Labor Immigration Law

The Department of Labor (“DOL”) has released some numbers about their pace of PERM processing.

There are about 58,000 applications currently pending of which 54% are under final review, 38% are in audits, 6% are on appeal and the remaining 2% are subject to  employment verification checks or othe.

DOL also reported that cases which are under supervised recruitment have a 25% withdrawal rate, 45% denial rate, 11% certification rate and about 20% remain pending.  Unfortunately, DOL did not report the total number of these cases as of the date of their report.

What Do These Numbers Mean?

Although the number of pending PERM cases is higher than the numbers as of December 31, 2008 (which was 53,200), we expect to see processing PERM times descrease slightly over the upcoming months.   We have written about the cause of the PERM processing delays in the past and it seems that although the overall number of pending cases has not decreased substantially, the processing times have gone done slightly.  We expect this trend to continue, although we do not expect major processing time improvements.

With respect to supervised recruitment, the numbers do not look encouraging with a 11% certification rate for each case which has been ordered for supervised recruitment.  This could be due to the fact that many employers decide to withdraw the case and refile (which explains, in part, the high withdrawal rate of supervised recruitment PERM cases of  25%).

We hope that with the introduction of the new iCert PERM portal  later this year and with the economy slowdown, the PERM processing times should improve.