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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 ;)

This is the government. Everything goes slow.

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