Thought Garage

USCIS today released the final count of number of unique pieces of mail received for H1B petitions. It received 133,000 unique pieces of mail containing H-1B petitions. I guess, each piece of mail will ‘mostly‘ contain more than one petition, as no company would send each petition in a seperate package and its most unlikely that a firm applies for just one petition.

Probably by the end of next week, we might know the actual number of H1B petitions filed and how lucky one must be to get through the initial filter.

Source: USCIS Releases Preliminary Number of FY 2008 H-1B Cap Filings (26KB PDF) 04/05/2007

During Monday and Tuesday, USCIS received 133,000 unique pieces of mail containing H-1B petitions. This is lower that the original USCIS estimate of 150,000. USCIS based the initial estimate on amounts from manifests received along with the mail. USCIS reached the updated number following a physical count of the mail. Each piece of mail may contain more than one H-1B petition. It will take USCIS a substantial amount of time to open and sort through that volume of mail.

As of Wednesday, 28,052 of the cases sorted are H-1B petitions subject to FY 2008 congressionally mandated cap. Four thousand, seven hundred three (4,703) cases are exempt from the FY 2008 H-1B cap as employers filed those petitions for aliens holding a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. institution.

Update: Now it is official and confirmed by USCIS. Here is the official press release from USCIS.

As expected, H1B visa cap for 2008 was reached on day1 itself. On USCIS website, there is no official notification yet, but AILA has posted a PDF file that says its a notification from USCIS. Not sure why USCIS hasn’t provided this notification on its website but provided the announcement document just to AILA. Quite strange, suspicious and confusing.

Read the USCIS Notification document from AILA website here

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that it has received enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap for fiscal year 2008 (FY 2008). USCIS will use a random selection process (described below) for all cap-subject filings received on April 2, 2007 and April 3, 2007. USCIS will reject and return along with filing fee(s) all petitions received on those days that are not randomly selected.

As of late Monday afternoon (April 2), USCIS had received approximately 150,000 cap-subject H-1B petitions. USCIS must perform initial data entry for all filings received on April 2 and April 3 prior to conducting the random selection process. In light of the high volume of filings, USCIS will not be able to conduct the random selection for several weeks.

It is still not yet officially confirmed by USCIS, but there is a news item here that infers, cap on H1-B visas could be reached on Day 1 itself. If that is true, then USCIS would take all applications received on 2nd and 3rd of April and use lottery system to pick eligible applications.

USCIS began accepting petitions for fiscal 2008 H-1B visas on Monday. It will accept more petitions than the allocated spots because not all the petitions will be approved for the actual visas.

However, if the mailman’s bag is any indication, USCIS may have already reached it’s total of petitions, says a USCIS spokeswoman.

USCIS service offices in Vermont and California — where petitions for H-1B visas are collected — have reported “significant increases in the amount of mail” they receive, she says. “We’ve hired extra staff to work in the mailroom and sort through it,” she says.

It may take a day or so, but it’s possible USCIS has already received the maximum number of visa petitions. “Right now, H-1B is still open,” she says. “But once we state the final accept date, we’ll stop accepting them and petitions will be rejected,” she says.

Source: The Cap On H-1B Visas Could Be Reached Soon – Technology News by InformationWeek