How To Apply For A Green Card under EB-3 & EB-2 Category (most common for H-1B and E-3 visa holders)

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If you are currently on an H-1B visa or E-3 visa and curious about what you have to do to get permanent residency (aka a Green Card) then we will try and document the process here for you.

If you are interested in the issues surrounding whether or not you are able to do it and what other visas can transfer to a Green Card, read the specific Green Card and visa posts as they discuss that in more detail. This post is designed to be strictly about the process.

Firstly let us show you the Green Card. The most thing to note is that it is not actually green and it is a plastic card issued to you by the USCIS.

You can read more in the Green Card information post about the EB-2 and EB-3 category of green cards. Essentially EB stands for employment based as this version of permanent residency requires the employer to file.

The EB-2 category is for Post Graduate degree holders like a Masters Degree or Bachelor Degree holders with 5+ years experience in the chosen specialty.

The EB-3 category is for Bachelor degree holders or those with enough work experience in the relevant specialty which was enough probably in the first place to get them their H-1B or E-3 visa without a Bachelors degree.

THE GREEN CARD PROCESS

Step 1: Labor Certification

Application  using Form ETA-750 submission via your employer to the Department of Labor.

During this Labor Certification procedure, your employer has to prove to the Department of Labor they were could not find a suitable person for the specific role you are in within the US. They will have to advertise for your position, and sometimes do interviews and other recruiting procedures to prove this under the DOL guidelines.

After this your employer can file an application with the DOL explaning they were unable to find both a suitably qualified and experienced candidate. As a result they wish to sponsor you for permanent residency as you have the relevant expertise.

This process can take many months to years to complete.

The cost of this process with the advertising of the role can obviously range greatly but a rough conservative figure may be $1,000 but if can differ greatly state by state and also with the different DOL offices.

Step 2: I-140 to USCIS & Adjustment of Status ( I-485)
These two can be filed in parallel but form I-485 wont be approved until after you I-140 is accepted
At this time you can also file for EAD ( Employment Authorization Document) and AP ( Advance Parol or Travel Document) , once you file for 485, you will be required to do fingerprinting.

Once your Labor Certificate is approved, your employer will file a Form I-140 -(know as Petition for Immigrant Worker) – on your behalf.

Employer should demonstrate that the company is in a good financial position to capable of paying the salary advertised for the job. For this purpose employer’s financial financial statement and corporate income tax return documents also required.

Also at this point a National Visa Number issued via the Department of State. The Adjustment of Status can only be filed once your Visa Number is available according to the Visa Bulletin released by the Department of State each month.

The applicant is given is granted against per year Quota/per country/per category. So people from China, India and Mexico and those from those countries with just Bachelor Degrees tend to have very long waits into many years before they can complete the process.

Another restriction at this stage is that a person applying for a green card needs to stick with the company, through which his/her green card is getting processed, till he gets his Green card. Otherwise he loses the process, and needs to apply for a fresh application from the beginning.

Spouse/Dependent applications can only be filed once the I-140 is approved for primary applicant.

The I-140 processing fee is constantly changing but is currently $500 for regular and $1,000 for premium processing.
The I-485 fee is $930 (includes work authorization EAD and Advnace Patrol Travel if filed at same time otherwise EAD is $340 and Advance Patrol is $305)
Additionally a $120 medical assessment paid to approved Doctor is required as well as $80 biometric fee.

It should be noted that these fees are multiplied when dependents like spouses and children under 21 are involved.

Get You Passport Stamp and Green Card

I hope this helps your understanding of the Green Card process. It is fairly complicated and is one of the reasons why lawyers start to become more necessary in these times which is unfortunate as that is an added cost to the employer and immigrant.

CJ

Why Are US Companies Not Hiring Foreigners And How Can You Get A Job?

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So on April 8, 2009 after the United States Custom and Immigration Service (USCIS) announced they were still accepting petitions for the H-1B visa for FY2010, many, including myself, were shocked.

How could a program that especially in the last 2 years was utter chaos with double the amount of applications received than available H-1B visas to issue on Day 1 alone (April 1st) now a week later still be accepting applications. Hell…they even created the H-1B Visa Lottery system just to deal with this inundation of applications!

At last report there were about 20,000 H-1B visas potentially still available reported by the USCIS  for FY2010 so in comparison with past years something drastic has happened.

So what has suddenly happened to cause this halt in job offers to foreigners?

Enter the opportunistic US Politician and the US Sensationalist “Look For Easy Answers and Targets Despite Facts” Media!

Senators Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) as well as esteemed news organizations like Business Week and many major television news networks are all trying to push agendas and sadly legislation to limit at best or get rid of the H-1B visa program all together under the guise of protecting US Workers regardless of the facts.

These people haunted by the fact that their lack of oversight and investigative journalism and thus personal responsiblity for the economic mess we are all now in, are looking for an easy target to appease the disgruntled, angry and now often unemployed constituents, readers and viewers.

So they pick a target like immigrants, who cannot vote and have very few rights and a lot of downside risk to complain about any injustice involving themselves and blame them for all economic ills and why their American counterparts now don’t have jobs.

The argument would be funny if it wasn’t causing millions of people in the US to believe into this false notion via the out of control sensationalist media who has little care for anybody other than their own bottom lines.

Of course rarely in these articles, broadcasts or policy speeches is anything made of the fact that every CEO from GM to Merril Lynch and from rougues like Bernard Madoff to Allen Stanford all have one thing in common. That is they are all US citizens. Additionally, as mentioned, all the politicians who should have been watching and enforcing reuglations and media owners who should have been exposing this corruption are again all US Citizens!

So its funny in the end that foreigners are getting blamed for a mess which they played no part in causing.

This hysteria  is causing Acts like the EAWA (Employ American Worker Act) within the TARP funding for bailed out businesses mainly in the finance sector to be created. Hence companies like Bank of America had to withdraw legitimate offers to highly trained US Masters Degree holding foreigners.

Then you have Top 10 H-1B visa employers like Microsoft (who has people like Bill Gates advocating for the H-1B Visa cap to be raised to 500,000) who announce while they will hire foreigners this year, they will do so in far reduced numbers.

Sure the economy is playing a part but the 65,000 H-1B visa quota (and 20,000 extra for Masters Degree Holders) and 10,500 E-3 Visa quota among other visas represent a tiny, tiny fraction of the US employment market of say 150 million people plus. Additionally there are still a large amount of available jobs on the major sites we recommend to look for foreigners.

There are sectors like Online, Health and Educataion that remained relatively strong despite the downturn and with the Dow picking up in the past month, there is more optimism currently in the US than at anytime in the past 6 months despite the heavy recent job losses.

So the real underlying reason why companies are not hiring foreigners is that many companies, particularly the large and more prominent ones who have hired a lot of foreigners in the past, are being told by their PR people to dampen down for a little while due to this media hysteria and potential bad publicity. There are many stories of comapnies being vilified in the media for just hiring foreigners at this time.

What is the truth and How Can You As A Foreigner Still Get a US Visa In this Economy?

The fact is that Immigrants founded more than half of all the Silicon Valley start-ups in the past 10 years. These immigrant founded U.S. technology companies employed over 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005 alone according to Vivek Wadwha from Harvard.

Google, eBay, Yahoo and PayPal are all examples of companies founded by Immigrants to the US which are now household brands and responsible for millions of direct and indirect employment bring billions of dollars of wealth to the US and its people

Immigration experts say shutting out the talent from abroad will only hurt U.S. competitiveness in the long run. The next Google or Silicon Valley will be in Bangalore or Beijing according to Vivek Wadwha due to the current loss of talent.

Of course you never would here a politician admit to any of this!!

My best advice is to continue to look at our recommendations for the best place to find a job for foreigners. (a new site for the IT people in Australia we were recently aware of is growusa.com.au which can help with your E-3 visa search in that sector)

Additionally look at further education via the F-1 visa while this hysteria plays out as there is no cap there and a Masters Degree is very helpful for not only your search and salary demands, but also does enhance your chances. If you do go after a PHD, a republican congressman from Arizona, Jeff Flake, is trying to introduce a bill to staple “green cards” to the PHD which of course is very valuable 🙂 (yes there are the odd positive stories and reasonable politicians in Washington!)

The J-1 visa in terms of Internship programs is also an option for a visa you can transfer to an H-1B visa or E-3 visa later on from in a years time for example.

The other bit of advice is to consider small companies with less public profile and also smaller cities in the US to move to as they have less public profile, less likely to follow the mainstream and thus more likely to hire you if you are a good candidate.

I hope all this advice helps you in this difficult time and provides more context and facts as to the problem facing foreigners today.

CJ