The US Citizenship and Immigration Services or USCIS will start receiving the first registrations for the H-1B visas on March 1 and remain open till March 18.
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How To Apply
USCIS will assign a confirmation number for each registration submitted which can be used to track the process.
Applicants can apply through the online H-1B registration system after paying a $10 registration fee.
After it receives enough registrations by March 18, the USCIS will randomly select registrations and send selection notifications through their myUSCIS online accounts by March 31.
The US issues 65,000 new H-1B visas every year and another 20,000 are reserved for US Masters’ degree holders.
Indians have been the biggest beneficiaries of the system, receiving about 70% of the new visas issued each year.
Lottery Based Allocation
Of late ,the USCIS started conducting lotteries to allocate all the visas due to insufficient number of final applications after the initial selection.
The shortage can be attributed to reduced travel and mobility forced by the pandemic.
Companies Getting The Most Approvals
Among private companies, Amazon had the most approved H-1B petitions for initial employment in FY 2021 with 6,182 approvals.
Infosys ranks second with 5,256 approvals, followed by TCS (3,063), Wipro (2,121) Cognizant (1,481), Google (1,453), IBM (1,402), HCL America (1,299) and Microsoft (1,240).
The overall rate of visa denials dropped to 4% as the result of change in how USCIS adjudicates applications for workers employed at third-party sites.