Washington: Own Punjab Media: The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Tuesday announced that it will conduct a second round of random selection for H-1B visas for the 2025 fiscal year under its regular annual 65,000 visa cap. USCIS said in a statement that the selection will be made from pre-submitted registrations for the FY 2025 cap season. The H-1B visa is the primary high-skilled worker visa in the US.It is in high demand among professionals of Indian and Chinese origin, many of whom work in the tech sector. Meanwhile, USCIS said those who were selected for the FY 2025 cap season can file their petitions between April 1 and June 30. “We recently determined that we will need to select additional registrations for beneficiaries to reach the regular FY 2025 cap,” the immigration authority said. USCIS will soon select additional registrations for unique beneficiaries from among previously submitted electronic registrations using a random selection process and notify potential second-round petitioners that they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition. .
USCIS said we will announce when we will complete this second process of selection and notifications. This will be visible on applicants’ online accounts. In addition to the regular cap, the US allows 20,000 H-1B visas for those who have a US master’s degree or higher. USCIS clarified, however, that there would not be a second round of selection under this advanced degree waiver because sufficient applications had already been selected and sufficient petitions had been received for the master’s cap allocation. For each cap season USCIS adopts a lottery system to select beneficiaries for H-1B visas. Earlier this year it implemented a unique beneficiary-centric registration process that it said would eliminate abuse and fraud in the system. USCIS also recently implemented a steep increase in fees. Under which the registration fee was increased from 10 dollars to 215 dollars and the application fee was increased from 460 dollars to 780 dollars. It was a move that raised concerns in the Indian IT industry.
USCIS preparing to conduct second H-1B lottery program to meet FY25 limit

Leave a comment