News Update - January 28, 2011U.S.C.I.S. Announces Last Night H-1B Cap Exhausted.Please be advised that U.S.C.I.S. announced last night, January 27th at 8:00 p.m., that the H-1B quota for fiscal year 2011 has been completely filled. This was in accordance with our earlier forecasts that the cap would be exhausted in the last part of January. In the announcement, U.S.C.I.S. said that the last date for receipt of applications was January 26th. For last day applications, the agency will use a computer-generated random selection process to ensure that all applications received on the last day have an equal chance of being accepted. At this time, new H-1B petitions will not be accepted until April 1, 2011, for work to begin on October 1, 2011, at the earliest. It is difficult to state whether there will be a large rush for H-1B cap numbers beginning April 1st, since the demand will greatly depend upon the state of the economy and employer hiring. If the economy continues to pick up steam and begins adding more workers, demand for numbers will be higher. In such event, fiscal year 2012 H-1B numbers (10/1/11-9/30/12) will certainly not last as long as they have in the past two fiscal years. I note, however, that no one at this time is projecting number exhaustion and lottery style selection in the first week of April, as was the case in fiscal year 2009 (10/1/08-9/30/09) and before.
† The author is a 30+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004. ‡ This article © 2011 Alan Lee, Esq.
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