We've finally decided to take public our 4-year FOIA battle for data on H1B visa holders. Customs & Immigration have put us through the wringer and we've gotten stuck in their massive backlog of requests. We're afraid we might be stuck in this for ANOTHER four years. The story doesn't do justice to the many back-and-forths and idiotic experiences associated with this request -- we didn't want the story to come off as whining because we haven't gotten what we wanted. Instead we wanted to shed light on the fact that **nobody** knows much of anything about this visa program because of the lack of data and delays in reports from CIS.
As you'll see in the story ,they actually sent us data back in January. But it is basically swiss cheese. Whole fields completely empty; others with very few records filled out. Essentially it's worthless because the empty fields are the ones holding the information everybody really wants. The kicker for me was the letter that came with the data that said: "There may be blank fields contained within the database due to the compilation." Jeez.
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