H-1B visa petitions hit cap limit on first day

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that petitions for H-1B visas for 2008 exceeded the cap limitation on the very first day that submissions were being accepted, April 2, 2008. See a related H-1B blog post written earlier today and the news story, Senate H-1B bill seeks to give U.S. workers a better shot at tech job openings. The USCIS said it will use a system of rand

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that petitions for H-1B visas for 2008 exceeded the cap limitation on the very first day that submissions were being accepted, April 2, 2008.

See a related H-1B blog post written earlier today and the news story, Senate H-1B bill seeks to give U.S. workers a better shot at tech job openings.

The USCIS said it will use a system of random selection and will reject all filings not randomly selected.

Here's what the press release said in part: [Thanks to Greg Siskind, a partner at Siskind Susser Bland for letting me excerpt from his blog, The Visalaw Blog.]

* USCIS has determined that as of April 2, 2007, it had received enough H-1B petitions to reach the FY 2008 H-1B cap and has set the “final receipt date” as April 2, 2007.

* In keeping with its regulations, USCIS will subject H-1B petitions received on the “final receipt date” and the following day to a computer-generated random selection process.

* USCIS will reject all cap-subject H-1B petitions for FY 2008 received on or after Wednesday, April 4, 2007.

* USCIS will reject and return along with the filing fee(s) all cap-subject H-1B petitions that are not randomly selected.

"As of late Monday afternoon (April 2), USCIS had received approximately 150,000 cap-subject H-1B petitions. USCIS must perform initial data entry for all filings received on April 2 and April 3 prior to conducting the random selection process. In light of the high volume of filings, USCIS will not be able to conduct the random selection for several weeks."

I spoke with Siskind, who had some interesting comments to add to the H-1B story.

Siskind, a partner in a firm with an immigration law practice, believes that the news today clearly shows that the demand is "way out of sync with the quota." He also points out that the quota was set back in 1990 "which means Congress was debating it in the '80s," Siskind said.

Siskind also says that nobody now remembers why the number was set at 65,000, but a Congressman who was part of the process told Siskind that its intention was not to limit immigration but to encourage permanent residency.

From Siskind's point of view, the entire H-1B visa system "is a disaster."

A lot of people will agree with that much, but they will have far different reasons than Siskind for saying so.