Applying for a green card for an employee
July 8, 2016 6:17 PM Subscribe
We are a small company, just shy of 100 people and applying for a green card for an employee via EB-2 Category. Will the lawyers do everything or do we the HR department need to do something to make this process easier for us?
Best answer: just as an addendum, and with an employee bias -- I've worked for 100-150 person companies for the last 15 years. I know how it can be when a company of that size may have only one or two full time staff doing HR (and maybe you're also being an office manager and/or assist executives). I've seen the temptation to just delegate all of this work to the employee or to the hiring manager since they may have more skin in the game.
There are some merits to that, and you should absolutely get the hiring manager involved, at a minimum; but somebody needs to take ownership of the process or it will fail by dint of too many people being too distracted by their "real jobs" to submit all the paperwork before the employee's visa expires. And the consequences of failure are being out $5000 - $10000 in legal fees, damaged morale, and losing an employee who may have to leave as their immigration status falls apart.
So to answer the question of how to make things easier for you, if you trust the hiring manager to be a competent, reliable partner who has a genuine interest in retaining the employee, then absolutely delegate the bulk of the work to them and act as the interface between them and the lawyers. If the manager is disinterested, similarly overburdened, or just unreliable, then having to manage them as well will make the job harder for you. If there's another individual in the hierachy (perhaps higher up) who would be a better partner, then enlist them.
posted by bl1nk at 5:57 AM on July 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
There are some merits to that, and you should absolutely get the hiring manager involved, at a minimum; but somebody needs to take ownership of the process or it will fail by dint of too many people being too distracted by their "real jobs" to submit all the paperwork before the employee's visa expires. And the consequences of failure are being out $5000 - $10000 in legal fees, damaged morale, and losing an employee who may have to leave as their immigration status falls apart.
So to answer the question of how to make things easier for you, if you trust the hiring manager to be a competent, reliable partner who has a genuine interest in retaining the employee, then absolutely delegate the bulk of the work to them and act as the interface between them and the lawyers. If the manager is disinterested, similarly overburdened, or just unreliable, then having to manage them as well will make the job harder for you. If there's another individual in the hierachy (perhaps higher up) who would be a better partner, then enlist them.
posted by bl1nk at 5:57 AM on July 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
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Essentially, as the employer you have to do at least two things to support the petition and process.
1. Define the job, and petition the Department of Labor for a prevailing wage survey to verify that you plan to pay the employee a wage that is aligned with what DOL expect other employees to be paid.
2. Advertise the job and gather applicants, then submit evidence that you can submit to the government showing that none of the American citizens who applied for the job met the requirements stated.
Your lawyers can help with drafting the forms and petitions that support 1 & 2, but you, the employer, have to create the job description that is the basis for Step 1, and you also have to manage the application process in Step 2.
Your lawyers can provide advice, but they don't know your business well enough to know what a relevant job description would look like.
posted by bl1nk at 8:17 PM on July 8, 2016 [1 favorite]