Post Holiday Busyness and Lotteries

If you're anything like me, you're recovering from overeating from the holidays and trying to catch up on work from being out of the office.

For me, it seems like immigration has no downtime and does not recognize holidays. Although the federal agencies are closed on federal holidays, there are a couple deadlines which sneak up this time of year. The first is the H-2B filing season for jobs starting in April. Even though employers may need workers in April, we've long been preparing for their need and on January 1-3 submitted the applications to the Department of Labor to start the process for temporary labor certification so they can get their workers when they need them.

Another deadline is for H-1B registration. The H-1B program is for employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in occupations that require the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher in the specific specialty, or its equivalent.

In order to submit an H-1B petition to USCIS, applications must be "registered" and selected for the lottery. USCIS opens an initial registration period for a minimum of 14 calendar days each fiscal year, which in 2021 happened from noon Eastern Time (ET) on March 9 and run through noon ET on March 25. This causes a flurry of registrations in March to see if the employer and beneficiary will make it in to the H-1B cap of only 65,000 visas + 20,000 visas for people with a Master's degree or higher. In March 2021, 308,613 H-1B registrations were submitted and USCIS initially selected 87,500 registrations. Then, on July 29, 2021, USCIS announced that they conducted a second selection of an additional 27,717 registrations. This resulted in a total of 115,217 selected registrations.

As can be seen from this data, March is important for registering and knowing if you can submit your case to USCIS. If not all the cases get approved, you may even get to submit your case at a later time, as happened with the second selection in 2021.

If you have thought about temporary professional visas, now is the time to discuss your options so we can get you into the registration process in March. Contact me today for a free consultation for the H-1B program.