A second-round selection for the H-1B visa lottery for the fiscal year 2024 is in store as confirmed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) earlier this week.
US H1B Visa Second Round Lottery Next Week Likely
The lottery is most likely to be conducted within the next few days, by August 2, according to Day 1 CPT Universities analysis.
With the help of this lottery process, 20,000-25,000 H1B petitioners are likely to be selected.
Each year, USCIS is authorized to grant 85,000 cap-subject H-1B visas.
Earlier USCIS conducted the initial random selection process on properly submitted electronic registrations for the FY 2024 H-1B cap in March 2023.
In this process, only around 70% of the authorized quota had been issued, leaving a significant number of available visas.
In order to select these registrations, the USCIS will use a random selection process from the previously submitted electronic entries.
How Does The Second Round Of Lottery Work?
Prior to this, Rajiv S. Khanna, managing attorney at Immigration.com, the Law Offices of Rajiv S. Khanna, PC had forecasted that there would be a second round of H1B visa lottery.
Khanna said, the IT industry has faced layoffs, and some employers are hesitant to commit to hiring foreign workers, in a media report.
Moving ahead, this uncertainty has led to delays in the filing of H1B visa applications.
As some employers were waiting to see how the market evolves before submitting their applications.
In the second round of the lottery, the government statistically computes the number of applicants that would be needed to fulfill the visa allotment that they have and typically selects more applicants than the available number of visas to account for those who do not end up filing for various reasons.
Khanna noted, “If the computations, which are only statistical projections, are incorrect and there are leftover visas, a second round of the lottery may be held to allocate the remaining visas.”
