If you have sponsorship, do you still need an EAD? If so is the EAD specific to one employer? Or does an EAD say that you may now work for any employer without being sponsored?
I am asking because I have a job opening and we do not care what the immigration status is per se but we don’t have budget to pay for sponsorship, if costs are involved in doing so. So I am trying to figure out what the flavors of immigration status are. We already have some H-1B employees that we have sponsored, but I am hearing some vague things about regulation changes regarding the EAD that may affect how we hire. Thanks.
If they have the H1-B they can already work for the employer, surely? By sponsorship do you mean further steps towards permanent residence (i.e. a green card application)? If so my understanding is that an EAD is something you can apply for if you’ve gotten far enough through that process (an approved I-140 if I recall correctly). I believe they can be renewed annually for as long as the green card application is pending, which may come into play if the H1-B cannot be extended further.
IANAL but if I recall correctly (big if!) when I was on a H1B I didn’t need a separate Employment Authorization Document. The H1B both allowed me to stay in (and reentry) the US, and work in the US.
I only needed a separate EAD (and the equivalent, awesomely named, “advanced parole” document that allowed to renter in the US), when I moved to AC21 the weird middle ground where you don’t have a green card, but have been in the application process long enough to stay in the US, and work here.
And yes, if you are on H1B you and don’t have AC21, you are SOL if a new employer doesn’t have money to sponsor you, you can’t transfer the H1B.
If you have AC21 (which happens when you have reached a certain point in the green card process), then transferring is easy (they do need to do some paperwork, but it is no more than a letter stating you are now employed by the new company).
If someone has an H1-B but they want to change jobs, the new employer has to sponsor them. I don’t know if the EAD is simply a document says that a particular employer has agreed to sponsor them, or if it is something else. The USCIS site does a poor job of explaining it.
It’s not quite that simple - the new employer should be prepared to document that the new job is in the same or similar occupation as the job for which you received green card sponsorship. Here’s the memo. So if you were sponsored as a programmer/analyst, it’s going to be tough to convince USCIS that your new job as a Vice President is similar enough not to have to start the green card process all over again.
As for EADs, there are numerous bases on which to obtain them (as an applicant for adjustment of status via a family petition; as an asylum applicant; via F-1 OPT; etc.) The I-765 application instructions can tell you more.
But yes, if you have an H-1B, you don’t also need an EAD (and normally won’t have one unless you are on F-1 OPT, or have a pending I-485, which are the two most typical situations in the employment-based context). But there are some circumstances in which it might be advantageous to have an EAD in addition to/instead of an H-1B: say you are from a country with short visa reciprocity, or where it’s a PITA to apply for a visa, or you are a dependent of an employment-based I-485 applicant who isn’t independently eligible for work authorization (teenage children can work that way, too, for example)…
The EAD in the I-485 context is not specific to one employer. But it doesn’t mean you might not be faced in the future with either sponsoring the candidate, or letting him/her go. When I worked in-house for a corporation, the employment application asked whether the applicant now or in the future might require immigration sponsorship, and we took it from there.
See this link. A vaguely recent (or at least when I went through it 5+ years ago) addition to visa law, to alleviate the issue of H1B workers basically be indentured servants (bound to a employer and unable to leave). Basically if you have reached a certain point in the green card process (which can take many, many years) you have “AC21 portability”. Which means you can remain in the US, and work in the US on the basis of that alone, you don’t actually need your H1B any more. You can work for anyone if you have a valid EAD.