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No new H1B workers for over a yr
USCIS has announced it has exhausted its cap for H1B visas for this year.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that it has already exhausted its cap for H1B visas for this year, implying that companies will not have access to any new H1B workers for 14 months.
To the surprise of many US manufacturers and the IT industry, the announcement that the cap for the work permit had been exhausted two months ahead of schedule came less than a week after the USCIS announced that some 6,000 spaces were still left.
This is the first time the cap has been reached two months before the fiscal year even begins.
The State Department in its September Visa Bulletin estimated that the demand for the coming year will be much higher than the allotted H1B employment visas.
The USCIS after announcing August 10 as the deadline for applications said, any petitions received on this date would be subject to a random selection process and that the department would reject any petitions that are subject to the FY 2006 annual cap and received after the "final receipt date".
According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which calls itself the nation's largest industrial trade association, this was anticipated before the end of the fiscal year in October, but the rate at which visas were used up was unprecedented and caught many employers by surprise.
The Congress has established an annual H1B cap of 65,000, but some 6,800 are set aside for the H1B1 programme under terms of the US-Chile and US-Singapore Free Trade Agreements. The total H1B cap number available for FY 2006 is therefore 58,200.
The law provides that any of the unused Chile/Singapore numbers can be reallocated back to the FY 2006 H1B cap.
The USCIS said these unused numbers will be made available on October 1, 2006, the start of FY 2007.
The law authorises the USCIS to make such unused numbers available within the first 45 days of FY 2007 to 'aliens' who had applied for such visas during the previous year. At that time, the USCIS will announce how many Chile/Singapore numbers went unused and can be reallocated.
However, the USCIS has kept open visas for advanced degree holders from US universities for both FY 2005 and FY 2006. As of August 4, advanced degree cap counts for FY 2005 and FY 2006 were at 10,379 pending or approved cases and 8,212 pending or approved cases, respectively.
The State Department estimates that the FY 2006 demand in the employment-based immigrant visa categories is expected to be well in excess of annual limits with worldwide unavailability in some categories as early as December.
"The level of demand in the employment categories is expected to be far in excess of the annual limits, and once established, cut-off date movements are likely to be slow," the State Department said in its September Visa Bulletin.
The State Department noted that the backlog reduction efforts of the USCIS and the Department of Labour "continue to result in very heavy demand for Employment-based numbers", and may result in early third preference employment cut-off dates for India, China, Philippines and maybe Mexico by October, and a worldwide cut-off date of December.
In addition, "the amount of employment demand for applicants from China and India is also likely to result in the over-subscription of the employment first and second preference categories for those chargeability areas. The establishment of such cut-off dates is expected to occur no later than December."
Officials at NAM have indicated they have to step up lobbying efforts to convince legislators that the unavailability of both H1B and EB (employment based) visas proves the current system is broken and that the needs of highly educated workers must be addressed in any reform efforts this year.
Fortune magazine ranked the NAM tenth among Washington's 25 most influential advocacy groups, and The New York Times called it "the nation's chief business lobbying group".
