational Outlook Handbook states that the job does anything but ALWAYS require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree or higher to perform, an expert opinion letter must be included along with a detailed breakdown of the duties and responsibilities of the job to show that specialized skills and knowledge are required. 

If the H-1B employee does not hold a US degree in the exact field of the H-1B job, include a detailed credential evaluation written uniquely to fit the situation that fills in any gaps between the education the employee has, and the education the employee needs.

The good news is you don’t have to start from scratch to file.  Just be sure that your petition is airtight.  At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with difficult RFEs every year and keep an eye on USCIS approval trends. 

Let us review your case for free before you file.  Visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.

If an RFE arrives instead of approval, that means your H-1B petition did not make the clear case that they job, the employer, and the beneficiary met eligibility requirements.  Someone dropped the ball.  The key to answering this RFE is to find out who it was – not to place blame, but to get the visa approved.

Sometimes the one that dropped the ball is USCIS.  Over the past better part of a decade, they have been a wild card when it comes to approval trends.  They shirked their own specialty occupation eligibility requirement by adjudicating usually as always when it comes to minimum educational requirements, effectively making the exception the norm and causing all kinds of problems.  They assume level one wages implies an entry level position.  They started only accepting educational degrees earned in the exact major of the H-1b job rather than in a related field.  They started requiring a complete itinerary of the work to be performed by the H-1B employee for the duration of the visa, which blindsided H-1B beneficiaries employed as consultants.  Maybe the adjudicator was having a bad day or in a rush to get home.  All of these factors could contribute to your RFE.  The bad news is, if USCIS is to blame, it’s still on you to fix it.

Sometimes the RFE was triggered because answers, name spellings, and dates were not consistent across all documents.  Inconsistencies trigger red flags that lead to RFEs that you now have to answer.  Whoever proofreads the petition needs to pay extra close attention to this detail in the RFE response.

Sometimes it’s the employer’s fault.  Did they provide enough evidence and documentation as to their economic viability?   Did they provide evidence of past hiring practices and a detailed job description to show the occupation is specialized?  Did they clearly show their ability to control the employee’s work even at third-party worksites and show that the H-1B employee has a full work itinerary for the duration of the H-1B visa?  All of these factors are essential for visa approval.

Sometimes it’s the employee’s fault.  It is not uncommon for an H-1B beneficiary to be misleading about the academic value of their degree, either on purpose or by accident.  For example, different degrees have the same title in different countries while the same degree can have a completely different title somewhere else.

Sometimes it’s the credential evaluator or the expert who wrote the opinion letter’s fault.  The evaluation must be written uniquely taking the education, the job, the visa, and USCIS approval trends into account.  This will often require a progressive work experience conversion written by a professor with the authority to grant college credit for work experience.  A cookie cutter evaluation won’t cut it.  On a similar vein, USCIS will only accept letters from experts with extensive experience working in the field of the H-1B job as valid.  Simply instructing in the field will not suffice.  Ideally, the expert has been in leadership roles and made hiring decisions regarding the position in question and supporting positions.

Identify who dropped the ball and identify what eligibility requirements have not been met.  Then fortify these areas accordingly with added evidence and documentation, the right credential evaluation, and an expert opinion letter from the right kind of expert.  Sounds exhaustive?  With the proper guidance, it doesn’t have to be.

Let us review your RFE for free to identify areas of weakness and consult on how to strengthen your case to get that visa approved.  Visit www.ccifree.com for a free review of your case.  We will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.

Specialty occupation and wage level issues have become a scourge for H-1B applicants.  Over the past few years, USCIS has changed the way it adjudicates the specialty occupation requirement.  This year the wage level component has become a heated legal issue with the AILA representing five tech and medical nonprofits suing the Biden Administration to block H-1B approval based on the highest wages.

We expect these hot button issues to impact H-1B petition adjudication this summer with the Double RFE, which takes issue with wage level and specialty occupation.

Here’s how it works:

USCIS has been adjudicating the specialty occupation requirement differently.  Instead of defining a specialty occupation as a job that normally requires a minimum of an advanced degree, it adjudicates the term as ALWAYS requiring an advanced degree making the exception the norm.  USCIS has also been making the assumption that wage level one implies a job is entry level.  Since entry level jobs are more likely than other industry jobs to normally but NOT ALWAYS require an advanced degree, this becomes both a wage level issue and a specialty occupation issue: either the H-1B employee is not making the prevailing wage, or the job is not a specialty occupation.

Of course, this is flawed logic, but it is flawed logic that H-1B applicants are left to deal with.  At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we help our clients answer this RFE every year.  This is what we do:

We work with experts in every H-1B field that can write expert opinion letters to validate that our clients’ cases meet H-1B wage level and specialty occupation requirements.  These experts have at least a decade of experience working directly in the field of the H-1B job, are in excellent standing within the industry, and have made hiring decisions regarding the position in question and supporting positions.  Our clients provide the expert with as much evidence and documentation as possible regarding the position and the employer, including a detailed breakdown of the duties and responsibilities of the job, past hiring practices, the ad for the job, and ads for the same position in parallel companies within the industry. 

Also include the factors that went into setting the wage level.  The purpose is to show that the educational requirement is an industry standard for this position and that the wage level is set appropriately in regards to the beneficiary’s education and work experience.  In many cases, the wage level is set low because a beneficiary may have the required degree but little to no actual field experience and would therefore require a high level of training and supervision to start justifying the low wage level.  There are many factors that go into determining the wage level for any given job including what parallel companies within the industry in the employer’s geographical location are paying and employee experience.

From all of this documentation and evidence, the expert can write the expert opinion letter your case needs to overturn the RFE and get that visa approved.

Before you file a completed H-1B petition or answer a Double RFE, let us review your case for free and provide a free consultation.  Visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.

Every year, H-1B applicants file completed petitions only to receive an RFE…with EVERYTHING in it.  Complex RFEs that take issue than more than one requirement area have become increasingly common over the past decade and are expected to continue to arrive.  It may seem like you have to rewrite the petition from scratch to meet its demands, and there is never enough time and money to make it work.

At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with complex RFEs every year, from the Double RFE to the Triple Threat to the Nightmare.  We advise answering them in these three steps:

1. Go back to the basics.  Read through the RFE with your team, then put it down and go back to the original H-1B eligibility requirements.  It is essential to keep one eye on USCIS approval trends when identifying where in your case eligibility requirements are not met.  For example, USCIS has been taking issue with occupations that do not ALWAYS require a minimum of a US bachelor’s degree even though eligibility requirements state that NORMALLY will suffice.  USCIS requires an exact degree specialization match to meet educational requirements.  Consultants require a complete itinerary of the work to be performed for the duration of the H-1B visa along with additional documentation of how the employer will be able to control the H-1B employee’s work offsite.  Level one wages tend to raise a red flag as USCIS assumes this means the position is entry level and applicants are back to square one with specialty occupation issues all over again.  Identify where your case needs work and fortify accordingly.

2. Include and expert opinion letter.  If you receive a complex RFE, do not submit your response without an expert opinion letter to lend weight to your case for visa approval.  This letter can address specialty occupation and wage level issues and is based on the evidence and documentation you can provide about the position and the company.  USCIS won’t just accept any expert’s opinion letter as valid.  This expert must have at least ten years of experience working directly in the field of the H-1B job, have leadership experience within the field, and ideally have made hiring decisions regarding the H-1B position and supporting occupations.

3. Include a credential evaluation to fill in any gaps between the education the beneficiary has and the education the beneficiary needs.  If the beneficiary has anything OTHER THAN a US bachelor’s degree or higher in the exact field of the H-1B job, you will need to include a credential evaluation.  It must be shown that the beneficiary has the academic equivalent of a US bachelor’s degree or higher in the exact field of the H-1B job by US academic standards.  This requires a detailed credential evaluation that takes course content, non-collegiate training, and years of progressive work experience into account.  USCIS accepts that three years of work experience in the field of the H-1B job wherein the employee took on progressively more complex duties and responsibilities can account for one year of college credit in the field.  If a work experience conversion is required, a professor with the authority to grant college credit for work experience must write this conversion.

At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with the right kind of experts in all H-1B fields and professors with the authority to grant college credit for work experience.  We always watch USCIS approval trends closely and can help you identify where your case needs to be strengthened.  Receiving an RFE means an opportunity to strengthen your case.

Let us review your case for free.  Visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in 4 hours or less.

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com.  Sheila specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.