Articles Posted in Work Visas

These are hectic days for immigration lawyers and clients alike. I get call all day long from worried clients wanting to know the status of their H1B visa petition. It is hard to beleive that the fate of one’s future in America will be decided by a lottery drawing.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced an updated number of

filings today as the counting of H-1B petitions received on April 2 and 3 continues. On April 3, USCIS announced that it had received enough petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap for fiscal year 2008 (FY 2008) and that it would conduct a computer-generated random selection of cap-subject petitions filed on Monday (April 2) and Tuesday (April 3) to determine which cases would be accepted for processing.

“This is unbelievable, this is not happening”

says Jacob Sapochnick, an immigration attorney based in San Diego, California. Thousands of employers, visa applicants and their family members couldn’t agree more. Attorney Sapochnick was describing the federal government’s Scary-tight restrictions on visas released each year to highly skilled foreign workers needed by technology firms.

This year, as in the past, 65,000 of these H-1B visas are available. On April 2, the first day on which applications were accepted for 2007, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received more than 180,000 petitions from companies needing them to hire scientists, engineers, architects, computer programmers, researchers and other highly trained employees. It’s clear that a lot of skilled workers wishing to live and work here are out of luck and employers are in big trouble.

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As most of our readers of you are aware, there is an annual cap on the number of new H-1Bs that USCIS can approve. The cap opens up each year on October 1, the start of the government’s fiscal year. However, because H-1B petitions can be filed 6 months in advance of the employment start date, H-1B petitions for those subject to the cap can be filed as early as April 1, 2007.

Every year, since the cap was reduced to 65,000 H-1Bs per year, the cap has been filling up sooner and sooner. Last year, the cap was reached on May 26, creating a window of less than 2 months during which any new H-1B petitions could be filed for that year. There are 20,000 extra visas for applicants with Masters degrees from US Universities.

For those of you looking for work and a US sponsor, now is the time to update your resume and start networking.

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