The United States will begin accepting petitions for the popular H-1B US visas from the start of next month for the 2017 fiscal year. The work visa is particular popular with Indian immigrants and is used by US firms to bring in overseas workers into industries that need specialized knowledge such as the fields of computer programming, engineering and science.
There will be no change in the H-1B US visa cap of 65,000 that was mandated by Congress for the 2017 fiscal year, which kicks off at the start of October this year. However the first 20,000 H-1B US visa petitions filed for people who have a minimum of a US Masters degree will be exempt from that cap.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services has released a statement in which it says that in this year’s applications it is expecting to receive over 65,000 H-1B US visa petitions within the program’s first five business days. The agency is to take careful note of the amount of petitions that they receive and will announce to the public when the cap for H-1B US visas has been reached.
The official statement pointed out that should US Citizenship and Immigration Services receive more petitions in the first five business days than they have places, then a computer generated lottery system will be made use of in order to choose the number of petitions entirely at random.