USCIS conducts H-1B visa lottery for over 1.90 lakh applications

Bengaluru : The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) conducted an H-1B visa lottery for over 1.90 lakh applications received during the filing period in first week on April.

H1B visa is mainly used by the IT industry that sends employees on projects on-shore.

For the last two years the number of applications for H-1B stood at 199000 and 236000, respectively. 

“On April 11, USCIS used a computer-generated random selection process to select enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally-mandated cap and the US advanced degree exemption, known as the master’s cap, for fiscal year (FY) 2019. USCIS received 190098 H-1B petitions during the filing period, which began April 2, including petitions filed for the advanced degree exemption,” wrote the US government body in its news release. 

Recently, USCIS had announced that they have reached a limit of 65000 H1B visa applications.

USCIS saw a decline of nearly 9000 petitions this year. This seems to partially reflect the decision of many IT services firms, including Indian IT firms, to reduce H-1B applications as they increased protectionism and demand for local hiring in the US.