Immigrants could help the US labor shortage -- if the government would let them [View all]
Amid nationwide labor shortages in critical industries, more than a million immigrants are waiting on the US government to issue them work permits. Without these permits, many could lose their jobs, and some already have.
Biraj Nepal, a Nepali asylum seeker living in Woodland, California, has been working as a software engineer in the IT department of a bank for the last four years. Nepal went on unpaid administrative leave starting on January 26 because his work permit expired and the government has yet to process his renewal application. That has left his employer in a lurch: There’s long been a shortage of IT workers, and the pandemic accelerated that trend as companies went remote. Now, nearly a third of IT executives say that the search for qualified employees has gotten “significantly harder.”
If Nepal isn’t issued a new work permit within 90 days of taking administrative leave, his company will, by law, no longer be able to hold his job for him and will likely look for a contractor to fill his role. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be a concern; work permits are meant to be issued quickly so that immigrants can be self-sufficient even while they are waiting on other applications for visas and green cards, which can take months or years to process. But the backlog at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has reached crisis level.
“It’s a critical situation here. I’m in a financial crisis,” Nepal said. “We are being punished by the government without doing any crime.”
It only takes about 12 minutes for an official to review an application for a work permit, but an overstretched USCIS still hasn’t been able to keep up. It’s a symptom of broader dysfunction in America’s legal immigration system, which has not seen major reform in decades and was a target of former President Donald Trump.
USCIS is now taking about eight months to a year to issue work permits at the National Benefits Center, its main processing center. Federal law directs that the agency take no longer than 180 days to process those applications. It was abiding by that timeframe pre-pandemic, but that’s not a hard legal requirement. It’s taking so long to issue new permits that, according to the latest available data from the agency, the backlog stood at more than 1.48 million pending applications as of the end of September. The agency doesn’t track the number of people who have lost their jobs as a result.
This bureaucratic backlog is a problem for immigrants who are applying for work permits for the first time and for those who are seeking to renew their employment authorization. The permits are typically valid for two years and some can be automatically extended for 180 days, but after that, an immigrant can no longer legally work.
The delay is affecting a range of immigrants, from asylum seekers to beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. There were nearly 11 million open jobs as of the end of December, many in industries ranging from tech to trucking that need every worker they can get right now. Those industries heavily rely on immigrant workers, and due to pandemic-era policies that have prevented some 2 million new immigrants from coming to the US, the available supply of those workers is smaller than it otherwise would be. The US needs to leverage its existing immigrant workforce, but the work permit backlog is standing in the way.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22933223/work-permit-uscis-backlog-immigration-labor-shortage
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They might also *ahem* become US citizens!
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