To Whom It May Concern:
I recently posted an open letter that dealt with abuses in the H-1B visa program at http://econdataus.com/h1bletter.htm. This open letter deals with another very troubling item that I've come across. I analyzed the Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) that the U.S. Department of Labor discloses publicly online and posted the results at http://econdataus.com/lcainfo.htm. First of all, the two graphs at the top show that only a small percentage of applications are denied, both as measured by application and by total number of positions. More disturbing, however, is that the certified applications contain a large number of errors, many of which it would seem to make the application impossible to process correctly. The first table lists those errors for applications involving a large number of positions, at least over 100 per application. Beneath the table is listed the basic types of errors. Those containing obviously too many positions (over 2000) appear to have been caught. However, there are also a number of certified application that contain errors in Employer Name and Address in certified Applications. The second table lists certified applications in 2013 where LCA_CASE_WORKLOC1_CITY was set to an apparent address instead of the work location city as requested. Hence, there is no apparent way to determine the work location city, a critical item in validating an application. The third table lists certified applications in 2013 for which the ratio of the starting wage rate to the reported prevailing wage was greater than 7.9. It would appear that the starting wage rate and/or the prevailing wage are in error in these applications. As with the second table, it would seem that he lack of valid salary information would make the application impossible to process correctly, Yet, as before, these applications were certified.
This is not necessarily a criticism of those doing the processing as they may be understaffed and any concerns that they express may be getting ignored at some level. Still, this pretty much destroys any notion that the LCAs are successfully insuring that H-1B and American workers are being protected. This would seem an argument for reforming the H-1B system such that these protections are real. For American workers, that might be to limit the percentage of H-1B workers that any company can hire or some other policy that could not be easily circumvented as it appears to be the case with the LCA system.