This post is a version of a section of my paper updated with statistics from the 4th quarter of FY 2022: Processing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: Describing the Scale of the Problem
The Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (DOL-OFLC) has a narrow niche within the U.S. immigration system: certifying that employers have met the requirements to petition for their workers to receive certain temporary visas or green cards. These categories include only the following: H‑2A temporary agricultural workers; H‑2B temporary nonagricultural workers; H‑1B, H‑1B1, and E‑3 temporary skilled workers; CW‑1 transitional workers in the Northern Mariana Islands; and EB‑2 and EB‑3 employment‐based second‐ and third‐preference green card categories, respectively. In conjunction with certification, employers must often obtain a prevailing‐wage determination that establishes the foreign worker’s salary.
In 2022, the DOL-OFLC’s backlog was nearly 250,000 cases—up from about 96,000 in 2019. The largest increases occurred among the labor certification and prevailing wage applications. Because the DOL-OFLC prioritizes the temporary worker programs, their backlogs have always remained a small percentage of the total number of applications received. As a result, prevailing‐wage determinations and labor certifications end up accounting for over 90 percent of the backlog. Table 1 breaks down the DOL-OFLC processing backlog by type of application.
Figure 1 shows the backlogs for prevailing‐wage determinations and permanent labor certifications from 2010 to 2022, quarter 4. These backlogs combined have increased from a low of about 28,000 in 2011, quarter 2, to a combined 226,837 in 2022, quarter 4. The increases have been particularly sharp in both categories from 2020 to 2022. Although the DOL-OFLC made concerted efforts in 2010 and again in 2016 to reduce its permanent labor certification backlog, that backlog has reached the highest level since the office created a more streamlined permanent labor certification process in 2004. The DOL-OFLC reformed and centralized the prevailing‐wage determination authority in 2010 to streamline its process, but that backlog has also reached a record high.
Bigger backlogs have translated into longer wait times for employers seeking to sponsor foreign workers. Given the prioritization within the DOL-OFLC for temporary workers, the wait times have mainly affected applications for permanent labor certification and prevailing‐wage determination requests. Figure 2 shows the wait times for those applications. Wait times for the prevailing wage determination grew from 67 days in 2016, quarter 1, to 189 days in 2022, quarter 4. The labor certification processing times improved dramatically in 2016, eventually reaching a low of 96 days in 2019, quarter 2, but they have exploded again in the past 3 years, reaching 263 days in 2022, quarter 4. The combined wait time to receive a prevailing wage determination and then a permanent labor certification was 452 days in 2022, quarter 4.
Read the entire report here.
