American Employers Continue to Seek Foreign Tech Workers

Author: Michael Cardman, XpertHR Legal Editor

April 9, 2014

The demand for foreign workers in tech jobs and other specialty occupations remains high.

Employers have flooded United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with enough petitions to meet the cap of 65,000 H-1B visas for fiscal 2016. USCIS also received more petitions than the 20,000 H-1B visas available under the US advanced degree exemption. This marks the third year in a row that the caps were reached less than a week after USCIS began accepting petitions.

H-1B visas are issued to foreign workers who will work in a specialty occupation in the US. A specialty occupation is defined as a job that requires at least a bachelor's degree (or its equivalent) in a specialty field of study such as biotechnology, chemistry, architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, medicine and health, education, law, accounting, business specialties, theology, and the arts.

Several organizations are exempt from the numerical cap, including institutions of higher education (or an affiliated or related nonprofit entity), nonprofit research organizations and governmental research organizations. There are currently only 65,000 new H-1B visas available each year and an additional 20,000 H-1B visas available to foreign nationals holding a master's degree or higher from a US university.

Because there were more petitions than visas, USCIS will use a computer-generated lottery process to randomly select the petitions needed to meet the caps of 65,000 visas for the general category and 20,000 for the advanced degree exemption. USCIS will reject and return filing fees for all cap-subject petitions that are not selected, unless they are found to be duplicate filings. USCIS has not determined when the random selection will take place, but prior to running the selection process, it will conclude the initial intake of all of the H-1B petitions it received during the filing period.