H-1B Lottery Conducted Yesterday

Some news reports in recent months suggested that the demand for the H-1B visa was on the downturn, even suggesting that some large employers would opt out from competing for the program altogether.  Well, the results are in.  FY 2019 ran neck and neck with FY 2018.  This year there were 190,000 applications submitted, only down by 9000 from the prior year. 

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 U.S. advanced degree exemption, known as the master’s cap, for FY 2019. 

USCIS received 190,098 H-1B petitions during the filing period, which began April 2, including petitions filed for the advanced degree exemption. USCIS announced on April 6, that it had received enough H-1B petitions to reach the statutory cap of 65,000 and the master’s cap of 20,000. USCIS will reject and return all unselected petitions with their filing fees unless the petition is a prohibited multiple filing.

USCIS conducted the selection process for the master’s cap first. All unselected master’s cap petitions then became part of the random selection process for the 65,000 cap.