PERM Labor Certification: A Brief History

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has a long history of backlogs going back 20+ years

A brief history of labor certification --->

-- In the early 1990s the traditional, old school labor certification process existed. That process was most akin to 'supervised recruitment' now. That process existed but the nature of that process was that it could not handle a high volume of cases. It also involved individual state processing before the labor cert would go to regional offices of the DOL.

-- In the mid-1990s in recognition of the tight labor market and DOL's inability to process the cases quickly enough, RIR was promoted. (Technically it always existed but it was never used). RIR stands for "Reduction in Recruitment." It was the process where you did the recruitment in advance of filing the labor certification (which is what we do now in PERM) whereas the traditional old school process involved filing the application and then doing the recruitment.

-- In 2001, because of a law called 245(i) which allowed certain undocumented immigrants to obtain green cards through adjustment of status based on an I-130 (family petition) or labor certification, the entire labor certification system got crushed with filings, particularly in California and Texas but all over - there were a bazillion filings and the system got stuck.

-- So DOL invented the PERM labor certification system as a way to deal with the 245(i) bottleneck and also to improve ways to counter fraud as there were some really brazen fraudulent situations under the RIR system.

-- In 2005, when PERM started, a PERM application could be approved in a week. Seriously. And it stayed that way for a few years until we got to the Great Recession. Then things started to slow down and supervised recruitment was used more extensively for Wall Street firms and other companies where there were a lot of layoffs.

-- In 2022, we are now 10+ years beyond the Great Recession and the labor market is arguably the tightest it has ever been. Employers who would never traditionally consider sponsoring foreign workers are now doing so. I have heard stories of certain health care employers filing hundreds of PERM applications for entry-level medical assistants where basically no experience is required.

-- In 2022, it seems clear that DOL has a problem akin to what it had in 2001. DOL is a major bottleneck and it is only going to get worse. Something will have to happen to fix this.

BUT HERE IS THE THING - after DOL fixes its bottleneck and PERM processing improves, then the bottleneck will move to the US consulates for immigrant visa processing for these EB3 skilled and unskilled workers but also if DOL ever clears its bottleneck, what is going to happen is that the cut-off dates that only exist for India and China (and occasionally Philippines EB3) - they are going to spread to more and more countries.

The fundamental issue of US immigration law is that there is a huge amount of demand and a limited 'supply' of ways to immigrate.