Washington, April 9
With the US immigration authorities getting enough applications for
H-1B visas coveted by Indian IT professionals within a week, a random lottery will pick 65,000 lucky winners for 2009.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced yesterday it had received by Monday enough petitions for the 65,000 H-1B visas available for fiscal year 2009 starting October 1, 2008, to meet the “congressionally mandated cap”.
The government agency, which extended the acceptance period to five business days to improve the fairness of the process, also announced it had received enough applications for the 20,000 H-1B visas allocated for the “advanced degree” exemption limit to meet the mandated cap.
The applications received would now be subject to a random lottery process for selection to determine which individuals could start working at their sponsor companies from October 1, 2008.
Before running the random selection process, the USCIS would complete initial data entry for all filings received during the filing period ended April 7.
The USCIS said it would first conduct the advanced degree random selection and that “advanced degree petitions not selected will be part of the random selection process for the 65,000 limit”.
Industry groups that support revising the H-1B programme say this year’s process mirrored last year’s, in which the USCIS received more than 123,000 applications in less than two days. The shortage of applications proves the programme needs to be updated to better meet US workforce needs, according to Compete America.
— IANS
