A US federal agency has announced that it has received enough petitions to reach the mandated cap of 65,000 on H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2022. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will formally begin accepting petitions for 2023 from March 1 to March 18, 2022.
The USCIS follows anOctober to September year, meaning applicants selected for FY 2022 can start working in the US from October 2022.
Earlier, it had announced that of the 275,000 applications received for FY 2021, around 67% were from Indians.
TheH-1B visa is a US non-immigrant visaused by US companies to hire foreign workers withtechnical or theoretical expertise from India,China, among others. The companies can hire employees on a temporary basis from speciality fields such as Architecture, Engineering, Social Sciences, Mathematics, etc. The employees hired can be degree holders of Bachelor's or higher qualification levels and must be hired on a specialised and practical application basis.The programme is the most sought-after among Indians.
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A cap has been mandated by the US can issue a maximum of 65,000 H-1B visaswith regular cap and 20,000 underadditional special advanced degree exempt categories.
USCIS is now sending Not Selected notifications to the applications that are to be rejected. The applications exempt from the cap are still being processed. Around 6,800 visas are exempt from the annual cap as a result of provisions under US-Chile and US-Singapore Free Trade Agreements.
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The current holders of H-1B visasare counted against the cap for the year they filed the petition, and are exempt for the fiscal year2022 cap as long as they retain their original cap number. Petitions for anextension on visa duration, change of occupations and work concurrently in additional H-1B positions are still being accepted and processed.
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Source: NDTV