![]() Prepare and file the I-140 petition – the Schedule A nurse petition (I-140) can be filed to USCIS once the PWD has been received. In these cases, the Department of Labor will defer to the wage provisions in the CBA when assigning the prevailing wage for the offered position, instead of assigning the prevailing wage amount based on the DOL’s Occupational Employment Statistics wage database. Union positions – where the position falls under a Collective Bargaining Agreement, the Employer must provide copies of the relevant portions of the CBA, as well as notice to the Union Representative in order to submit the PWD. The PWD must be included with the I-140 petition. The PWDs are filed online and currently taking 5-6 months for DOL to process. Prevailing Wage Determination – (PWD) – although the Employer is able to skip the PERM process, they must first obtain a Prevailing Wage Determination from the Department of Labor in order to proceed with a Schedule A I-140 petition. Consulate abroad for purposes of the nurse entering on an Immigrant Visa (Permanent Resident Visa) to begin work with the sponsoring Employer. by filing an I-140 petition to be processed via a U.S. An Employer may also recruit internationally and sponsor a nurse outside of the U.S. A nurse can be sponsored while on an F-1/OPT status and while working on his/her EAD under the Optional Practical Training period. Professional nurses that are licensed and meet certain educational qualifications fall under Schedule A which means an employer may file an I-140 petition (sponsoring the nurse for a green card) directly to USCIS once they have obtained a Prevailing Wage Determination from the Department of Labor. ![]() The Schedule A occupations allow the employer to skip the first step in the employment-based green card process, the PERM Labor Certification application, which can take more than a year, and proceed straight to filing an I-140 immigrant visa petition to USCIS which is a streamlined process available to those categories of employees that are listed on DOL’s “Schedule A”. ![]() workers and therefore hiring a foreign national nurse or physical therapist would not displace available U.S. However, for the “Schedule A” occupations of registered nurses and physical therapists, DOL has made a determination that there are not a sufficient number of U.S. The most common type of employment-based permanent residence category is based upon obtaining a PERM Labor Certification from the Department of Labor, certifying the unavailability of U.S. In the rural and medically underserved communities where it has always been a struggle to fill these positions, COVID has only exacerbated and highlighted this need – leading more and more hospitals to consider hiring international nurses. We recently reported on our Immigration Blog that hospitals and medical centers, facing challenges in staffing during the pandemic, content with heightened struggles to find and hire sufficient numbers of registered professional nurses.
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