On January 1, 2019, the US Department of Labor’s (DOL) electronic filing system for the H-2B visas, iCERT, went down, leaving employers unable to start the process for obtaining foreign labor for the spring season.
In an announcement on January 2, the DOL stated that the crash was the result of massive demand, with employers requesting 97,800 H-2B workers even though only 33,000 visas are available.
This outage has left thousands of employers in limbo, with no filing date in sight. The DOL is working to get the system back up and running, and promises to give applicants a 24 hour notice before it is operational again.
Increased Demand
January 1 is the first day that applicants can file for an H-2B visa for workers beginning April 1. The demand for these visas has grown exponentially in the past few years, prompting the DOL to time the receipt of employer filings down to the millisecond and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to hold lotteries for the visas. In 2017, the DOL received 25 percent more applications than in 2016, and the 5.4 percent more in 2018 than 2017.
Congress has granted Homeland Security the permission to double the amount of visas granted the last two years, but the agency has only added 15,000 each time. These 66,000 allotted visas are split between spring and fall, with spring traditionally being the season of heavier use as landscaping businesses begin their season.
Phoenix Labor will provide updates as this issue is resolved.