Notice of Action Blog

My April Fool’s Day joke about the “Public Appeasement Fee”  is no longer a joke because it came true. To my relief, I overestimated the amount of the proposed fee increase. And it turned out that my other joke about USCIS Call Centers in India and the Philippines was not too far off the mark either. After recently exchanging mind numbingly futile and circular email correspondence with Serco, Inc. contractors from the National Visa Center, I googled the company’s information only to discover that it is a subsidiary of the foreign conglomerate Serco Group plc, based in the U.K., with tens of thousands of employees all other the world providing immigration support services to foreign governments such as ours that opt to outsource administration and enforcement of their immigration laws. It turns out that Serco already runs most of our critical immigration infrastructure. Their employees answer your calls, sort mail, answer written customer service inquiries, and perform many other important and not always transparent administrative functions. These services are probably not cheap. So Public Law 111-230 will now require U.S. companies who employ 50 or more employees in the United States with more than 50 percent of its employees in the United States in H-1B or L (including L-1A, L-1B and L-2) nonimmigrant status…to pay for the services of another U.S. company run from overseas to which critical immigration support service functions have been so creatively outsourced.