International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Improving Access to Labour market Information for migrants and employers
24
uncapped, however, the complexity of the procedures and the housing requirement
contribute to explaining the limited recourse of United States growers to H-2A
visa and continuing trends of irregular employment of undocumented migrants in
agriculture (Chapter 12).
Even in the case of Sweden, where procedures to recruit and apply for a work
permit are relatively simple and non-bureaucratic, and migrant inflows are small in
international comparison, waiting times due to backlogs in processing applications
have repeatedly been pointed out by employers as being the biggest hurdle when they
try to hire workers from outside the EU (Chapter 9) 9 . To shorten the processing times
and facilitate recruitment from abroad in response to domestic labour needs, some
countries (such as Australia and Sweden) have introduced systems of certification
of “reputable” employers, which partly exempt those employers from administrative
requirements. While those schemes undoubtedly streamline the immigration
procedures and are particularly interesting in the case of foreign recruitment in
response to temporary labour needs, they generally apply only to large employers or
to employers who frequently recruit from abroad and may, thus, contribute to widen
the labour market information gap between bigger and smaller firms. In Sweden,
for example, companies that submit at least 25 work permit applications a year can
apply to become certified by the Migration Board. This certification exempts the
company from the requirement to obtain the trade union’s opinion on wages and
working conditions, and may reduce the waiting time to obtain a work permit to five
days. However, the requirement of 25 applications a year hinders companies with
low recruitment and SMEs from getting certified. Similarly, in the United States
of America the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
provide a Premium Processing Service for employers filing an application to sponsor
a migrant on a non-immigrant visa for short-term employment, which guarantees
application processing within 15 calendar days (against a normal average of two to six
months). However, since the service is provided for an additional fee of USD 1,225
per application, it is unlikely that small employers have recourse to it.
In most of the countries studied, regulations on intra-corporate transfers also give a
competitive advantage to big firms with subsidiaries and affiliates abroad compared
with SMEs, when trying to fill temporary labour shortages. In the United States, for
example, businesses that have offices abroad or a foreign parent often use the L-1 visa
for intra-corporate transfers. This is the most employer-friendly visa allowed under
the United States immigration policy. Certain large corporations with at least 1,000
employees in their United States offices and annual sales of at least USD 25 million
receive a blanket L-certification provided they obtained at least ten L-1 visas during
the past one year. Once granted, the blanket L-certification allows a company to
bypass the USCIS petition process. The L-1A visas for intra-corporate transfers of
9 Based on figures from the Swedish Migration Board for October 2012, the IOM LINET country
study on Sweden reports an average processing time of six to seven months, against a target to complete
applications submitted electronically within four weeks. It has to be noted, however, that for about half
of the 60,000 decisions that the Migration Board processes per year, the companies have to wait for
less than five weeks.