From an outcome standpoint, things have settled down and, in my experience, nearly all approvable H-1B petitions get approved. The issue is with the high number of lottery submissions so the odds of getting selected in the H-1B lottery have been really low the past few years.
It's luck in the sense that for your first H-1B, you must go through a lottery (a completely random selection process). The actual adjudication and approval of an H-1B petition, if the individual is selected in the lottery, for individuals with good educational backgrounds, is actually pretty easy. It's getting picked in the lottery that's the hard part.
There's currently a 32% selection rate on the H-1B lottery, regardless of whether your application's even eligible or not. The best case (with OPT extensions right after college, not applicable for already-working people; and also assuming selection rates don't further decline) is 69% selection rate after 3 attempts. I don't imagine hundreds of thousands of H-4 holders like those odds.
I think you’re missing something essential. There are only a limited number of H1B visas awarded each year, and they are awarded by lottery. Far, far more applications are submitted than slots are available, and most applications are rejected. After this change the number of H1B visas awarded isn’t likely to go down.
Just to add some context to this since I was a bit confused. The H-1B goes through the lottery to see which applications get seen by immigration. This seems to be the approval rates of the H-1B after the lottery which makes sense. The FAANG applications are probably mostly legit. 90% acceptance rate for an H-1B before lottery though seemed a little high :)
There's one additional wrinkle that the story, in fact, gets wrong:
> Federal officials allow only one application for each foreign worker.
That isn't the case. An individual may have multiple H-1B petitions filed, provided they're for different, unrelated employers. And indeed, it seems some people do pursue that route, accepting multiple offers, in order to boost their chances in an increasingly uncertain lottery. (In 2014, about half of the applications were selected; this year, about a third) And even if you're lucky in the lottery, you face months of waiting and uncertainty - filing takes place on April 1, with lottery notifications going out in June and July, whereupon processing commences. (If you're lucky enough to find a particularly good employer, they'll add $1,225 to the already substantial fees and lawyer costs, for "premium processing", guaranteeing a decision within 15 calendar days, though you still can't start until Oct 1) Decisions then tend to come through in August and September - but, that's not the end of it yet, as around a third to a half of all applications will hit the "Request for Evidence" status, which may query the company's finances or legitimacy, the candidate's education or experience, and so forth. That can take weeks more to file and then be acknowledged, whereupon processing resumes, for a decision in perhaps October or November.
Bear in mind, this is all for a process that likely started with interviews in January or February, to give enough time for the employer to gather the documentation required for filing.
If you apply early, the probably nears 100% (if applicant fulfills all requirements). It fills up over a matter of months. An immigration lawyer will be able to tell you the chances at any given time.
Edit: Wait, is the lottery thing new? When I got my H-1B in 2013, my immigration lawyer gave me the above advice, i.e. that the process is first-come-first-serve.
It's just that the way the current system works, you could have the best job offer in the world and still have a 50:50 chance of not getting a visa in the lottery.
Although I believe a bill raising the H-1B limit significantly has just passed or is close to being so, so it might get a bit easier in 2014! :-)
The H1B situation in the US has been described as very "luck" based to me, and some have called it "a mess". Is that still the case? How much does it actually depend on luck, or other factors such as country of origin, occupation, etc.?
The H-1B system is terrible. I applied twice to it while I was on an internship visa, and ended up not getting through the lottery and had to leave the US. Then had to wait a year and a half to get a greencard in order to come back.
There's no difference in selection in the lottery (it's truly random) and in terms of approval, it's probably slightly easier to get an H-1B through a larger/established company since USCIS is less likely to raise certain questions, such as the availability of work and the absence of non-qualifying duties.
The chance of approval really isn't tied to the size or reputation of the company but more to the job and the individual's background and we're seeing high approval rates where the job is clearly an H-1B job (such as a software engineer) and the individual has a related degree (such as computer science) even for small startups. The real challenge comes with filing H-1B petitions for founders/those with significant ownership interests.
I was planning another post on that topic :) in a nutshell, we got H-1B visas. With a good attorney the paperwork is mostly tedium, but lots and lots of tedium. The process is very opaque and full of uncertainties.
There are insane amount of H1B applications (I think there were over 200,000 last year). Ofcourse they use the lottery to process about "only" 85,000 of them.
This does not include H1B transfers and other stuff USCIS handles.
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