December 9, 2019

Tech Visa Denials Spike

H-1B Visa Registration System

H-1B News

Challenging H-1B Denials in Federal Court

H-1B Online Registration Starts on March 1, 2020

The H-1B online registration system will go into effect on March 1, 2020. Employers must submit the required information online for each H-1B beneficiary whom they wish to sponsor between March 1 and March 20. However, the details of the system have yet to be released by the USCIS.

The fact that the current Administration has been hostile to the H-1B program is no secret. The percentage of H-1B petitions which have received Requests for Evidence, Notices of Intent to Deny and Denials has increased dramatically during the past few years.

For example, in fiscal year 2015, the denial rate for initial H-1B petitions was 6%. By fiscal year 2018, without any changes to our immigration laws and regulations, the denial rate skyrocketed to over 30%. H-1B visas are for professionals: physicians, teachers, computer programmers, engineers and other professions which require a minimum of a 4-year university degree. In other words, H-1B visas are for "merit-based" immigration, exactly the type of immigration that the President claims to favor.

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H-1B Online Registration System Announced

On December 6, 2019, the USCIS announced it had completed a "successful pilot testing phase" and would implement an electronic H-1B online registration process starting on March 1, 2020.

The announcement states as follows:

"Under this new process, employers seeking H-1B workers subject to the cap, or their authorized representatives, will complete a registration process that requires only basic information about their company and each requested worker. USCIS will open an initial registration period from March 1 through March 20, 2020. The H-1B random selection process, if needed, will then be run on those electronic registrations. Only those with selected registrations will be eligible to file H-1B cap-subject petitions."

If needed?

During each of the past few years, employers filed around 200,000 initial petitions for 85,000 H-1B visas. This means that well over 50% of the H-1B workers that employers would like to hire are prevented from being employed in the U.S. While this may be great news for Canada, Australia, the UK, etc., it makes it difficult for U.S. employers to hire talented foreign-born professionals, even those who earned their degrees in the U.S. As a result of this misguided policy, the next Google, Facebook and Amazon may be developed abroad rather than in the U.S.

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