Labor certification (not to be confused with the Labor Condition Application, LCA) is an immigration process step in the United States of America. Its stated goal is to "protect U.S. workers and the U.S. labor market by ensuring that foreign workers seeking immigrant visa classifications are not displacing equally qualified U.S. workers". There are several options available to U.S. employers who wish to hire foreign, non-immigrant workers on a temporary but long-term basis: H-1B visas, L-1 visas, TN status and other options. These temporary options are often sufficient to meet the needs of employer and employee. When a U.S. employer wishes to hire the services of the foreign worker on a permanent basis, however, a complex sponsorship process for the green card begins, a process that can take years. Generally (although not always) the first step in that process is labor certification. Labor certification is a process of proving that there are no qualified U.S. workers for the position being offered. If there are qualified U.S. workers - in fact, even generally speaking if there are even minimally qualified U.S. workers - then the foreign worker cannot be offered the position on a permanent basis. This does not necessarily mean that the foreign worker will be immediately replaced by a qualified U.S. worker, though. The foreign worker can still serve out the remainder of their existing U.S. temporary visa, and may well be able to re-apply for labor certification and be approved. But it does create a substantial inconvenience for the U.S. employer who wishes to hire a foreign worker, which does provide some protection to U.S. workers, although the process is controversial. Reduction in recruitment The original labor certification process, used exclusively up until about 1998, involved a lengthy interview process, whereby instructions were provided after filing the case as to how the employer was to go about recruiting for the position. After complying with those instructions, the employer needed to persuasively argue why any U.S. applicants for the position were unqualified - otherwise the petition would be denied. Beginning in 1998, a more streamlined approach called Reduction in Recruitment (RIR) was introduced. Under RIR, the sequence of events was reversed: the employer first did the recruiting, and then filed the case with evidence that no minimally qualified U.S. workers could be found. RIR tended to speed processing times up somewhat, so that labor certification times which were previously