H-1B Visa Lottery Held Today

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that it conducted the H-1B visa lottery earlier today. The agency announced last week that it had received enough H-1B petitions to reach the 65,000 visa statutory cap, as well as the 20,0000 visa advanced degree cap for FY2016. USCIS received about 233,000 H-1B petitions during this year’s filing period. Earlier today USCIS used a lottery (really, “a computer-generated random selection process”) to select enough petitions to first, meet the 20,000 advanced degree cap and second, the 65,000 statutory cap. Any advanced degree petitions unselected in the initial phase was lumped back into the pool for potential selection to reach the 65,000 general category cap. Petitioners that had their cases selected will begin having their filing fee checks deposited and the resulting issuance of fee receipts. The unselected cases will start coming back some time thereafter.