In a first, H-1B aspirants get a third chance in lottery – Times of India

In an unprecedented move and for the first time ever, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has conducted a third lottery, to select additional registrations (including the Masters cap) to reach the H-1B cap quota for the fiscal year that began on October 1. The annual quota is 85,000 (including the Masters cap of 20,000 which is reserved for those with advanced US educational qualifications).
With doors now open for international travel, the third lottery may come in handy for sponsoring employers to meet the skill-gap. The H-1B visa is a very popular work visa, especially for Indians in the tech sector. For the fiscal year 2022 (year ending September 30, 2022), during the H-1B cap registration period, sponsoring employers had submitted 3.08 lakh registrations. Typically, at least 60% of the registrations are for Indian beneficiaries (individuals who are being sponsored for this work visa).

Under the E-registration system introduced since last year, after registering basic details of beneficiaries, only post the lottery, sponsoring employers are required to file detailed visa applications for those selected. According to USCIS, the filing period for applications based on the registrations selected in the third round which was held on November 19, begins on Monday and closes on February 23, 2022. Individuals who have been selected under the lottery, will have their ‘myUSCIS’ accounts updated to include a selection notice, it adds.
USCIS states that an H-1B cap-subject petition must be properly filed at the correct service center and within the filing period indicated on the relevant registration selection notice. Online filing is not available for H-1B petitions.
Earlier this year, in July, USCIS had conducted a second random selection (referred to as the lottery) from among the e-registrations submitted for fiscal 2022. This was the second running year, in which a second round of the H-1B cap lottery had been conducted. However, the then existing travel ban had meant that it was largely helpful to STEM-OPT students who were already in the US and who were to transit to the H-1B visa.
Referring to the third round of random selection, Kripa Upadhyay, managing attorney at Orbit Law, states, “This either means that lots of business entities faced Covid-19 downturns and didn’t end up filing visa applications. Or depressingly, and the far likelier scenario is that employers and employees both ‘gamed the system’ by filing numerous speculative registrations that employers then could not move forward for lack of work/contracts and employees who had duped/paid multiple employers to file registrations for them so went with the one that got selected and left some employers in the lurch! Either way, USCIS needs to revisit the idea of the lottery registration system as it currently exists.”
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by a group of 510 foreign nationals (including Indians), who were not selected in the H-1B cap visa lottery for the FY 2022 is still pending. They had challenged the existing procedure, which enables multiple registrations to be filed for the same individual, which in turn gives him or her a better chance of being selected in the lottery.