Should you switch employers if you’re in your third year of H-1B and your current company has decided to pause its PERM program?
Here’s a post by immigration lawyer Amber Davis on whether you should switch employers if you’re in your third year of H-1B and your current company has decided to pause its PERM program:
If you wait for your company to restart its PERM program and they don’t, you’ll most likely have to change jobs if you want to continue to rely on PERM as a way to secure a priority date.
You can also look into EB-2 NIW (or even EB-1A) while you wait, and even apply for EB-2 NIW. If you get an approval, you will not need PERM to get a priority date.
If you decide not to wait for your company to restart PERM, you’ll have to find an employer that will file a PERM for you as soon as you join or soon after. This is possible with smaller companies but can be difficult with larger companies as they tend to start PERM only after an employee has been with the company for at least six months to a year. If you do get an offer from another company that’s willing to file a PERM for you, you can always ask that they file a PERM for you as soon as you join or soon after and explain that since you’re in your third year of H-1B, you’ll need to secure a priority date soon. A lot of companies will accommodate your request if they see that you only have a few years of H-1B left, especially if they want to hire you.
You can always accept a job at a company that offers to file a PERM for you not immediately but in six months. It’s just given how long PERM could potentially take (right now, around two years), you may still want to be looking even after accepting your new job. If you do end up finding an employer that will file a PERM for you immediately after you join, you should definitely consider joining that company, especially if you’re nowhere near the six month mark in your new job.
Getting a PERM filed when you’re midway through your H-1B is extremely important and changing jobs after having just joined a company is something you should seriously consider if you want to rely on PERM as a way to secure a priority date.
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Interested in EB-1A, EB-2 NIW or O-1? Feel free to reach out to Amber at amber.davis@waypointimmigration.org or via LinkedIn messages.
Interested in profile-building for EB-2 NIW and maximizing your chances of approval? Check out Amber’s course, NIW Ready, which helps those of you who want to build a strong NIW profile in 2-3 months. You’ll also be considered for Amber’s refundable case package, which guarantees a refund of only attorney fees if your case does not get approved. At the end of the course, assuming you do the work, you’ll be ready to file.