Press Release

Newark CA – On August 13, 2010 President Obama signed into law H.R. 6080, an act making emergency supplemental appropriations for border security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for other purposes. This law includes an increase of certain H-1B and L-1 application fees.

USCIS conducted a teleconference today and provided additional details on these fee increases. Since this bill was signed into law by the President, the fee increase is effective immediately. Any petition filed as of August 14th or later will be subject to the fee increase provisions. USCIS is working on updating the I-129 form.

Companies with 50 or more US employees also have 50% or more of their employees on H1B or L status are required to pay an additional, non-refundable $2000 for new/change of employer petitions H-1B petitions, and $2250 for L-1 petitions. Extension petitions where the employee is already with the employer are not subject to this fee increase. The 50 employee count only includes US employees, so if a company had 40 US employees working in the US, and 15 employees working abroad, it would not have to pay this additional fee. The 50% count includes the total of all employees on H1B and L status, combined, including those on L2, so, hypothetically, if a company had 50 US employees, and 30 of their employees were in L2 status with work authorization, then any H-1B or L-1 petition would be subject to the additional fee. Finally, the employer is required to pay the additional fee; it may not force the employee to pay.

We anticipate that this fee increase will dramatically change the playing field in the IT consulting world. This creates a disadvantage to large IT consulting companies, and we anticipate that larger IT consulting companies may be more hesitant to file H-1B petitions, thus, creating more opportunities to smaller IT consulting companies to hire foreign national programmers, software engineers, systems analysts, etc.

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