Businesses interested in hiring foreign employees with the equivalent of a bachelor’s or advanced academic degree must begin preparing for the upcoming H-1B visa lottery. Similar to last year, this year’s process features electronic registration and an employee compensation adjustment that is favorable to employers.
The H-1B visa program allows 85,000 foreign nationals to work within the U.S. each year. H-1Bs can be useful tools for employers looking for hard-to-fill positions in information technology, engineering, science and other fields requiring at least a bachelor’s degree, but demand always outstrips supply.
Significant changes to the H-1B lottery system that went into effect last year made it easier and less expensive to participate, which drove up demand. Companies filed 275,000 H-1B petition registrations in 2020, which was an increase of nearly 37% over 2019.
The 2021 lottery process will continue to lower costs for employers, enticing even more companies to submit petition registrations. For decades, businesses were required to invest in the cost of submitting complete H-1B petitions, a sizeable paperwork endeavor, to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. These were typically due during the first business week of April, and included filing fees exceeding $1,000.
In 2020, the USCIS switched to an online registration system and extended the filing period to 20 days in March. Those requirements remain the same this year, with the registration period opening on March 9 and closing on March 25. The filing fee has been dropped to $10, and only minimal information is required at this point.
Further benefitting employers this year, the USCIS recently announced it is delaying the “implementation of a Trump administration regulation that would have allocated H-1B cap numbers to beneficiaries paid the highest wage level for their occupation and geographic area.” Instead, the lottery will continue to allocate the first 20,000 H-1B visas to foreign nationals holding a U.S. master’s degree on a random basis regardless of compensation level. If not selected, those job seekers still remain eligible for selection from the 65,000 visas for those with bachelor’s degrees, which is also a random selection process.
Employers will receive an electronic notice of their selection by March 31, which will provide a time period of approximately 90 days in which they can submit their full H-1B petitions. They will be required to pay all fees at that time.
The entry window is right around the corner, so employers seeking H-1B visas this year should contact their attorney soon to begin preparation for the early lottery period. For more information on this and any other immigration matter, please contact Michael Wooley or your Warner attorney.
This article has been published in DBusiness here and in the Midland Daily News here.