Labor Immigration Law

The Department of Labor has released an interesting report regarding the number of PERM and H-2A/H-2B labor certifications.

For the period between October and December 2007, DOL received almost 20,000 PERM on-line submissions and slightly over 1,000 mail-in submissions. DOL completed work on 16,200 cases, of which 12,500 were certified (78% certification rate), 2,800 were denied (17%) and 800 were withdrawn (5%).

It is interesting to compare the approval rates for the Oct-Dec 2007 period with the historical certification rate since PERM started in March 2005. The historical overall certification rate is slightly above 78% which seems to indicate that the Oct-Dec 2007 certification rate was in line with historical averages.

Among other interesting findings in the report are the top five states of intended employment - California (23%), New York (10%), New Jersey (7%), Texas (7%) and Florida (6%). Few would be surprised that Indian nationals were the top nationality with 28% of all certified applications and computer software engineers were the top occupation with 17%.

In the H-2A/H-2B section of the report, it is worth noting that there was a significant increase in both the number of requested and certified labor certifications for both the agricultural and non-agricultural programs in FY07 compared to FY06. This seems to suggest that more employers are resorting to H-2 visas to obtain temporary labor. [See our recent post on H-2B cap.]

The relevant portion of the DOL report can be read here (PDF).