What is H1B Visa Lottery Process? [Video]

In today’s article you find answers to the following questions

• What is H1B visa lottery
• What happens during the H1B Lottery process
• How the USCIS conducts random lottery selection of H1B applications?

Attorney Murali Bashyam answers the above questions in this 3 minute video.

• Next H1B Visa 2018 cap season starts in April 2017.

What is H1B Visa Lottery?

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Video Transcript

Here’s the Transcript of the Video:

Raghuram Sukumar: Let’s go on to the next question. What is the H1B Visa lottery?

Murali Bashyam: The H1B lottery is not like a regular lottery where you win billions of dollars or whatever, but the lottery is typical, as we have discussed before, the USCIS allows 65,000 regular H1B Visa a year with an additional 20,000 for advanced degree US students.

The earliest you can file an H1B case is April 1^st, and if it’s selected and approved, it would be for October 1^st start date. The lottery is, let’s say that 110,000 cases are filed on April 1^st for a total of 85,000 H1B numbers. What the immigration service typically does, then, is hold this random lottery, and we don’t know how random that actually is, but it holds this random lottery to select 85,000 out of that 110,000 cases. What they do with is they’ll select those 85,000 and then the rest that they don’t select get returned to the employer along with the filing fees.

The lottery used to happen quite frequently a long time ago, and then based on the economy and other issues, we haven’t had a lottery for a number of years until last year. Last year’s the first year we had a lottery in quite some time. For this fiscal year’s H1B cap, the expectation is there will be a lottery. That’s what the lottery is, Raghu. It’s just a random selection process of a number of cases being filed on April 1^st Exceeds the number of H1B Visas available.

Raghuram Sukumar: Okay. What happens if the case does not get selected on the lottery?

Murali Bashyam: If the H1B doesn’t get selected in the lottery, the immigration service returns the entire application to the employer along with the immigration filing fees. That’s a question we get quite often. “We’re paying these legal fees, filing fees. What happens to the filing fees if the case doesn’t get selected in the lottery?” The answer is the employer gets that back.

Raghuram Sukumar: They get back the whole package that was mailed?

Murali Bashyam: They get back the entire package that goes to the mall with a sheet on the top of it, saying it was not selected in the lottery along with the filing fees and everything else. It’s unfortunate if that happens considering these employers really need these workers, but that’s what happens to the cases not selected in the lottery.

Related – H1b Visa Lottery Infographics