On March 20, 2020, US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it would accept electronically reproduced signatures in benefit requests during the coronavirus (COVID-19) national emergency. Additionally, on March 24, 2020, the Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) announced that ETA Forms 9089, Application for Permanent Employment Certification (ETA 9089), will be issued electronically to employers and their authorized attorneys or agents. After these announcements, USCIS notes that the agency “inadvertently rejected some Forms I-140, Immigrant Petition for Alien Workers, that included these e-certified ETA-9089s or blue ETA-9089s with electronically reproduced signatures.”

USCIS is requesting that affected petitioners re-submit their Form I-140 with the blue ETA Form 9089s or e-certified ETA-9089s with “either wet original signatures and/or scanned copies of the original signatures as well as a copy of the rejection notice.” If the petitioner’s inadvertently rejected ETA-9089 expired between March 20 and May 18, 2020, USCIS notes the agency will accept the re-filed Form I-140 petition along with the inadvertently rejected, expired ETA-9089 for the duration of the national emergency.

Whenever employers wish to hire foreign nationals for a permanent position in their company, they have to go through the process of sponsoring the foreign national for a Green Card. In any conversation about this process, the word “PERM” may come up, in the context of the employer-sponsored labor certification. (There are other routes to the Green Card but this post will focus only on the PERM.) PERM stands for Program Electronic Review Management (sorry to all of you who had images of the iconic 1980s hairstyle in your head) and refers to the review of the labor market testing the employer must conduct in order to obtain a certification from the US Department of Labor (DOL) that no US workers exist to fill the job offered to the foreign national.