As the United States begins receiving applications on Monday for the annual disbursement of 65,000 H-1B work visas, the authorities are expecting a phenomenal rush, predominantly from Indian IT majors with US operations.
With the American economic recovery gathering steam, leading to an upswing in job hires in specialty occupations, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) anticipates a virtual repeat of the record rush of 2007 and 2008 when all H-1B visas were snapped up within a couple of days.
The USCIS has already announced that it will use a lottery system for selection of H-1B petitions for consideration if the numbers far exceed the limit — as was done in those two years. Based on feedback from the major sponsoring companies, the USCIS expects to receive between April 1 and April 5 more petitions than the number of visas it could grant under the Congressionally-stipulated cap of 65, 000 H-1B visas in a fiscal year. Once this happens, the agency will
notify the date as of which the cap has been met and reject all petitions received after that.
As a concession to foreign individuals graduating from US universities with master’s degree or higher, the first 20,000 H-1B petitions filed on behalf of this pool continue to be exempt from the cap of 65,000 visas.
All the work visas granted in this round will take effect from October 1, 2013, when the American fiscal year 2014 begins. The H-1B visas are initially granted for three years and are renewable for another three years. Employers are free to sponsor the visa-holders for green cards or permanent residence, which is a long-winded procedure that could take many years of waiting.
The ongoing immigration reform exercise is expected to bring about a modicum of streamlining the green card procedures, besides expanding the H-1B programme, even while addressing the larger issue of a path to earned citizenship for an estimated 11 million
illegal immigrants, including about 300,000 from India.
The bipartisan Senate group which has been hard at work on this score is widely expected to lay out its draft proposals in respect of all immigration issues, including H-1B and green cards, in the coming week or two. Republican Senator lindsey Graham, one of the eight members of the Senate group, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the group has reached a “conceptual agreement” on the proposals, going so far as to indicate the plan could be rolled out next week.