Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

What does "premium" processing mean?

I just moved to a new company so I can talk about the H1b transfers. When you apply for a H1b transfer, currently it is taking 8-9 months before you can get the final approval. You can however work for the new company while this process is going on.

That said, you (or your employer) can pay about $1k which sort of puts your application at the top of the pile. If you go down this route, you end up getting the approval in about 2 weeks.

There are reasons why people choose premium processing. For example if they have to go out of the country within the next 6-8 months, it is best if you have the H1b approval documents with you.

Shouldn't this system allow USCIS to hire the adequate staff to handle the premium applications on a separate load than the regular pipeline? They seem to be shutting this down to help the regular H1-B application pipeline, that means all applications were being handled by the same staff, which seems silly.

Depends if $1k is commensurate to the additional work needed, and if they can find enough staff to hire to put the money to good use. At least one of those failing to be true seems fairly likely to me.

Also depends on whether the $1,225 fee was used to pay for H1-B processing at all, or simply used to cover other USCIS expenses.

Yes, I probably should have wrote something like "commensurate to the amount of work/money USCIS's structure requires before it will process the application." I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone argue that USCIS operates at near-optimal levels of efficiency ;)

There are insane amount of H1B applications (I think there were over 200,000 last year). Ofcourse they use the lottery to process about "only" 85,000 of them.

This does not include H1B transfers and other stuff USCIS handles.

This is the government. Everything goes slow.

I don't know the exact details of DHS and UCSIS but typically, the number of employees is set by the Federal Budget and the have may have limited flexibility to hire more.

To do something like that there would probably have to be special language written into the budget and it would have to be approved by Congress.

Pay to play. You pay more, you jump to the front of the line. This will the let USCIS work through the backlog.

Basically it means that you get bumped up in the queue. Which when you think about it is really a very odd feature to add to a government (i.e. non-profit generating) service.

It's a good way to deal with scarcity. And scarcity is definitely an issue when the government agency in question doesn't necessarily have the resources available to them to actually perform at the level that they need to due to funding and political football.

Paying a premium for expedited service is fine (I'm sure you've paid USPS a few extra bucks to mail your package faster), but I do agree that it should be applied judiciously.

It's self funded.

The State Department has a similar service for expediting passports. It's great because it lets people that actually need it fast to prioritize themselves by paying more.

When the normal queue is 9 months, it would be immoral not to have any ways to jump to the front. Like the WWDC selling out in seconds, it might be "fair" but it's clearly not the optimal solution.

Are we all not (potential) workers that would improve the economy? This premium service does not protect against national threats.

This has nothing to do with Trump, or national threats. No F1B holder is superior to the others, but I'm glad that there's a way to jump the line if you have the means.

This along your other comment in this thread is the definition of 'classism' and how the income gap widens.

Attempting to frame opposition to lowest-common-denominator-politics as a equivalent to racism and other -isms with a word made up by sociologists is laughable. A Porsche costs more than a Toyota. 2-weeks processing costs more and uses more resources than 9-month processing, and you can pay for it if you wish. If everybody paid the premium fee, then USCIS could hire more, and everybody could get it done in 2 weeks. Couldn't be fairer. USCIS is entirely (99%) funded by applicant fees, so this is literally how it works.

Why immoral? Genuine question - if anything surely the premium processing is immoral as it pushes other (innocent?!) workers further down the queue?

It's better to have recourse. Either everybody waits a ton of time, or some people barely wait and some people wait a ton of time. Why drag everybody down to the lowest common denominator because of "fairness"?

It's companies paying an extra fee (around $1000 I think) to have expedited processing of applications. It means you're guaranteed a response (for or against) in a shorter period of time, I think 14 days. It's commonly used, in my experience.

I was at an immigration talk recently and the lawyer advised against it saying the office managing the expedited applications (SoCal) is stricter than the regular process.

You pay money, they process it in 2-3 weeks or you get your money back.

Expedite, seems like.

It looks like they still support "expedite criteria"[1]

Perhaps "premium processing" is expedited without a justification.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/forms/expedite-criteria

Reply on news.ycombinator.com