The USCIS institutional “culture of no” is now expanding to include attempts to deny EB2 petitions for holders of two year India master’s degrees, where the beneficiary’s undergraduate degree was a three year bachelor’s program. There is no explicit legal authority for this position. Of course, lack of legal sanction has never stopped CIS adjudicators in the past.  

The issue of prevailing wage is perhaps one of the most misunderstood of all immigration questions. For most foreign nationals, there are two situations where prevailing wage is an issue: H1B and PERM. The application of the rules is a bit different in each situation and this can lead to confusion, sometimes with serious consequences.  

In another article in this issue, we discussed briefly the disparity that sometimes exists between an H1B prevailing wage and a PERM prevailing wage. This can be a symptom of a much larger problem: inconsistency between H1B representations and PERM representations.