United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that the registration period for this year’s H-1B visa lottery will open on March 1, 2022 and through March 18, 2022.
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant employment visa reserved for workers who will perform services in a specialty occupation, services of exceptional merit and ability relating to a Department of Defense (DOD) cooperative research and development project, or individuals who will work as fashion models of distinguished merit or ability. There are initially 65,000 H-1B visas available for all potential applicants, and an additional 20,000 are reserved for those who have earned a master’s degree or higher from a US institution of higher education. Due to their limited number, these visas are in extremely high demand, and a lottery process is used to determine who may submit petitions for consideration. Of over 308,000 H-1B registrations filed in 2021, roughly 87,500 were selected to submit petitions. Because not all of the visas were granted following the initial round of the lottery, USCIS then conducted two additional selections in July and November of 2021.
As with 2020 and 2021, employers wishing to enter prospective employees into the H-1B lottery must create a myUSCIS online account to register (employers who need to create a new account can do so beginning February 21, 2022). There is a $10 registration fee required for each beneficiary. Following the end of the registration period on March 18, registrants will be selected at random through a lottery process and will notified on or around March 31, 2022. Those who are selected will then be allowed to file H-1B petitions with USCIS.
H-1B workers who have already been selected in the lottery and need to extend their stay or change employers, as well as those who will work for a “cap-exempt employer” (which include institutions of higher education and certain related nonprofit entities, nonprofit research organizations and government research organizations) are not subject to the H-1B quota and do not have to enter the lottery.
If you are an employer or an individual wishing to learn more about the H-1B process, please call Wildes & Weinberg at (212) 753-3468 or email as info@wildeslaw.com to schedule an appointment to speak with one of immigration professionals.