As a follow up to our previous update, USCIS has confirmed that it completed its second H-1B lottery on Monday, July 31, and has notified all employers whose registrations were selected.  If you did not receive an email from USCIS (or an email from us if we submitted the registration on your behalf), then your registration was not selected in the second round. 

USCIS ran a second lottery this year because a significant number of employers whose H-1B registrations were selected in the initial lottery in March did not move forward with their selected registration.  USCIS received a record number of registrations in March (780,884), and selected 110,791 registrations, coming out to a 14% chance of selection. Despite pulling 32,591 additional registrations in anticipation of employers not acting on registrations, this estimation proved too conservative, and USCIS ran a second lottery to meet the annual limit of 78,200 H-1B visas.

Employers whose registration was selected in the second lottery will have until October 31, 2023, to file their H-1B petition with USCIS.   

By way of background, Congress authorizes approximately 78,200 new H-1B visas each year (65,000 for all high-skilled workers, an additional 20,000 for individuals with a US graduate degree, minus 6,800 for high-skilled workers from Chile and Singapore).  The demand for H-1B visas is much higher than the annual limit authorized by Congress so the US Citizenship and Immigration Services runs an online lottery each year in March.
If you would like to discuss the H-1B visa or alternative visa options, please don’t hesitate to contact me.  

This alert is for informational purposes only.  Please contact us if you would like to discuss these developments further.