Immigration Horror Stories: Unfiled Immigration Paperwork

Last Updated on March 2, 2023

With Halloween just around the corner, we’re starting to feel the fright of the season. Most of it is all in good spirits, but HR departments know that immigration-related mishaps are far from fun. Sometimes immigration horror stories are downright scary. Not only can they be costly for your company, but they can impact people’s lives.

Over the next seven days, we’re bringing you true HR horror stories of immigration management gone wrong – from HR managers who have seen some of the worst mistakes in the industry.

Unfiled Immigration Paperwork

Joanne is an HR manager at a technology insurance company. One day, an attorney who was working with the company forgot to file one foreign national employee’s immigration paperwork. Using old-school manual processes and long email chains to communicate with attorneys, the HR team was faced with knowing they’d let someone slip through the cracks.

The mishap meant that the employee and his family had to relocate to India while the issue was resolved. His children, who had only known life in the United States, were uprooted from their local school and life in the U.S. to travel to and live in India.

It took the organization roughly a year to get the situation remedied and bring the foreign national and his family back into the States. Spending that much time away from his regular job and his children away from their home took quite a toll. The emotional costs for the family were high, and all Joanne and others in HR could do was work quickly to try to set things right.

The cost for the company was high as well. The organization paid for the employee and his family to move to India and back again to the U.S. The expenses were similar to a typical relocation, but decidedly unexpected.

What’s the solution?

Outdated forms of communication between HR, attorneys and the foreign nationals they’re serving are a hotbed for mistakes – like unfiled immigration paperwork – and they’re all too common in the industry.

Using a cloud-based portal to communicate with the entire immigration team is the best way to avoid mistakes like these. By using technology, you can keep everything you need for every single person in one place with need-to-know access. And, you can set alerts and notifications to make sure not one person – or family – gets overlooked.

To read more immigration horror stories, and what HR managers can do to avoid the same fate, read the ebook here.