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United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that the initial registration period for the fiscal year (FY) 2023 H1B visa cap will run from March 1 to March 18, 2022. During this window, prospective H1B petitioners and representatives will be able to submit their registrations using the USCIS, online H1B registration system.
A USCIS statement said: “USCIS will assign a confirmation number to each H1B visa registration submitted for the FY 2023 cap. This number is used solely to track registrations; you cannot use this number to track your case status in Case Status Online.”
According to the USCIS, prospective H1B cap-subject petitioners or their representatives must use a myUSCIS online account to register each beneficiary electronically for the selection process, and pay the associated $10 H1B registration fee for each registration submitted on behalf of each beneficiary.
New myUSCIS accounts
“Prospective petitioners submitting their own registrations will use a ‘registrant’ account. Registrants will be able to create new accounts beginning at noon Eastern Standard Time on February 21, 2022,” USCIS said.
It’s understood that representatives will be able to add clients at any time. However, representatives and registrants must wait until after March 1, 2022 to enter the information of a beneficiary and submit a registration with the $10 payment.
The USCIS statement said: “Prospective petitioners or their representatives will be able to submit registrations for multiple beneficiaries in a single online session. Through a myUSCIS account, petitioners or representatives will be able to prepare, edit, and store draft registrations prior to final payment and submission of each registration.”
Notified by March 31
“If USCIS receives enough registrations by March 18, we will randomly select registrations and send selection notifications to users via their myUSCIS online account. It is the intention of USCIS to notify all account holders by March 31, 2022,” the USCIS statement added.
Every year, USCIS issues 65,000 H1B visas, while a further 20,000 are reserved for US Masters’ degree holders. Indians have long been the main beneficiaries of the H1B visa program, receiving approximately 70% of the new visas issued annually.
In recent years, USCIS has had to conduct multiple lotteries to allocate all the visas, including an historic third lottery in 2021, after having fewer final applications following the initial selection. The lack of final applications has been attributed to several factors, including reduced travel and mobility amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Amazon receives most approved H1B petitions
In FY 2021, Amazon had the most approved H1B petitions for initial employment with 6,182 approvals, followed by Infosys (5,256), TCS (3,063), Wipro (2,121) Cognizant (1,481), Google (1,453), IBM (1,402), HCL America (1,299) and Microsoft (1,240).
The overall refusal rate for H1B visas dropped to 4% in FY 2021 after USCIS made changes to the way that it adjudicates applications for workers employed at third-party sites.
Under former US President Donald Trump, restrictions on US H1B visas were tightened amid the coronavirus pandemic with Trump claiming that tighter rules on H1B visas would ‘help to protect jobs for Americans’.
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