U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services district director David Gulick is warning that employers who make an attestation that is \u201cnot truthful\u201d when filing a CW-1 petition for a guest worker can face penalty fines and prosecution.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t play games with us,\u201d said Gulick, speaking at the Rotary Club of Saipan meeting at the Hyatt Regency Saipan yesterday.<\/p>\n
Gulick said that employers filing a petition for their guest workers need to attest that there are no qualified U.S. workers that are available for the guest workers\u2019 positions \u201con the day they file the petition.\u201d U.S. workers include U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, green card holders, or citizens of the Freely Associated States.<\/p>\n
Employers, Gulick said, also need to attest that they \u201creasonably believe the worker is not eligible for another U.S. immigration category as a non-immigrant worker.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gulick noted, though, that the duration for advertising the position is not specified anywhere in the worker rule. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey [employers] have to take reasonable efforts to determine whether or not there are available U.S. workers in the CNMI at the time when they signed for the petition,\u201d said Gulick.<\/p>\n
According to Gulick, they are giving employers \u201ca great deal of discretion\u201d by leaving it up to them how to satisfy the attestation requirement by making a \u201creasonable determination\u201d as part of their office\u2019s \u201congoing efforts throughout our adjudication process to reduce the paperwork on employers and applicants.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe burden shifts from us to the employer and they have to start thinking, doing decisions for themselves and they have to make good faith efforts to do what they can do,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Gulick emphasized that the purpose of the transitional worker rule \u201cis to replace all the guest workers in the CNMI with regular U.S. immigration workers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is something that I hope people begin to understand and let\u2019s work together to do this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt may take some energetic, some out-of-the-box thinking on the case of the CNMI employers in trying to come up with how they\u2019re going to solve their worker needs with U.S. workers in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gulick said that when an employer deliberately misrepresents facts \u201cwith the intention of getting us to approve\u201d the petition, then the U.S. Attorney will become involved.<\/p>\n
While Gulick said that they will be conducting random checks to determine the accuracy of the petitions filed by employers, these random checks \u201cmay be subject to budgets and other factors.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt could very well happen. I would do my best to make sure it happens as much as I can,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Besides the amount of time needed to advertise a guest worker\u2019s position before making an attestation, Gulick said that inquiries about determination of H1 visa eligibility and processing was also a key point that came out in all the outreach sessions that their team has conducted.<\/p>\n
The USCIS team also conducted an outreach session on Rota on Monday and on Tinian yesterday, with schedules of more outreach session today and tomorrow. Except for Gulick, the outreach experts are scheduled to leave on Friday. Gulick will be on island until Oct. 9.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven right now, I don\u2019t have answers to every question\u2026We will give everybody fair consideration and take into account all the circumstances and there\u2019s a lot of unique circumstances that exist here,\u201d said Gulick.<\/p>\n
These circumstances that have raised concerns, Gulick said, include the hiring of household workers and caregivers. He said that they\u2019re \u201cnot going to be restrictive\u201d if a legitimate business engaged in an ongoing activity of providing services or goods for profit \u201ccomes to us and petitions for a household worker or a maid.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Gulick, \u201cwe will probably go ahead and assume that that\u2019s one of the situations where it\u2019s legitimate and we will probably not question it\u201d like they would, for example, a restaurant that petitions for a heavy duty equipment operator.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I do tell employers that if you do, there had better be an employer-employee relationship,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services district director David Gulick is warning that employers who make an attestation that is \u201cnot truthful\u201d when filing a CW-1 petition for a guest worker can face penalty fines and prosecution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}