The H1B visa is a visa issued by the United States Department of Immigration to individuals who are looking to work in the United States on a specialized assignment. Unfortunately, due to the stringent US visa policies in recent years, many applicants are denied an access to the H1B on several grounds. One of the main reasons is the denial of the sponsor’s petition – when the pertinent US department believes that the prospective employer hasn’t fully demonstrated their case. The following are some of the most common reasons which lead to such a denial.
Job Does Not Require Specialized Knowledge or Skills
For the issuance of a H1B visa, both the employer and the employee must prove that the job in question is indeed a specialty occupation. The US Department of Immigration and Homeland Security defines a specialty occupation as a job that at least requires a bachelor’s degree or higher as the minimum educational requirement. Failure to demonstrate this evidence almost always results in the denial of the petition.
Inadequate Showing of Employer/Employee Relationship
This reason mostly comes to the fore when the job in the application entails the employee working offsite. This raises alarm bells for immigration officials because the scenario looks like an organization is acting as a job center for individuals, or a front for applicants to get their job through. In this case a solid proof is required on the employer’s part to show that the employee is indeed bound to the organization in question through a contractual or related agreement.
Petitioning Employer’s Failure to Meet Requirements
This is the most common reason by which the H1B visa petition is denied. There are two ways in which this occurs:
- The applicant doesn’t provide all necessary documentation despite repeated call-to-actions.
- The sponsoring employer isn’t able to effectively demonstrate their working capacity as a functional U.S. company. This is by far more common of the two. Often the employer will sponsor the visa request and then not provide any additional information related to their functioning like tax returns, financial statements, premise proof and likes. This leads to the immigration official believing that the organization doesn’t have the capacity to hire and pay an individual coming under H1B. Thus the visa petition is denied.
Position Is Not Truly the Position the Petitioning Employer Claims It to Be
This sounds rather absurd but is definitely one of the reasons why the Immigration Department denies a petition. This comes into play when immigration officials second guess the job title that is submitted to them. For example, a company that has a revenue of $200,000 and is centered on less than 10 employees can legally sponsor a H1B request for an accountant. Despite being a specialty occupation, the immigration officials won’t allow for an accountant to be sponsored because they will see that the position can easily be termed as a bookkeeper rather than an accountant given the size of the company. And thus someone with far less qualification can actually perform the tasks put forward with relative ease.